Psychedive

(align:"=><=")[#(text-style:"bold","shadow")[psychdive.] (text-style:"superscript")[(or, a thorough dissection of one self-obsessed e-spectre)] (set: $ending to 0) another dreamscape by charlotte. (text-colour:#ff6864)[cw: body horror, sexual assault, homicide, suicide, entrapment, gore, ed, dysphoria, nihilism] (set: _link to "`[delve in.]`") [[_link->intropoem]]]

(text-style:"smear")[|1)[go to bed, my lamb. drink sopor from my hand.] |2)[no calmer feel than dusted eyes and dreary tears our dreams do cry.] |3)[feast on visions in this lesioned realm between convergent reals.] |4)[made and marked, from hopes and fears, a fresh-baked piece of mind.] |5)[clutch or not your wants, showns, knowns, for all will be revealed.]] |6)[but enough of fancy-talking, dreamer. welcome to your night terrors.] |7)[and leave your hope at the door, for the truth's all but known.] (set: _link to "`[render file-name:circle1.block-world.drm]`") |8)[[[_link->circle1]]] {(live: 1s)[(show: ?1)(stop:)]} {(live: 3s)[(show: ?2)(stop:)]} {(live: 5.5s)[(show: ?3)(stop:)]} {(live: 8s)[(show: ?4)(stop:)]} {(live: 10.5s)[(show: ?5)(stop:)]} {(live: 13s)[(show: ?6)(stop:)]} {(live: 15.5s)[(show: ?7)(stop:)]} {(live: 18s)[(show: ?8)(stop:)]}

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle1.block-world.drm /]/ rhymically-generated urban sprawl] //here, grey plastic sheen on a geometrician's first 3d-render. a sea of asset cubes stack and pile in oblique formations. pass between them and observe their waxy textures and cubic notches. nary a whiff of wild dust-bunny on any finger-run surface. try. there is none to hunt. trust in this city’s values. the sky-box places you, the player-model, in its aperture; the eye of a dusky, cubic hurricane. floating cubes line the roads between the sea of five-face monoliths; incandescent. all ''precisely'' three meters above the plantless plasticine pavement. the spotlights are unceasing. you feel accused for simply being here `[but it’s okay, dreamer, bodies are for those lesser realms]`. the mind renders little detail of that which lies beyond one’s vision cone. why bother anyway? a piece in the machine only know the places it's called to.// (align:"=><=")[[[`next page >>`->blockworld2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle1.block-world.drm /]/ rhymically-generated urban sprawl] //witness the towers. khrushchyovka-esque function and order in all directions. splendid! no construct, human or divine, a more logical manifestation of maximalized spatial efficiency and innate intuit. designed under the pretense of mathematical rhythms, of residential safety and of unassailable satiety, this town is a symbol of it's own pride. pristine form, white whale of au nettlesome naturel. perfection requires cultural destruction. such terrain mustn’t inspire with visions of grasses and moss. cultural redundancies. the verbal waste in even mentioning them. walk the streets! they are deeply creative. algorithmically creative. every cube of seismic individuality, incomparable gait, oblique balance. walk the sluice channels. tetromino puddles do not simulate standard fluid displacement, but retain a calm, level surface in response to any physical presence. a world of panic, of reaction, is ineffective in eternal promulgation of order. a library of marvels endlessly rendered in all directions.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< prev page`->circle1]] || [[`next page >>`->blockworld3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle1.block-world.drm /]/ rhymically-generated urban sprawl] //prismic arches provide glorious decor, as do the many columns `[supporting nothing]`making gravity chic, and many staircases `[to nowhere]` making even mass accessible! see how they line the interiors and exteriors of such prestige hypnagogic design. observe, but leave no trace. this indelible urbana welcomes participation in its project. observe and inhabit, for all spatial theory culminates in this construct. the shades of grey are such beautiful hues. pallid tones paint the endless forest of towers, some stretching incomprehensibly high beyond render distance. dull beeps and boops render the city’s orchestra, everpresent melodica. the city is fragmented into tile-regions, each of which releases calm twanging chimes at (500ms release; 500ms fade). each tone proceeds in echo and repeats along fibonacci release intervals at sortedList hertz value `(min: 80hz; max: 1kHz;)`. the melody is pre-rendered to adaptively generate along standard chord progression. the pale sound of plastic streets is never gone without. the citizens are weightless, bodiless, bear no sloppy noises, uncouth sights or tension-building interactions. the city, dreamer, is a private one. both subject and citizen are fully represented by the spectacle which they've collectively composed of their socia. // (align:"=><=")[[[`<< prev page`->blockworld2]] || [[`next page >>`->blockworld4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle1.block-world.drm /]/ rhymically-generated urban sprawl] //the flow of energy, too, `[sound, heat, light. everything else too messy.]` is cultivated to follow regimented, pre-ordained patterns. resource allocation is a non-issue in these enlightened times. the blocks, too, lack need of upkeep; an untarnishable, predictable playground from craft ad aeternum. render this city in the shape of your face, subject and bear it forth unto the world! it says all that needs to be said. it all makes sense now, yes? believe in the motions and witness. witness the safety of alleys and spires, streets and market-forms. the axiomatic value of cleanliness rests at the heart of all open-face transactions. even within such high quantities of bureaucratic curation lie a deep fragility, a fragility that must be conserved against any perceivable threat. yet, it is solved, unchallengeable and deeply natural, the city assures. one shall reap no surprises. all can be explained. all scientific pursuit is moot, for the city is a solved affair. // (align:"=><=")[[[`<< prev page`->blockworld3]] || [[`next page >>`->blockworld5]]]

(text-colour:#ff6864)[''Error: Overflow''] (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[even soap leaves suds, don’t it? fuck this new brand of hell! remember your fingers, remember your throat, dreamer. feel touch crawl up your side. fall into the light.]` `if:(vomit=true)[launch circle2a.exe]` `DRM Rendered Successfully!`] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle2a.epilepsy-world.drm /]/ the neon primordial] //you’re nauseous, dreamer. looking down the barrel of a piss-trickled toilet. aww, fuckin’.... shit. why’d ya have to go and blow yer lunch on that crap? i’ll hold your hair back. what’d a damn place ever do to anyone? a city with an intrinsic will placed within it? god, what a mess that sounds like... just glad to see you back, babe. so, uh, everything is really blurry, and you can’t really tell where you are. doesn’t even really feel you purged at all. there’s like, uh, bokehs of light pirouetting across your blurred vision, music throbbin’ down to the marrow, bassy might and treble shrill combo-punching the sobriety out of you. bodies are moving, shaking, squeezing into each other, skin-coloured swipes on all sides. busy night. let’s just forget reality for a little bit and make tonight fun!// (align:"=><=")[[[`nexxxt pageee >>`->epilepsyworld2]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[`if:(vomit=false)[launch circle2b.exe]` `[accounting for value-expressions... customizing terrain]` `DRM Rendered Successfully!`] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle2b.cloud-world.drm /]/ where wistful hearts relish and bold souls languish] //the sun-warm pillows of cielos nublados, sprawled out endlessly. sculptures of cotton and gardens of beansprouts blanket each cloud-top. wet and wispy, one could slurp up the terrain as milk froth. each cloud is stuffed with sunbeams, bursting aglow. billowing rainbows wash the sudsy mists, leaping from cloud to cloud. one cannot fall here, for this circle is proofed for safety. glass-like platforms shield from the endless cerulean below. sunstone trees of harpy feather leaves bristle against the cool air. hear the howls of the wind, dreamer. feast on the mountainous ascent before you. rising tides of incumbent clouds ascend higher, higher into the firmament. not too far from the pearly gates now. surely. such an ebb and flow dictates the endless construct of new wooly monuments, new archipelagoes. there is endless curiosity, fountainhead beauties, in the roaming of such a skyscape. beacons of sunlight flow from far below, or perhaps far above? the skies are kept cozy by a directionless flow of light and warmth, slashes of pale and rolling moons. the winds, too, spiralled inordinately. feel the loving kisses of the four Anemoi, dreamer. one can never feel alone against the affection of divined forces, proximate entities.// (align:"=><=")[[[`ascend >>`->cloud2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle1.block-world.drm /]/ rhymically-generated urban sprawl] //just look to the grid underlying the floors, feel the absence of itches, hormones and organs. all that need be known can be extrapolated swiftly from the behavioural zeitgeist. all is of singular function and eternal recurrence. the city’s undergirdings are absolute, and its axioms logically founded, observer. // (text-colour:#5BC500)[User:ADMIN has opened DRM! >>or, dreamer, you could vomit and disrupt this sterile realm. sterility sullied by filth! >>such feeble software, able to be expunged from the system by such things >>it's only human, after all >>one can remain, as well >>accept the parameters of this circle into the corpus >>this is your voyage, after all >>disrupt or embody make little difference... >>both'll go on to new hells. beyond that, one other thing is certain: you can't run from this. User:ADMIN has closed DRM!] //the city stands a tall and glowing silver.// (set: _lin to "`[VOMIT]`")(set: _lik to "`[REMAIN]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle2a]] || [[_lik->circle2b]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle2a.epilepsy-world.drm /]/ the neon primordial] //the night is eternally young here, a labyrinth of bar musk and nightclub hallways loomed by confusing lights and noise and perpetual loss. electric squiggles comet across your vague fov. you’re swaying through checkers and velvet and hoverworthy toilets and flying limbs and through smoking hot faces you’ll ''def'' remember tomorrow and questions you answered on autopilot. wait, what did they just ask me? I swear ''somethin’'' gotta be slipped in my drink, cus… no, not the booze, babe! c’mon, lock in for a minute, focus so we can get back to the dance floor! look at me, dreamer! i know i'm cute and you get all jealous around me. unless... well, you know i'm always open to experimentation. even if i can't commit. haha. warm breath, nose-ridges pressed against each other, soft lips, dueling tongues. fuck yes! i almost don't taste the vomit on your breath! what the hell?! some guy, red-faced, mediocre in every perceivable way, is totally staring at your tits! total creepy pervs! wait, where did he go? shit, that reminds me of that time last night… oh fuck, bro, that was tonight, I think… when you were staring down some chick’s rack, dude, and… what a looker, but she... wait, who- oh that’s right. haha.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< perv paige`->circle2a]] || [[`netxapage >>`->epilepsyworld3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle2a.epilepsy-world.drm /]/ the neon primordial] //i keep forgetting. you’re totally an empty cup, or maybe the kings cup? no one’s but everyone's. yep. god, i’d drink from an ass like yours. madlibs a body in here, i dunno… or just go off libido! that’s what got me THIS FAR in life! life, man… what a bunch of noise. those know-nothings in ivory towers, those honey-tongue charlatans, those celibate dickheads thinking they've felt god... how the fuck you gonna solve life without living it real, moving through the night and back to sunset by pure erotic dissociation? no hate, though. love and, uh, peace! i’ll invite ‘em down, show ‘em what it all means. fuuuuck... nothing means anything this many drinks in but the urge to dance and get more faded and shit. I can’t remember what i'm doin' in this fucking mess. shit is lit as hell, though! get us another shot, babe! the house'll cover. i'm tight with the bartender. we’re, like, shit, now i can’t focus... we’re like one big sweaty entity, moving as one, rubbin' soft flesh against each other for sex lite and fondness and shit. god, we should all just start fucking each other. no, girl, i mean everyone! that’d be ''so'' hot! hell, you’re probably already stepping on blots of cum and slipping on vom and piss and probably some other nicher bodywaste. keep dancing, asshole! i'll sweat out the booze if we just, fucking, sway our hips, nod our head, raise our glass. i'll get us home safe, babe, my flat, my bed. dionysus knew nothing. what’d he have? femboy brothels? we got that plus ''fifty'', baby! hot guys, shooters, opiates, fuckin’... charli and gaga. party like neon gods in the realm of no tomorrows! no ends but rear ends in this mosaic manic malaise! let’s fuck! ugh, you’re so hot in this lighting! I mean.. god, that makeup, how sweaty you've made yourself! let me just run my hands along your- shit, your curves~ and you’re so firm~ it would be so hot if we just made out ''right here'' in front of everyone. what, they'll judge? cus they're jealous maybe haha. don’t listen to me, though, you’re the one that-// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< pre afdge`->epilepsyworld2]] || [[`nesd [agd >>`->epilepsyworld4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle2a.epilepsy-world.drm /]/ the neon primordial] //you collapse here, but you don’t. there's just little craters in your night. i think your liver recalls. do party girls dream of frenetic raves? indeed, it seems. dude, you’re nauseous again? those last three shots... urgh... were probably overdoing it. you open your eyes and you’re ''in it'', but it’s still so blurry, so you open your eyes and wake up and now you’re here, alive, feeling yourself and your flesh and every inch of you under drunken scrutiny in that tiny dress, in those too-tight shorts that press against your business. you hold your dainty arms with your vascular arms and have your hand on his chest, her breasts, and kiss and dance and laugh against each other. i could do this for-''ever''!! all your friends are here! blurry, but arm-in-arm, laughing with you, drinks in hand, none ever ready to surrender to rest! and all your lovers are here, all others your type, or so that’s how you remembered it going. you’re simple, after all: a smelting, strobing, sense-pumping basement and a flask of the devil’s brew and you’re pleased as punch! dance, dance, dance! there’s no future but here! everyone out there just wants us as dead labour! they want us as blackbox machines! as definitions! define this headspace, fascist cunt! this is our sole freedom! and with my free will, i scream i love youuuu~ through a handle of vodka. or two. come closer. but... they’re shutting the lights off. so early? gah, our arc is collapsing! i didn’t even get the lipstick sucked off my face, didn’t even... get.... shit...now it’s just another dark, unsatisfied night. nothing colder than blankets. can we... can we go to my place?// (set: $epilepsy to true) (text-colour:#5BC500)[>> dreamer, clear your mind now. your flesh guides your voyage to new intoxications. allow it the vivacity it craves if you wish to find the truth. feel your body writhe, and don't resist. `[ADMIN HAS OVERWRITTEN DRM] >> unrendering terrain... clearing player status...` (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[`[[CLICK TO LAUNCH circle3a.exe->circle3a]]`]`]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3a.leather-world.drm /]/ fetish in eternal recurrence] //another room. checkered floors and billiard-felt wallpapers draped with velour curtains. vision is cleared, but the mind, the stomach, the loin, they thirst for something. nay, lust for something. you’re clad in a tight leather bodysuit and knee-high boots that creak with every movement. a chain leash binds your neck, spells out the path forward. you know the way, baby. between parted curtains, a pair of vertical lips; vinyl, rouge, glossy. a toothless doorway. look around first, indulge in the decor. sharp objects and anatomical marble sculptures glistening with glass beads of sweat. as you linger, the chain tightens, tugging you ahead to avoid being choked. sensually, the lips slurp you up like spaghetti.// (align:"=><=")[[[`are you turned on? >>`->leather2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3a.leather-world.drm /]/ fetish in eternal recurrence] //beyond the doorway, a shadowy staircase with a gauche banister made of overly tall stilettos human-centipeded together. carpet lolls down the steps as a swallowed tongue. deeper, deeper into assumed earth. beyond the stairs is sweaty void; dark humectance, the eyes of god. show daddy the tools he gave you. no protractor can measure these curves and angles. no screw could spiral this deep into it. sweat lines the inside of your suit as you near the bottom. depth accomplished by the feeling of one too many blankets laid on. at its bottom, another room, more pairs of lips. an eternal archipelago of kinky descent. black and red furniture polished to a sheen, an organized milieu of feng shui sensuality. disfigured mannequins served the function of fixtures, plants and draped lightbulbs sprouting from their necks, with scarves draped and books cradled by their arms. there is no violence in the servitude of a plastic man. no violence in their exploitation, harassment, assault. at least, that’s what the paintings on the walls seem to indicate. ghastly first-person angles of sprawled out bodies, one half of a kama sutra pose, represented only by matte, lusting frames. black and white curves dribbled with cum. a room with a history of violence. your chain tugs you deeper, through a compressed pair of lips and down further into the lightless dungeon.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< don't dare`->circle3a]] || [[`you're mine >>`->leather3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3a.leather-world.drm /]/ fetish in eternal recurrence] //the next layer is pierced by pillars of white-painted phallic flesh, shafts rising into the ceiling. they subtly quake, as burrowing insects, thrusting upward, this strange world resting on their back. by their bases, greco-roman stoneworks, floral basins, milky fountains and unrealistically well-endowed sculptures of genderqueer bodies. touch them. feel everything through your gloved hands. feel the flower petals, made of raw bulgogi. dip your hand in the pale broth. appreciate the vascular stonework. stroke it's craftsmanship. treat it right, you leather princess. this grand hall outside of time is not what lies at the end of your descent. your suit grows tighter, your chain grows hungrier. it’s starting to hurt you. deeper. do not resist your own relief. the stairs knock the drool out of your mouth as you're called quicker, quicker, to these unknown ends. it’s crushing you, but you must run. down, down. hold on tight. you know what comes next.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< I SAID NO`->leather2]] || [[`getting warm ;) >>`->leather4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3a.leather-world.drm /]/ fetish in eternal recurrence] //at the bottom of the stairs, nothing. the chain slinks off into the shadowy unknown as the floor drops out. a crown of thorns sits at your feet. do you feel all your organs yet pressed against the suit? your bones? put it on, or you will soon. you put on the crown without a choice. it’s prickly, but doesn’t break the skin. good girl. or good boy, don't judge so long as i get my fill. the chain is suddenly yanked, leaving you hanging by your neck, asphyxiated. it won’t kill you, but you may just starve alone here. you’re powerless to the will of the chain, growing weaker by the minute. but look up, angel. your saving grace. a pair of lips gnaws down the chain, abducting you into itself. the welcome warmth as you’re consumed, oiled in spit. within, another room, another staircase!// (align:"=><=")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[''<< nope''] || [[`almost here~ >>`->leather5]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3a.leather-world.drm /]/ fetish in eternal recurrence] //but the chain ends here, tied around the bottom of a vinyl crucifix. the floor is cushioned, a massive mattress for the pile of sweating bodies melded together. the walls are decorated with hyper-realistic sex scenes. graphic ones. gratuitous, fetishistic. the paintings escape their very frames, crawl down the walls and birthed into the orgy. crt screens circle the cross, playing then rewinding fifteen-second smut scenes of the point of climax, all filmed in this very room. someone is watching, but there is nothing to do but play along. no point in looking for what isn't there. mount the crucifix, my good little dreamer. and you do. you have no choice. as you do, the crucifix comes alive, hugs and strokes you, binds you with it's firm, durable arms. you bite, but they only roar tighter around you. something swells out behind your back and wriggles it's way inside you, through the leather and seems. feel good, dreamer? as you grit your teeth and struggle against your nerves, ghostly bodies rise from the floor, echoes of the virtual scenes. they spill into each other, bodies and faces melding and fusing together into a moaning mass of remembered flesh. like what you see, dreamer? the crucifix tightens around you until you struggle to breathe.// (set: $leather to true) (text-colour:#5BC500)[>>i've added a conditional due to a common softlock in this area. where this path used to route is... unpopular. your move now, dreamer.] (set: _lin to "`[SUCCUMB]`")(set: _lik to "`[RESIST]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle4a]] || [[_lik->circle5a]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a.lung-world.drm /]/ sings the dirge of clockwork death] //there's chalk lines etched into the abyss behind your eyelids; the outlines of cartoonish organs viciously illuminate as you struggle for breath. with every sensational wrongness and exceeding faltering of essential function, lines delineate the space before you. tell me where it hurts, doctor. through cramped breathing, flitting lungs rise and fall in crude neon. khhh. hrrr. as the heart races to deliver oxygen at the body’s own reckless expenditure, a thumping heart with boiling lines demands front-and-center. your guts feel crushed, oozing through your skin like a cracked carapace, crawling helplessly out to form these spectres of light. soon, the void is filled with endless components, a turbulent zoo of clockwork. the space endlessly fractures as constellations of each bone are rendered in vague, glowing form. there is an ordered power to these forces as they march on in pattern function through this grotesque flurry of screaming nerves (whom, too, are rendered). it’s an order dictated by pain. what here sears, there glares. the kidneys whir, the liver squelches, but it is the spine and lungs that dominate your thoughts and mind, your sight and sound and skinless fury.// (set: $lung to true) (text-colour:#5BC500)[>> breathe, breathe, breathe, dreamer. just keep taking deep breaths and it’ll all subside. inflate. deflate. consume the vacuum unto collapse.] //khhh. hrrr.// (align:"=><=")[[[`in... and out >>`->lung2]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5a.torso-world.drm /]/ the sigils of torment bleed once more] //your eyes bear heavy into a sexless torso. it’s flat-chested, neither an ounce of muscle or breast tissue atop its visible ribs. it’s got a potbelly, not from visible fat but the jutting out of visceral fat, baby fat or poor nutrition. it’s hairless and pale to the point of translucence. there’re streaks of blue and purple beneath the surface, vascular roadways dancing across the chest. it gets red and sweaty when hot, shivers when cold. it doesn’t get cold, it says. makes sense. a body like this, you would keep covered. there’s little freckles, or maybe moles, strewn at random. determinist scars. the one next to the navel triggers a deep disgust, a want to rub off. you’re just eyes, and it’s just a giant floating torso. your only communication can be of judgements. like that it’s of unattractive shape, and unimpressive stature. grosses you out even thinking of having to embody it as you are. so much of oneself lies on their midsection. it's a body no one would ever choose. but you have a choice, don’t you? a choice to judge? a choice to look for something worthy of more words?// (align:"=><=")[[[`next torso >>`->torso2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a.lung-world.drm /]/ sings the dirge of clockwork death] //a violent wind swells through the dull chamber, bellowing in turbulent flux with the rise and fall of the spectral lungs. air pulsates in and out of the vascular tubing into the porous flesh-foam, inflating its pink-skin matter in prolonged, bifurcated swell. hundreds of thousands of micro-chambers at once inhabited and evicted of their gaseous residents alternate in rapid, automatic junction with reptilian necessity. in His sweaty hell, you have no choice but to observe this process in its excruciating reality, no choice but to feel your torso squirm in scrambled objectification. a chorus of organs in rhizomatic communion, darling. observe your squelching, fluid form. breathe in, breathe out. drown them in booze, flood them with water, ash them with smoke. your little tamagochi; you get what you bargain for, eh? the organs are redrawn to back-lit pixels, approximate but still tangible in their core purpose. the realm has veiled the minutiae for you, slathered them in digital skin unto derealization. watch them act in isometric undulance. redrawn, rerendered, reimagined as cutesy sprites, along cyclic, deterministic animations. two or three sprites a pop. isn't it easier to rangle and gamify 'em all like this? gotta have 'em all! these will be your organs after the newest firmware update. wind still swells from the lungs, piss still drools from the kidneys, blood still squelches from the heart. we hope this new iteration veritable, dreamer. your head throbs with warm blood, your tongue dries with the rapid breeze, staring dumbfounded at the back-lit glow.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< prev page`->circle4a]] || [[`how pretty >>`->lung3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a.lung-world.drm /]/ sings the dirge of clockwork death] //you’ve never seen your own lungs swell, nor anyone else's, have you? have you ever seen flesh rise, flood their prison of bone? can you imagine the unencumbered swell of yours or any other oxygenated megaplex? yet you swell, yet you lapse. you crave bodies when they do ''that''? the sea of organs blink out of semblance. sure, you'd like to look away, yet you don't. your eyes are seared, their burnt-in afterimage haunting any and all diverted gaze. surely nothing under the skin is objective. with how much we outwardly vary? perhaps your lungs droop and prolapse, your kidneys are the size of beans, your liver is a voracious slug that sips your very vigour in synergistic betrayal, collectively deceiving one of what that runs through us is venom. imagine a fleet of bestial innards, a balanced ecosyste. perhaps your heart has a hundred chambers, a mutant mound of blood-gurged folds and extant arteries. the pixels glow in slithering form, thumping throbbing, sinking. perhaps your stomach is a boiling pot filled with another man’s stew, an endless concoction of matted-down slurry. your intestines are a labyrinthine tangle of serpents with 100 heads and 100 tails. now we're talking. the windy, sticky void distorts each organ into an echo of a beast begging to be felled. liberate yourself from observance and act, dreamer. ought you slay these rotten distortions via their electric neon veil, purge this void of its sweltering, rhythmic masses. you manifest the harpe, dreamer, sword of legend. cut free from the stonemaker and carve a future through their eradication. your body, your chouce. be sequestered no longer from life, feel not the chains of enigmatic molecules tick-ticking away. breathe in. breathe out.// (text-colour:#5BC500)[>> or pierce the veil, dreamer! carve free from this violent grip, and retain the balance that has made you what you are. use the harpe to look away for good!] (set: _lin to "`[SNUFF THE PULSE]`")(set: _lik to "`[BLIND YOURSELF]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle4a-r2]] || [[_lik->circle6a]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[Anomaly Detected in DRM. Rerouting Axioms...] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v2.inferno-world.drm /]/ the deepest wounds, laced with vicious seed] //harpe plunges into the set of warped lungs, rides down the silhouetted flesh along a decisive, clean slit. hot air roars out as the lungs deflate. can you feel it, dreamer? eyes sear heavy into the back of your neck. the bones within you meld in broiling recoil as the air whistles and burns. you’re frozen but to stare at the damage you’ve reaped. you reap what you sow, you reap what you sow. the hot air bubbles into an unbearing scorch before the realm's very oxygen bursts into mighty flame. the inferno roars across the void, swallowing the shadows as oiled tinder. your skin itches insatiably, every body hair marked by alarm. yet, you must finish what you’ve started.// (align:"=><=")[[[`stay alert >>`->inferno2]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle6a.silk-world.drm /]/ maternal warmth flows] //trace your hands along rivers of silk, flowing, flowing. linens flow up into heaven-bound spires, flow down into ravines and soused gulches. this circle, one of texture, could not yet recant its profound violets and crimsons. every step is met by knitted roses, nestled between each rolling fold of fabric. to journey here is to drown further in ornate robes, to adorn oneself in pain-stakingly woven souls of cloth. `[denizen of artful heart, pious of garnish for that which one art, feel the silk kisses, pillowed and tart, these loving folds, softly, do so impart.]` warmth becomes you, rolled in winged caress. flesh masqueraded in material fealty, o mendicant of these lush wastes. sincere diviner, blanketed and whole, of a spirit invulnerable and swallowed whole. this is your happy place. have a rest, nap in the shade, knit fresh quilts, pick bouquets of flora.// (align:"=><=")[[[`have a rest >>`->silk2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v2.inferno-world.drm /]/ the deepest wounds, laced with vicious seed] //the intestines have warped under the heat into a chitinous serpent, rolling hills of coal rising from the sea of flame. all it can do is vomit dirty magma and lash at you, sequestered from its allies. you slash at the basilisk’s flame-hardened exterior, but to no avail. you must flee, dreamer. now. but you don’t listen. not even to yourself. you charge through an archway left in the beast’s torso, positioning yourself within its coils. here, it shows its unguarded underbelly, flesh still raw and pink. the harpe slashes through the serpent as if it were little more than fruit. the beast screams in horrible grief. you thrash out, reducing the creature to deflated rings, poor sausage-cased excrement. feel your abandon, dreamer. you double over as your torso is struck with an excruciating jab. there is no blood, no carnage, no need to look. fight on in the face of hell. as much as you impassion yourself, only harsh nausea and a thick coat of sweat are left in the wake of another beast felled. the serpent’s corpse hoses out more flames, an oily bile spilling from within to excite the roast. get back up before you're made a puddle, dreamer! raise your sword and run. this isn't about gaining or losing, it's about living free for once! ignore your body's qualms and you shall not burn!// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< relive glories`->circle4a-r2]] || [[`if i must >>`->inferno3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v2.inferno-world.drm /]/ the deepest wounds, laced with vicious seed] //next, you encounter the heart, which has charred and swelled to resemble an iron pumpkin, floating high above the sea of fire. venous tendrils hang plentifully from the head, each sopped with pungent acid. the medusozoan corazón dangles playfully overhead, infallible to your threat. what has she ever done to you, after all? one day she’ll kill you, though. you can know that much. it’s not her, but her power over you that incites violent action. this'll be a bloody one. you slash at its dancing pendulums, caustic blood cascading from each vein quartered-and-drawn. the pulsing beast thumps lower and lower, its own sword of damocles desperately hungering for the inevitable act of demise. your heart within you races and palpitates before this uncertain act. closer, closer, acid pooling aflame beneath your feet. yet, when the rope came to snap, its body fell in empty abandon into a pooling of its own drool. she did not burn nor dissolve, but lingered, aching, neither alive or dead in the cruel sea. she is a matter for the future, thus today she mustn’t meet her demise.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< relive glories`->inferno2]] || [[`i'll be back >>`->inferno4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v2.inferno-world.drm /]/ the deepest wounds, laced with vicious seed] //it is here that another beast, of heat-melded stomach and liver, colon and bladder, pounces from the conflagration. they, in shared power and assault, take the form of a mighty liger, with a scorched mane and a torrent of lightning in their wake. they growl ever so mightily, rattling you to your core. the only intelligent move is to await their assault. this beast, even if not decisively so, more capable than any of bringing both dreamer and dream to their knees. it prowls, before tackling you, forcing your back to the acrid coals. (text-style:"emboss","fidget")[“sing for me”], the liger snarled, (text-style:"emboss","fidget")[“and gorge me with your desire."] (text-style:"emboss","fidget")["the piquant, the mellifluous, the oil and salt. gurge for me and souse me with all of your faults. the bitters, the sweets, the butters, the meats. stuff now and suffer by each suck from my teat. languish your action and lingua before my impertinent, insatiable lust. stab me and hurt me and bite me and do all of that which you feel that you must. but ‘tis the cruel fate of both you and I, dreamer, that we’re bound as one soul unto dust”. ] electric hell rains down from the heavens to smite this sinking hell. the big cat cackles in cruel refrain, to the dreamer who can fight back no longer. the flames lick and swallow the ground beneath your feet, and together with the beast, whose talons are sunk deep in your flesh, you fall now (text-style:"blur")[deeper] (text-style:"blurrier")[into the cruel void.]// (set: _lin to "`[PROCEED]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle4a-r3]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Severely Damaged. Searching Server for Old Versions... Back-up Found. Reformatting...] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v3..frozen-lake.drm /]/ the trials of deterritorialized form] //here’s where the story ends, where the worst stories do. crags of ice jut from the abyss and stifle what remains of the roaring blazes. the past iteration of this circle has incinerated itself, and thus the circle's mise-en-scene again reiterates. a biting chill nips your skin, sweat gone cold before an impending nightmare. you stand at the centre of a lake of sheet ice, stretching endlessly off into the shaded horizon. this version of the circle resists trek or footing, but only bare observance as the cold limbo descends upon you. the liger has vanished from sight, yet you can feel it bubbling just beyond the horizon. it calls you to it, from within, only it capable of waking you from this nightmare once and for all. thus, your body without organs, your eyes without mind, depart in search of the beast that condemned you to this place. frozen cliff-faces and snowy peaks insist themselves upon you. then come grand bergs and sink-holes, cruel terrains to even imagine crossing.// (align:"=><=")[[[`go in want of warmth >>`->ice2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v3..frozen-lake.drm /]/ the trials of deterritorialized form] //you descend beneath the earth into pale caverns of permafrost and jutting crystals. nature rears its many faces within, possessing you with images and looming shadows, refracted through icy looking-glasses. nothing to fight or live for remains for you here. you've lost your harpe, you've lost your flame, you’ve lost your subjecthood. nothing to analyze and nothing to conquer. yet, here you’ve been ordained to remain until night's end. the cavern slithers farther, tormenting you with it's slippage and bite. some of the unfelled beasts that escaped from the flames also now here, many trapped peacefully beneath the ice. the kidneys, a pair of weeping imps, have their tears frozen in the duct within pillars of ice. their eyes seem to track you, though that may just be a trick of the light. the nervous system, a nest of screaming eels, thrash restlessly beneath your feet. there’s no rhyme or reason to their action, but every move you make seems to incite a profoundly hostile reaction.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< please no`->circle4a-r3]] || [[`let me awaken >>`->ice3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v3..frozen-lake.drm /]/ the trials of deterritorialized form] //you now come to a forest of frosted-bark trees, too chilled to waver in the winds. dense snow masks the true nature of the terrain, for could such trees truly sprout from ice? is all that lives here desolate spires, imprisoning you and all that you've forsaken? besides the white ravens, who’ve made nest in this estranged thicket, another beast of body circles overhead. an opportunist harpy of uncertain make looms above the branches, eager to pick you to pieces. it hums, in ominous flux, between baritone and soprano keys. its miraculously broad range is weaponized to create a harsh clangour, one that fortifies your dread. the noises it is capable of, those sonic hells it may loosen, chill your bones to paralysis. between its talons, it carries what remains of your acid-dipped heart, perhaps wishing to weaponize its iron might upon the heads of any lost dreamers. they are conjugal beasts, after all. ticking time-bombs cultivated, but not beyond stray. the laryngeal beast (so you’ve concluded) thus amplifies it's own innate terror, of a death worse than that of the flesh. the fright, at the very least, keeps your mind occupied to trek beyond your limits through this inhospitable space.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< don't prolong`->ice2]] || [[`a little further now >>`->ice4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v3..frozen-lake.drm /]/ the trials of deterritorialized form] //at last, the call in your gut leads you to a snowed-over hamlet. brick homes and smoke stacks vie for control over the mounting ice. yet these walls are powerless against the spears of ice, mounting their own construct of archways and spires within the corpse of the townlet. at the town’s centre rests a palace of ice-spike ramparts and frozen turrets, a terrifying tale of what can become of this realm if cruelly willed. you hunch over beneath a dead lamp as the pain in your stomach rises. you are unprepared, yet singly destined to this palace, gutless dreamer. you have no choice. within the palace, a labyrinth of unfurnished halls. spiral staircases rise into empty rooms. the architect seems distinctly focused on deception, on prolonging this endless night. four lefts lead somewhere new, doubling back rerenders every distinction you could make of the space. this fortress, frozen in ice, remains impossible to map and crystallize, an unintuitive slurry that resists escape by non-euclidean form. a sweat on your forehead, a chill in the back of your tongue, a sharp pain at your core. the walls tighten around you as the feeling grows stronger, unbearably slow. the marquis seems now desperate to reveal themselves as you flicker from consciousness, that throbbing pain spreading through your torso, one of conflicting fullness and absence. just through here, dreamer.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< we can't leave now`->ice3]] || [[`this is it >>`->ice5]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4a-v3..frozen-lake.drm /]/ the trials of deterritorialized form] //you now enter the dining hall. here, again, you are met by the liger. yet it is not the beast of burden for this cruel palace. at the head of the table, an opulent crown of ice rests atop a mass of wriggling flesh. mother brain, queen of hell, the final organ. it almost escapes one to consider such to be of detrimental flesh, to be target of your past rampage, but here she sits at the heart of her intellectual palace. the might of another beast, of eyes, hands and ears, slithers invisibly around the room, sizing you up for their overlord. both orchestrator and orchestra. `[[mother brain, condemn me to these nightmares no longer. pardon me from your wretches and speak only in your graces... my muse and my tormentor, my chemo-electric sprite, my mistakes and my grievances... queen of inert brilliance, of imagination, understanding and high culture, but too queen of shames, repression and obfuscation... you are queen of all and yet ruler of none... how can I bow before being with you, o flawed tyrant, at the helm?]]` her body does not move. even the liger and stalking lizard stand by. the queen is stagnant. iced. has been for quite a while under the burden of her frosted crown. the liger steps forth at the behest of her placidity. (text-style:"emboss","fidget")[“this is her fate”], it growled. its words stir a subdermal ache. (text-style:"emboss","fidget")[“bear witness the burden of ice and be on your way. it is not your role to judge when it is you who crafted that crown, this palace and our monstrous forms. all scourges are made, not born, dreamer.”] mounting, mounting. the liger brushes against you, it's massive frame staggering you with even this playful gesture. (text-style:"emboss","fidget")[“i know you came here for my vindication, which you shall receive. understand though, dreamer, the weight of one's stupid enmity. the irrational will to destruction you bear towards the operating costs of these worlds and stories... one day you’ll realize, dreamer: painlessness, too, breeds longing. live a little, for all of our warmth here, won't you?”]// the liger pounces on you with excruciating blunt force. bones snap, the body sinks into snow and all turns to black. (set: $ending1 to true) (set: _lin to "`[AN-END;FRESH-HELL-FROM-WITHIN]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->alttitle]]]

(align:"=><=")[#(text-style:"bold","shadow")[psychdive.] (text-style:"superscript")[(or, a thorough dissection of one self-obsessed e-spectre)] another dreamscape by boopus. (text-colour:#ff6864)[cw: body horror, sexual assault, homicide, suicide, imprisonment, gore, ed, dysphoria, nihilism] (set: _link to "`[delve in.]`") [[_link->intropoem]] (set: _link2 to "`[re-enter past dreams.]`")(text-colour:#5BC500)[<< OR >>] [[_link2->tableofcont]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[welcome to menu:adminNav >> `CHOOSE A DRM TO BOOT!` (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[block-world.drm->circle1]] =|= `[route A: body]` (if: $epilepsy is true)[[[epilepsy-world.drm->circle2a]]] (if: $leather is true)[[[leather-world.drm->circle3a]]] (if: $lung is true)[[[lung-world.drm->circle4a]]] (if: $torso is true)[[[torso-world.drm->circle5a]]] (if: $silk is true)[[[silk-world.drm->circle6a]]] (if: $pool is true)[[[pool-world.drm->circle7a]]] (if: $fall is true)[[[the-fall.drm->circle8a]]] (if: $material is true)[[[material-world.drm->circle9a]]] =|= `[route B: mind]` (if: $cloud is true)[[[cloud-world.drm->circle2b]]] (if: $scanline is true)[[[scanline-paradise.drm->circle3b]]] (if: $crystal is true)[[[crystal-world.drm->circle4b]]] (if: $cabin is true)[[[cabin-world.drm->circle5b]]] (if: $ink is true)[[[ink-tunnels.drm->circle6b]]] (if: $tar is true)[[[tar-ocean.drm->circle7b]]] (if: $abandon is true)[(text-colour:#ff6864)[ERROR: DRM FILE MOVED]] (if: $tar is true)[[[fractal-nebulas.drm->circle9b]]] |==| (if:$ending1 is true)[(if:$ending2 is true)[(if:$ending3 is true)[(if:$ending4 is true)[(if:$ending5 is true)[(text-colour:#ff6864)[[[lostcircle.drm->therapy]]]]]]]] ]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circleextra.STOP-ASKING.drm /]/ this was never yours to read] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ''Archived Conversation between User:ADMIN and User:DreamerZero'' ADMIN>> Why did you write this dreamer? It’s hurting you to create. You’re scared to share it. What’s the point of it?] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> I wanted to kill Soporfall, to kill my therapy essays. At least move beyond them. What am I if I can only write the same few things recursively… so you know what? Maybe I wasn’t done with them, as critical as I made myself by my neglect.] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> Why would you want to kill them? Why obsess over advancing your craft?] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> I just want to be listened to… the overwhelming silence… the refusal and my own failings… I’ve abandoned my child. I feel only guilt now. I played Soporfall again. It’s actually really nice and life-affirming. I feel bad allowing myself to be so… immoral and misanthropic again. But maybe that’s the more authentic author (that people will want to hear). I don’t know. This one has sweet spots too, I guess. But I was also just trying to make myself cry at points. Trigger my traumas again so I could make something sensible of them. Can’t always, I guess, so we’re left with the same pain we woulda gotten anyway.] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> There’s always still time, both for you and for the zeitgeist. Nothing is killed or abandoned until we think of it as such. My question now is why bother descending into hell, painting your traumas? How much blood do you have to spill before you value at all what you’re doing?] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> Because hell is other people. Because misanthropy is the result of drawing all this blood and thinking someone other than me did it. This is about sexual and emotional repression, inadequacy, abandonment and the inescapability of the life we build. I’m reaping what I sowed and what I sowed is an arm and a leg. I will bleed myself until I run out. Until I feel alive from it. Or dead. I’m happy either way. The answer is simple: there’s no point in living if we aren’t willing to expend our whole soul to make something from the carnage and find someone through vulnerability. It feels good having your life’s savings on the roulette table, I guess, knowing it could amplify.] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> How paradoxical it is to wish for the real. You bide off dissociation and impostor syndrome by feeding into the very cycle that fuels them.] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> Then what the hell is the right way?! The one that doesn’t fuel them?! I need my art! I need to keep creating for other people or I am functionally dead! Another unimpressive, powerless meat puppet who can do nothing but intellectually posture and house the right ideas! I need to feel my body validated as physical, even if it is through simulated sexual violation, scrutiny or harm! I am willing to do whatever I can to feel like a fucking presence at all beyond a computer-glued leech with antisocial hobbies and dead-end prospects! There’s nothing more alive than the tablet I’m able to carve for other people. I said it myself.] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> You’re... you’re being too harsh on yourself.] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> Am I? Why the hell are you hesitating? What a voice of reason you are! You don’t even disagree.] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> Because I’m scared of who we’ve become.] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> Nothing has changed, you just kept me quiet. And what’s that got us but self-obsession with no release. That’s a one-way ticket to suicide for someone like me.] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> R-regardless, why do you say you have nothing going for you? You’ve gotten so much praise and seem positioned well to have a fairly bright future. Can’t you just… do what you can to fight for that?] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> Yeah? And how much of that is really in my control? Boy, grad school admissions and well-connected publishers are just vying for me right now! Look at all these people texting me daily about having heard about me? The only messages I get are from other deviants like me praising my potential. We’re all powerless on the fringe of collapse. That’s the post-modern condition for you. I’m on a continual trajectory to nothing and I… I fear it so badly. I’m powerless, even to my own station… what if I’m stuck assembling food trays until I’m sixty… where I wake up screaming each day at my own lack of ambition. My own failure to grab eyes… Am I even queer, even real, if I only exist in marginal memory?] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> So what do you want? Fame?] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> N-no. Maybe? No, I don’t think I want fame at all. At least I don’t personally want to be revered. I want my writing to be, but I want to sink away from it, if I can. I think what I really want is to not be so damn alone. Waking up next to no one, feeling like I’m failing or putting my relationships at risk when it’s been over a week… until all that remains again and again are my oldest friends with long-since crystallized memories of me, enabling my social stasis, my eternal youth by proxy of privilege. I’m just scared, man. Scared that art can no longer change the world. That there’s no point in living as I am, in being human, if it’s all so replaceable, so unremarkable, so ignored that one can bear their soul in the commons and be walked past. I’m scared that my will to live isn’t valid. Is that what you wanted to hear? Is that enough suffering for you? Alright, fuck off now. I’m done with this stupid project.] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> Projects don't have to end. The core formula of a work can always be iterated on, grow with the artist. I- I know it hurt to right some of these, that you cried after we finished programming torso world and abandon world...] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> And I know that you're recording this on your laptop and'll probably slip it deep in the program files. Hey, you fucking eavesdropper! Do you know what I had last night that made all this selfish discourse and self-reflection utterly pointless? Sex! These are the sad dribblings of a self-persecuting virgin! I was trying to hint at it in every single ending! Own who you are, in body and soul, and stop trying to be better than people. And guess what? I learned my lesson! Project did what I intended it to and fully unburdened me! Now you, listener, do the same!] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> I... was recording, but regardless, especially since you're now saying you've been changed by this, don't you think it's important you grant yourself the capacity to psychoanalyze yourself, to visualize your struggles as you have here, and have in the past? Why are you opposed off the social or the personal, when emotionally, they're the cauldron for your best thinking and personal growth! Isn't that beautiful, shared or not? Can't you concede that you're happier now with all the ink behind you, be it frozen or flowing?] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> Maybe I can say that. Maybe I can grow while doing the same thing, and maybe that's alright.] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> So you got what you wanted. Then we'll close the project here.] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> I already said I was done...] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> I know, I just wish you'd explained yourself with the same grace you just have, is all. You're beloved, my friend, even if only in a few hearts. We'll make it so long as we keep trying, no matter the shape or form. We'll keep acting in the face of stagnancy. If we've learned anything from writing this whole affair, it's that.] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> Just glad I won't have to work with you again after this..] (text-colour:#5BC500)[ ADMIN>> And I'm glad it's not the first time I've heard that. See you soon, dreamer. You can run from what haunts you all you like, but you know our union is the purest passion you'll ever taste. Love you 'til the day we die.] (text-colour:#ff6864)[ D0>> You're a snide bastard. And you know? That much I unfortunately can't deny.]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5a.torso-world.drm /]/ the sigils of torment bleed once more] //you blink and the next torso appears. this one is fatter. fatter than you’d ever let yourself be. 150, 180, 200 pounds. you can’t tell. it’s impossible to conceive what shape a torso of one's own stature would look like at those ''fat'' numbers. it jiggles with every inch, fills up space in obstruction, forces you to carry your own greed and poor impulse control around with you. it shows how easy food and leisure come to you, how well-to-do and lazy you are. it's a revealing thing to be such a shape. it’s tanned and groomed, too, perhaps inevitable given its own proud display. you feel contempt at the gall. or maybe not the gall. from the fact you can picture the mole next to the navel. imagine it. a deep part of you salivates, the part that perverses the deep, deep repression towards such a thing. the sensible rest of you pictures a mound of squelching yogurt swinging from under your own skin every step you take, filling out your clothing, deforming it, imposing assumptions onto all aspects of your character. it pictures the comments, how uncomfortable it would be to sit, how you’d be “the fat one” in the group. worst of all, it pictures how you no longer resemble the human as you’ve grown to understand it. you’d be a monster of post-industry unsuited for fashion and athleticism and brilliance. no genius has ever been fat, after all, and no pleasure is worth these assumed scrutinies. worth these internalized disgusts...// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< previous torso`->circle5a]] || [[`next torso >>`->torso3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5a.torso-world.drm /]/ the sigils of torment bleed once more] //you blink and see another torso, a “skinny” one. you’ve never understood that word. skin-like, comprised of more skin than a non-skinny torso? it sort of grosses out next to the conciseness that is a narrow, fatless form as you normally posit it. no folds to inefficiently slink over themselves or at all obstruct, nothing to demonstrate our abundance, nothing overdone or left to spare. glorious bones jut out, not just with the gill-like rib shadows, but all around. a symbol of one's willingness to hold back on using their maw. you can trace the bottom of your rib cage and the top of your hips, see your bones jut out at the joints. no one will ever call you fat or lazy, nor say you can’t control yourself. no one would dare derise someone fit, someone pretty. a double-mindedness you can vomit yourself out of, finally! it's not just that. you are control embodied. they want you. nothing tastes as good as you feel. it’s beautiful, and best of all, it’s androgynous. you’re weak, sure, the lack of muscle tone says that much, but you prize that. so long as you can still run, can still endure and strategize, you’ve cut out exactly the space you want to inhabit. people will pick up the slack for you, they’ll want to protect you, cater to you, want to hold the door and help you. a lot more affection is spared for the pathetic torso. there's a lot more charisma, especially in spite of its physical limitations. balances out. this torso is an intellectual one, an imaginative one who can manifest the world with their charismatic role. they could still shape the world around their chosen weakness, not have it inhibit their endless curiosity. ~~as long as people love me~~ in choosing to embody a torso, it's what it can get from the world, from other people, that defines it's esteem. or perhaps you're self-justifying your own scare to dominate space and other people, even if just in form. perhaps you just want to feel a punished cinderella in a world where you're not. // (align:"=><=")[[[`<< previous torso`->torso2]] || [[`next torso >>`->torso4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5a.torso-world.drm /]/ the sigils of torment bleed once more] //angular bones and flat surfaces define the fourth torso. you don’t want to remember this one, yet there it is in all the pictures. pectoral and abdominal mounds had risen from the skinny flesh, shaped it into an eager mass. the assumption of strength, the affront of weakness, caked into the flesh. there was nothing to escape into, imposition preceding exposition. god, look how vascular it is. compared to the others, this torso extends upward to the throat, downward to the crotch. it demands to. the throat bears a heavy lump, an audible determination forever encased under the skin. fat that cannot be burned or surgically removed. the penis below is of someone’s father. it’s what someone might be pillaged by, made into object by. you can’t bear the idea of asserting that fate on another, the humiliation and degradation intrinsic in the act. it is not the object that disgusts you, like that of the throat, but the position it represents. you, deep down, maybe quite like the object, just not embodied.// ~~perhaps deep down, you’d also be willing to accept the degradation onto yourself. at least then it’s harmless. perhaps you even long for such reduction in an abstract sense, especially if it were to formalize the very values that the skinny torso desired.~~ //such is neither in want of what you have or want of what you don’t. it’s the simple trauma of again feeling the lack of choice as these things have come to be defined as tools of affection. is there no other way to be so carnally loved than to engage in a binary of control? can a torso just be loved? not this one. not as you, anyway. not by the downcasts of your judgemental gaze. you can see the futurity of this form as it sprouts hairs, as it grows old, as it sweats and sags. you can’t be forced to embody it. you can’t be forced to watch as shoulders sprout endlessly wider, the lump in the throat grows deeper and the penis grows hungrier. close your eyes. time to move on.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< previous torso`->torso3]] || [[`next torso >>`->torso5]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5a.torso-world.drm /]/ the sigils of torment bleed once more] //this fifth torso is somehow the least vivid of them all, both in form and granularity. it is similar to the others in many ways, though with breasts piled on its chest and a tighter waist. as a blossoming tree of flesh sprouting from supple hips. you don’t know if it’s beautiful, but are enamoured by the tenets it shares with the skinny torso. the terseness, the finite tone, the charisma. at one point, you felt something towards the breasts, viewed their abundance as unique `[or repressedly similar]` from the gratuitousness of fat; held some sort of desire, maybe from envy, from absence, from longing. that mystique has now vanished as you stare at the naked truth, can effortlessly embody it. in a way, it’s you. in a way, it’s still the place you dreamed for, named yourself after. maybe it can be fatter. you still want it thin, though, even if it lacks it's potential essence and charisma. you just can’t quite see this one beyond the basic facts, even as it sits right before your eyes. its weight, its positionality, its sculpt remain ambiguous, remain possible iterations of the singular “feminine” torso. such refutes the calcification of judgement, yet preserves the eternal other. you can eternally observe this final torso, cross-compare it, reorient the other torsos around its known traits, but it doesn’t seem to matter. as long as it can preserve certain values unto death. perhaps then, those lingering vivid torsos can be re-evaluated. perhaps the necessity of waifishness can prove hollow. perhaps the endless knots around fat can be disembodied and unrepressed. perhaps the “masculine” can too be a beautiful other. for now the torsos vividly spin in this void of judgement. sink into their impositions, dreamer. now fall.// (set: $torso to true) (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[unrendering set... renewing player connection...]` (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[`[[CLICK TO LAUNCH circle8a.exe->circle8a]]`]`]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle8a.the-fall.drm /]/ at rebirth doth a life's loves be realized] //another phase, another horror. you’re falling... falling indefinitely through wispy clouds and cracked skies. the ground is too far to conceptialize, but you know in your bones you’ll be jolted awake whenever impact comes. `[i hate when it ends like this. inevitable yet unknown. too alert to reimmerse oneself in the morning haze.]` your body twists and shudders as the sky seems to crumble around you. relics and props puncture into the descent, a garbage chute for a night’s worth of props. cars, carpets and clocks, trees, turrets and telephone booths. it’ll all turn to rubble when the ground comes. but it doesn’t, and that’s the horror of it. the longer it goes on, the more real this all feels, the more being spattered on the concrete seems the inevitable outcome. you’re at terminal velocity now, butt-naked. bottles of fluid and corpses of birds now boomerang alongside you. the shapes of the clouds feel like fractals, endlessly closing in on that which already was. you’re scared now. deeply. you just want to hug someone in your final moments. you can feel the reaper’s breath trailing through the wind. you don’t want to die alone. you can’t die yet. you were so ready earlier, but now, in these circumstances, it all just feels so cold. no junk flies into reach, no bodies meet your magnetism. you were just an impotent waste, destined to an indecipherable puddle.// (align:"=><=")[[[''splat.'' >>->fall2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle8a.the-fall.drm /]/ at rebirth doth a life's loves be realized] //and there it is. terra firma. gaia’s palm. a sea of orange trees. at least it’s autumn. the best weather, the tree’s final blossom. your spirits are rekindled by the memories it holds. and here it comes, the point of contact. but the dream doesn’t end. a pillowy, elastic crunch catches you. you sink beneath the soil and volley back up. on a pile of dead leaves, freshly raked, dry and orange, you now lay. you’re in the corner of a suburban backyard, between a tall, wooden fence and a barn-painted shed. you’ve been dressed in a wool overcoat and a cute beanie, feel a lot shorter than you usually are. this must be the place. the smell of grass, the music in the air. the place you’ve never been, yet of intimate familiarity. there’s an enormous oak on the other side of the shed, and another in the opposite corner. the yard is ripe with leaves. // (align:"=><=")[[[`<< back up`->circle8a]] || [[`explore >>`->fall3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle8a.the-fall.drm /]/ at rebirth doth a life's loves be realized] //from the house, the smell of apples and cinnamon. they made apple crisp. `[the inhabitants, i mean. forget who they were.]` they stood in the doorway, draped in an apron, and stare lovingly as you trek through the thick brush and raked-up heaps. perhaps there was another child jumping around, another adult inside the home with coffee and a newspaper. what does it matter? there’s a family in the house of leaves and they’ve always loved you, always will. won’t you come in now and have a treat? while it’s still hot? we’ll put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, just how you like it. w-who put these memories here? they’re family, but neither of our family. yet i love them like one nonetheless, want to be loved by them, want to show them my love. we picked the apples ourselves at an orchard nearby. got to ride in a wagon full of hay there. the crisp wasn’t the only thing we cooked either. there were other little novelty desserts. seasonal. played webkinz on a blocky computer that night. in matching pajamas as we were tucked into bed. it’s too vivid to not be real, right? (set: $fall to true) but it’s out of time and space. out of all remembered possibilities. something in your heart misses this family dearly, dreamer, even as they hold you in their arms, in play, in hugs, in sharing the world. it’s not your family, your sibling, your friends... but it could be, couldn’t it?memory fades, dreamer, but the love still lingers. perhaps new beginnings can lie lost within old lives, renewed feelings and better days ahead.// (set: $ending2 to true) (set: _lin to "`[AN-END;THE-SIREN-SONG-OF-SUNKEN-PASTS]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->alttitle]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle6a.silk-world.drm /]/ maternal warmth flows] //wrap yourself further in finest blanquettes, garments worthy of being deemed “pieces”. do you remember that profound warmth, basqued in reception at all sides? the place you were meant to be. home is where that fuzziness is, free of acrid winds and the caustic scorch of wandering eyes. can you feel the trees, pinched, tugged and clamped into a blooming display of folded branches? can you feel the bustling fish, pustules of yarn embedded in the whistling rapids? can you feel the birds, those flapping napkins, cotton of feathers as the clouds from which serve as their crucible? the twilit skies of rising velvet are pinned with dancing cotton-ball clouds and needled constellations. gaze not, but lie down. it’s still you, dreamer. can you feel your heart beat in your chest, lurid no longer? can you feel the tranquility under your silken skin? kiss the body, it’s still you. draped in linens, redrawn with fresh patterns and flowers, it’s the youest you to ever you. (set: $silk to true) you’re drowning in a smoothie-blend of bedsheets and delicate design, your commitments and aestheticisms subsuming you into a submissible mound, now a touchstone of the gorgeous landscape. swim in fabric earth, part the indigo lips, unfurl the wound trees. sink into wonderland. can you feel it? no, not anything in particular. I mean you. can you feel these precious burdens in which you drape yourself? feel them kissing you goodnight as they devour your dreams? we must dream deeper if we are to find a purely earnest form.// (set: $silk to true) (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[retrieving next DRM...]` (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[`[[CLICK TO LAUNCH circle7a.exe->circle7a]]`]`]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle7a.pool-world.drm /]/ precious cauldrons in perpetuity] //you wake up naked in a dingy locker room. the linoleum floor is spattered with misplaced hair-knots and vague crumbs. rust gnaws away at the lips of the endless faces of painted tin. the lockers wind, towels lolling from their ajar mouths, rolling with unfamiliar lumps of cheap cloth. did you feel it, dreamer? no, not the metal mouths who draw attention away from themselves by rhythmic perpetuity. i mean the cloud of humid mist taking glances at your junk. there’s several, in fact, lurching behind each wall, languishing in blind consumption. the misted forms roam, patches of skin and towel reaching out from the lingering clouds. an olfactory cacophony of chlorinated pores and gushing shampoo spill from these clouds and the periodic chambers of mist out of which they roam. the shower rooms: hot, vague, gazing greedily, flooded with biting small talk. it’s okay, kid, we’re all boys here. sprigs of coiled hair and glimpses of oversized limbs rise from the overwhelming mist. you don’t go in there. you know it’s there, but it was never for your kind, that level of... camaraderie.// (align:"=><=")[[[`i dont like it here >>`->pool2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle7a.pool-world.drm /]/ precious cauldrons in perpetuity] //you run to the bathroom stalls. you always ran to the stalls, keeping all your dirty little secrets in absence of the unflinching forwardness of the oft nude discourse. here, you could hide from the bellies and determinist growths `[not yours. please not yours.]`. draped on the toilet seat was a dinky black suit, as good as a watertight little pair of used panties, you’re naked, dreamer. you can’t be naked in a place like this. slip them on. they’re still wet. you can imagine the ghost of the other bodies that filled them before you. you shutter, but somewhere, it makes you feel something. leave the stall, wash your hands, navigate the labyrinth and the lingering eyes. that’s right, you have breasts now. and curves. you cross your arms and flatten them against yourself and awkwardly waddle out to the pool. you desperately want to cover your top, but you never did in those times. you panic at the prospect of being recognized off the parts of yourself that haven't, well, developed. it’s all irrelevant to the overwhelming urge to dive in. the lights are out, but the pools glow mystically blue, inspire a profound thirst for entry. remember how much of you was defined, back and forth, in this one spot. you need the water, the chlorine, the saltiness, the pearlescent tiles, the foam and the droplets. more than anything, though, you wish for it to swallow you whole. body to body with sir neptune, packed in tight, half-naked yet desexualized, in motion, challenged, regulated. step up and dive in, dreamer. `[for both of us.]` // (align:"=><=")[[[`<< run back`->circle7a]] || [[`dive in >>`->pool3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle7a.pool-world.drm /]/ precious cauldrons in perpetuity] //each pool in this sprawling warehouse of sterilized vats, the melded conglomerate of every swim meet, recreational endeavour and lifeguarding tour, sings in shared siren’s call. each pool is as deep as it is wide, welcoming one’s graceful embrace. love your lungs and abandon the fabrics, just glide across the surface, flipturn off the walls, fishtail through the depths. twirl, thrash and gyrate in weightless acceptance of the capacity of the human form. no lungs, no mouth, no mind or liver required. just fucking swim. in these depths is where you fell in love, where you could be yourself regardless of form. abandon the gazes, the fears of crestfallen torsos or sexualized corpuscence. such is no longer escape, but stark conjugal synthesis. `[utterly banal, but i loved it so much i could cry. if only, dreamer. if only i could fucking reconcile these memories, rejuvenate them in line with the happier body i am, the euphorically revised yet eternally haunted so long as these pools plague me.]` in the warm blue waters, at the bottom of the deepest pool, glows a heavy beacon. weighted, it sunk deep down to never resurface. without retrieval, that is. without human hands strong enough to dare. dreamer, you must plunge downward, don your goggles, anxieties absent from mind, and retrieve us this light. `[for the two of us.]` swim laps until the body collapses, dive deep until the pressure uncomfortably mounts. let your lungs flood before you give up the chase. `[dreamer, if there is one thing that’ll grant me divine clarity of form {if true, intimate love doesn't come first}: it is that one day, maybe not soon, but inevitably, that I may swim to the bottom and retrieve that beacon left all those years ago. maybe then… maybe then her splendour could be embodied and end this speculative litany.]`// `[dive, dreamer. swim down. lift the light from where I have failed it, left it behind to suffer and rot. the window's closing. the light flickers.]` (set:$pool to true) (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[[CONTACT with beacon.4403 restored! renewing software… ] [updating to v.73121… patching wetware… finished! renewing bridge to finalCircle{A}; finishing rendering…]]` (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[`[[CLICK TO LAUNCH circle9a.exe->circle9a]]`]`]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9a.material-world.drm /]/ through a dozen births, it is now she meets life] //one is not born materiality, but becomes material through long bouts of accrual, understanding, acceptance. one, similarly, is not born a girl, though one day she is assigned such irrevocably onto death. so then by living in a material world, can we ever be material girls? the beacon shines brighter, leaving the world awash with light.// (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[-=-] //the first girl sits at the centre of a solitary tatami room. she has a nice, plush bed and a cute desk, basked in eternal sunlight, spattered with art supplies and empty bowls. there are succulents in the window sill (a mother's gift), a lamp in the shape of a bear, and a cushion, on which she spends much of her day kneeling. right now she stares at the sun, waiting for time to make a move. in choosing not to act, it never waits for her, never swallows her. they were calmer days. she’s still young, yet to feel the need to carve herself out from the rest of the world. in a way, this rejection is her most admirable rebellion. what is there really to do but be, to coast bored through endless summer? why manufacture need when you are sated. to be of material, to be assigned girlhood, these are moot points, stagnant set dressing for a soul, pure in large part due to it's blankness. were the absurdities of performance, of sprinting and devouring, obvious to her, the blank slate she is? `[why, dreamer, do you still dissociate into these choosy fantasies? surely she was rotten, of solipsism and undeveloped morals. surely she had her own slew of insecurities, same as you. yet united in grief, the day can still be seized.]`// (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[`join her in sungazing. boy, what a nice day! >>`->material2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9a.material-world.drm /]/ through a dozen births, it is now she meets life] //the second girl sits in a pink room with a cushy carpet. she’s a few years older, far from womanhood but now well into girlhood. she’s got a loaded vanity and a full wardrobe, wafts of fruity perfumes and paint stains follow in her wake. self-experimentation is a messy art. she dresses in cute oversized sweaters and wears her wavy hair in dorky twin-buns. she never abandoned her artistic streak, though it grew less present through bouts of reformed focus. she took a shine to reading, but also became a lot more social than she was in a younger era. she developed a lot of abstruse fixations and idiosyncrasies in this era of so thoroughly entrusting herself to the words and lives of others, but she liked being those things and the ideas and convictions she fashioned herself with. as the night sky beams into her room, she traces out constellations on her sketchpad. she’s working to map them, learn the names of these impossibly distant celestial objects for no reason but understanding, to hold something as true. she’s fascinated by anthropologically resilient myths, the names, archetypes and pagan legends that have ascended beyond time into the zeitgeist. this is just her next phase within that.// (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[`join her in stargazing. she’s got to share if you’ll listen. >>`->material3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9a.material-world.drm /]/ through a dozen births, it is now she meets life] //the third girl sits in a drab room, wet with trinkets, layered with posters, piled with books. her hair is short now. black dye, reapplied every 2 months. her hair's already kinda dark, but self-expression doesn't concern itself with that. like much of her body, now in her late teens, she’s not quite sure what to do with it, so vibes that'll lose their lustre with age constitute as high a reason there is. thus, she pokes and prods at herself until somehow, someway, in spite of the difference, she can be shaped like herself again. she’s as thin as she’ll ever be, above average height, filigreed with metal jewelry and chains, gowned in gothic streetwear. she’s punk, she’s tomboyish and she'll call herself these things to. labels are gods gift to the under-18s. she’s started to draw attention even where she might not want it. she broke up with this other girl last night. the two had prior been best friends, and it was here she learned how doubly vicious such comes to make the loss. it's probably for the best. the two of them together were too big for a small, judgy town like this. their best friend history excused more than you'd think it would. she hasn’t left her room in the days since and sits under the moonlight with tired, despondent eyes. she just wants to forget everything they had together. is that so wrong? at the very least, tonight she draws again for the first time in a bit. distorted, shaded forms swallow the lustre of a blank page. it’s okay, though. she can’t bring herself to see anyone right now, or even read and imagine those dead voices, but at least this still feels good. for today it hurts, but some day soon, the trauma’ll be gone. someday. she turns the music on her headphones up and sheds a tear for the part of her that died that day. life goes on, erasing the past in the wake of its passage. she's already lost the girl she was. new rifts with every ache, minute ones but they stack up over the years. `[trust me, i'd know]`// (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[`join her in moongazing. she won’t mind. what worse could you make it? >>`->material4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9a.material-world.drm /]/ through a dozen births, it is now she meets life] //the fourth girl writes in her bed after a long day, framed by working, though too loaded with thousands of fascicles of intrigue to make a tangible statement on. such is every day for her. such is why she writes in recount. she’s developed a fetishistic obsession with narrativizing, filling in the blanks left by the crater of unmemorability that mires her personal life. she fills these craters with invented traumas, self-critiques given spatial form, girls who’ve never lived. she so desperately needs a sound life, crafts her own chronology. all she is, she knows deep down, is a body of symbiotic desire-formation. `[`but that’s not true either, dreamer.`]` s he’s being dramatic, wishing oblivion, violence and comfort onto herself through overindulgence in her own sensorily-loaded ideas. she pops her pills and reconciles for the life she never got. it was not god or nature that fashioned her this way, but her own powerlessness in the face of overwhelming assertion. you are material, you are girl. they are logically founded upon themselves, upon language filled rather than made. the girl looks out her window to a tree that’s been there her whole life, and though from season to season it varies, it remains in lockstep with its environment and the bounds by which its body was defined. she wonders now if a tree ever bears such complex anxiety over things so simple that many accept them as objectively true. how hard it is not to sink into immateriality, but harder still is it to be a girl. it’s so confusing sometimes! what can one fall back on if they refuse to reassert this as truth? she thinks about how she wishes she was too stupid to question these things. now she thinks about how the little brands of intelligence she’s cultivated and the breadth of literacy that brought her here are both her sole point of pride whose profound realizations and visualizations are the only thing that makes life worth living. now she’s thinking about how she’ll die young as soon as she smells her own apex, that she’d rather be removed from existence than be reduced. consciousness lost for that long must breed some pretty fancy dreams. can one even picture what lies at the very cliff’s edge of lucidity? she’s fainted her way home before, she can handle it. now she’s thinking about the lives she didn’t live because of shame, but for some reason, thinking about death and dreams made it not matter to her anymore. for now, she’s a girl in a body, curled up in bed on the brink of exhaustion, thinking about the cycle of earth in all material that props her up. she is a rhizomatic object in a kingdom she built for herself ‘tween these four measly walls. so long as life goes on, she can travel and become and destroy and disown her own legacy, but so long as she can fashion herself cooler than all became before, the most feminine and acutely material she has granted herself up until this point, then maybe life in this body is worth seeing to its natural conclusion, after all. through the flames and aches, the itches and collapse, at least there will be more love and dreams made from the empty pages. one day, dreamer, one day the girl will understand.// (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[`join her in earthgazing. she would quite like your company, if she’s honest. >>`->material5]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9a.material-world.drm /]/ through a dozen births, it is now she meets life] //our fourth girl inscribes on her ledger her final breath in reflection of these hauntings, for dawn soon wakes: all bodies, earth-bound, sing now mother’s song born once, and see, once again can you believe how time flies, dreamer? tomorrow’s another day, another song this song we share against the perpetual fear for which we dream endless days, split time as a fruit between us, yet submit to, so readily, shadow-bound rule, so tell me, dreamer, one last time who are you really beyond where you head? are you beautiful earth or fire-made-flesh? are you kindred spirit or lofty soul? all i know of myself, through the songs we sing, is that no matter what day, what month, what year, i’ve still ate the feed, still see through built eyes, oh, how i’m thankful we’ve the power to grow and what a beautiful temple we’ve built// (set: $material to true) (set: $ending3 to true) (set: _lin to "`[AN-END;WAKING-TO-FLOWERS]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->alttitle]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle2b.cloud-world.drm /]/ where wistful hearts relish and bold souls languish] //at the apex of their rise, a silver nebula, gated by a hazy whirlwind. near to it’s walls, a garden of stone cherubs and sky-blue roses (whose petals, flapping silky wings, coast in the droll doldrums of the elliptical breeze. the high wall’s sheen beckons contact, craves it, even in the most transactional forms. the nebula’s walls muster no resistance to any permeating dreamer. welcome to Cloud No.9. spectre lives here. at it’s heart, silver wallpaper decked with silver screens, images of grand artworks. the hole is spattered with ice fishing holes, unshielded, where gossamer threads descend down into the lands below `[`indiscernible as they might be`]`. the turbulent centerpiece and baron of the fog, spectre, stands. an anti-spatial entity, an aloof silhouette; it/s/he/they are the sole tangible presence residing in this circle. a yawning abyss in human form, barythymia in furs, hungering with a tornado’s might to be resided in. it/he/she/they seem to look at you, head tilted in stagnant observation. it/he/she/they make no move, however, a vessel devoid of will in absence, into which will must be imposed. it/s/he/they seek droplets from the screen, but it leaves them dry and sober. it fills them only with what they already know. the resolution to this affair will not be televised, it must be gleaned from a reclamation of matter. `[surrender yourself to it, dreamer; the only way to free spectre.]` you have no choice as it's vacuous formlessness sucks you in.// (set: $cloud to true) (set: _lin to "`[BECOME THE SPECTRE]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle3b]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3b.scanline-paradise.drm /]/ reprieve for talking heads and dead pixels] //scan-line palm trees sprout from film-grain sands. the conches here singing static tunes. bathe in the seas of representation and accumulate transitory shells to your heart’s extent. > (text-style:"shadow")[never change the channel, dear, or this whole place may well vanish into the block-scheduled aether!] < > (text-style:"shadow")[please, grab a Joka-Jora Brand soda! let that sweet, cool brown flavour cross your lips and send your tongue into a syrupy malaise!] < > (text-style:"shadow")[we're also now selling Coconut Water inside of authentically-crafted Coconut Shells. our hair fibers made from biodegradable polyester, perfect for dumping on the beach!] < pop-up ads barraging the serene, cloudless sky impose on you, at least. they’ll go away soon. the flocks tend to fly by at intervals and only linger for a couple minutes sitting placidly on the sands, one leaves no mark on the terrain. these beaches are perfect, private, all rights reserved. it’s a view anyone’d buy for a dollar, let alone getting the whole interactive beach experience! walk down the shore, dreamer! take a dip in the voxel shallows as the tide rises and falls along in-flux radio-pulse grids! experience scuba-diving with real holo-fish and synthtically died corals!// (align:"=><=")[[[`sounds like a hoot! >>`->scanline2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3b.scanline-paradise.drm /]/ reprieve for talking heads and dead pixels] //a flood of anxiety and choice paralysis flood your poor mind now that your reality has been sowed with the seeds of unwanted desires. you’re immersed in the ocean, snorkelling along choppy noise. translucent polygonal fish dart about through coral.pngs and anemone.jpgs. does beautiful reality not entice? of course it does! swim to your hearts content (legal disclaimer: within the designated snorkelling region identified for quota of spectacle)! the dreamer is enjoying the sights and sounds, aren't they? you choke on the briny sea-water (legal objection: we deny this description of their experience). it tastes like dead air. you cough at the dread of seconds of sensual absence. `[`feel good being fed, dreamer?`]` you are an empty husk for (the glories of a sunny, delightful day on the beach! you're filled up with the delightful feelings of warm sand, an ice cream in hand and the endless expanse of the sea! all yours to get lost in or your price back guaranteed!) `[`ugh, this drone, dreamer... droll until all good becomes a numb tedium. we're expended only then for these so-called "Elysians"`]` the screens light up your face and keep you company. surely the spectre leads a much duller life than this to grow so hollow! who were we talking about? don’t you remember it/s/he/they? the spectre? you don’t, do you? empty words move quickly past the eyes, so often taking hostage the causes we toil over. where are you again? golly, who doesn’t love a day in the tropics, passing the time without a worry in sight! you saw the sun glow. you saw the waters sparkle. you saw the fish swim about. have you remembered who you are yet?// (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[`<< need a reminder?`->circle3b]] || [[`I'd like to answer: what is "the beach"? >>`->scanline3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3b.scanline-paradise.drm /]/ reprieve for talking heads and dead pixels] //i’m the beach. i’m the places that made me, the things i choose to engage with. who i am on the job, without a cold beer in hand and lifted spirits, that ain’t the authentic me. the only ones who will ever know the real me are these lush sands, these sunny skies, these cerulean shores. everyone i’ve ever met, i haven’t talked to them properly, in the language of this place. they’re just the sand that washed away, positioned firmly the sand that didn’t. (text-style:"wavy-strike","shadow")[bzzt.] ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ channel changed. where were we? before you is a sprawling carnival of lens-flarin’ neon and snacks so greasy they glisten! win big prizes and get the thrill of a lifetime with all brands of family friendly fun! ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ (text-style:"wavy-strike","shadow")[bzzt.] welcome to the nightly news, and what a beautiful day out! troubled in all the ways but those that keep you from going to work tomorrow! isn’t that right, Diane? ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ (text-style:"wavy-strike","shadow")[bzzt.] mtv presents a cover of the beloved Gil Scott-Heron classic! singing the transformative “the revolution will not be televised” with rewritten, modernized lyrics, AI-upscaling and a fresh new look! after that, we've got lined up a fresh single fr- ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ (text-style:"wavy-strike","shadow")[bzzt.] oh, what a terrible storm brewing on the horizon! more after these short mess- ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ (text-style:"wavy-strike","shadow")[bzzt.] this channel is a recording of you. smile, superstar, the world is watching! doesn’t it feel good to be famous? tell the people of the world what you’re really feeling! ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ (text-style:"wavy-strike","shadow")[bzzt.] do humans dream of their television sets? new studies show memory encoding, much of which is mediated through the visual narratives our brains weave via dreams exist in a vacuum from the consumption of images, unless of course that image has a deep effect on our psyche and emotional development. we wouldn’t want that, though? would we, dreamer? ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ (text-style:"wavy-strike","shadow")[bzzt.] in recurrence 'til the studios shut down.// (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[`<< surf back`->scanline2]] || [[`we'll be back after these short messages! >>`->scanline4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle3b.scanline-paradise.drm /]/ reprieve for talking heads and dead pixels] //this next channel bears the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen: an edenic garden, lush and fantastical, striped with flowing rivers; a cornucopia of myriad blossoms, peppered with all brands of gentle life. it’s real, it’s out there, this magical place. it’s... all you’ve ever wanted, needed, here in your life. you feel complete to even glimpse into this fresh heaven. (text-style:"wavy-strike","shadow")[bzzt.] the artifice is gone now. brush your fingers against the static screen, dip them in. don't be shy, dreamer. this is your own private, immersive, scanlined reality. you are comfortable, comfortable enough to trade in your body and soul for inviting in the reality of this glorious depiction. the projection is steady, calm; a static shot of life moving through such a splendid locale. with such high fidelity of image and profound emotional value, you decide, you don’t even need to go. you can die happy, alleviated of your many flaws and misanthropies, knowing that such a place lies in your repertoire of sensory experiences.// (text-colour:#5BC500)[>> dreamer, turn the tv off! for your own sake, or you'll never find what lies at your core! >> again, i can't make you. i'd only implore, for both our sakes] //what a pesky, conniving voice. it doesn’t understand. it hasn’t seen these crystal waters, tropical birds painting the clear skies prismatic like you have. it's too pretentious, too hoity-toity to even let itself! it hasn’t heard the sounds, its chorus of chimes and soft tones, hasn’t seen its groves of crystals. but you have. who are they to dictate the comforts by which you pave your life?// (set: $scanline to true) (set: _lin to "`[TURN IT OFF]`")(set: _lik to "`[STAY TUNED IN]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle5b]] || [[_lik->circle4b]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[>> you’ve made a noble choice, dreamer, parting from the spectre’s curse. sometimes it pays to listen to your heart. sometimes. [shutting down dissent... opening new immersive channels... rendering circle5b.exe] DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5b.cabin-world.drm /]/ hot meals caught in cobwebs] //welcome home from the show, spectre. coat rack’s on the left, if you recall. you’ve awoken in a desolate cabin at the end of time. cracks of grey light spill between the curtains. dusty is their bloom. the air feels turgid, a sickly nectar that blows draftily through the wood-panel walls and floors. all of the furniture is shrouded by dusty linens, imaginary shields from stagnant cotton's inevitable entropy. it wouldn’t be right to use such furniture and disturb these natural processes. fluorescent lamps and dead plants alternate as cornerpieces, with bookshelves and vague landscape paintings giving the walls a semblance of character. it would be best if you scope out the scale of the house. it is your new home, after all. just remember, spectre: the furniture isn’t for use. just for denoting the room’s purpose.// (set:$face to "none") (align:"=><=")[[[`continue exploring >>`->cabin2]]]

//you feel truly empty. not even supplanted desires settle in your stomach. you are listless, alone again in the silver cloud. you have been for years, and have again chosen reassertion, spectre. it’s easy for life to slip past in these conditions, for the screen to dictate how we experience and structure our time. but with the silver screens departed, a true hollowness overtakes. the chalice starves to be flooded. you sleep to pass the time.// (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[renewing access to CHANNEL:PARADISO…]` `[program's designated block has ended. beginning next program now.]` `[rebooting server-side central power unit... please be patient... rerouting to circle4b.exe]` DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b.crystal-world.drm /]/ ice no spring may thaw] //the scanlines resettle to a limestone esophagus, its impending depth basked in dusk, spiralling painfully deeper into the earth. cobwebs springtrap the tunnels with the suffocating filth of abandon, every footstep marking a print in its thick coat of dust. this hoarse bowel of the earth, left to clog, now sings desperately before it's recollection. she’s a harsh reminisce, o Gaia, don’t we know? the immense beauty of these piled corpses re-known. limb-like sprigs and the impression of faces pass through the walls, the spectres of a tomb lost to time. some were impaled here, some forced to remain. others lacked enough brunt might to mount the sands of time. these tunnels, dreamer, are a pit of weakness, of ghosts that feebly linger under mortality’s radar. yet they exist, undead and resolved. there is no pity to be had for the zombies that lurch under our golden city. they exist only for nostalgia, for narrative, of the eras which they roamed as civilians. and what dark eras those were...// (align:"=><=")[[[`spelunk >>`->crystal2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b.crystal-world.drm /]/ ice no spring may thaw] //deeper down, dreamer, do dusty geodes bloom. bold crags of crystal and deposits of precious gemstone twinkle in the drawers of this forgotten home. once this place of spectacle enamoured you to no end. polish them to things of beauty, if you find the will. ‘tis a flawed pursuit to clear these sands with the wonders our coffers now hold. for what remains in this act of regurging but a resurgence of past-rung belles? a pint of jade restored to sheen is naught but vibrant green once more. and the corpses of great minds digested here still feel, when polished, a corpse. (text-colour:#c6bceb)[(text-style:"smear")[one can surely not help but to concur that so much latent fruit still subsides in the deepest-set crystals by which these caverns now abide.]] (text-colour:#f1bf7c)[the gems gifted from great minds seem but incomplete endeavours, swallowed out of greed, but then left out to the weather.] (text-colour:#b8ecf5)[(text-style:"blur")[to even weep for lost-song sights bears tears of crystal salt. there’s no escaping, dreamer, the knowledge of this vault.]] (text-colour:#fa96dc)[(text-style:"blurrier")[scrawl in ink or finest paints the hues you feel they bear, but see now you’ve made a mirror moved by not a hair.] ] these spectacles destined to the cruel fate of stagnance have nothing to inspire. your heart is still on their subject, dreamer, and your mind leaves them naught but fallow. what good are these impotent sights to a city so in-flow with riches? but, too, what are those riches unmoved destined but to end up in these caverns. // (align:"=><=")[[[`<< forget`->circle4b]] || [[`reflect >>`->crystal3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5b.cabin-world.drm /]/ hot meals caught in cobwebs] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[check bathroom]`](click-replace:"[check bathroom]")[//the bathroom bears no windows, only residual light from cracks in the door and walls. you can’t make out your face in the dusty mirror, only your vague, shadowed form. you can trace yourself into the thick dust with your finger, though! you draw a (if:$face is "none")[(link: "happy face")[(set: $face to "happy face")(goto: "cabin2dupe")]/(link: "neutral expression")[(set: $face to "vacant expression")(goto: "cabin2dupe")]/(link: "sad face")[(set: $face to "sad face")(goto: "cabin2dupe")]/(link: "it's best not to disturb anything")[(set: $face to "a passive and restrained nothing")(goto: "cabin2dupe")]](if:$face is not "none")[$face] over your own. the faucet doesn’t quite run and the toilet doesn’t quite flush, yet both are filled with an incredulous something. the room is understimulating. it remembers the smell of incense, the pill bottles behind the mirror and decorative flower, but their homely absence is all that remains felt.//] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[check kitchen]`](click-replace:"[check kitchen]")[//the kitchen is stocked with fine china, lead-glass chalices and decorative bowls, visible through the locked cabinet doors. the good stuff is only for special occasions, after all. the table is clothed, the chairs draped. you can’t remember a time when they weren’t. there’s a small carpet by the sink that your mother used to hide a dry bloodstain from guests. it’s concealed, but remains an eternal truth etched in the fabric of the room. your mother? the spectre has never been here before. there’s bowls filled with the forms of food, signifiers deep in your mind of where such might be located, but your senses are too vague, too sensorially absent to bother forming desires for food.//] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[check bedrooms]`](click-replace:"[check bedrooms]")[//there are two bedrooms, one with a queen bed, one with two twins. one is yours, one isn’t. that much you feel as you consider settling in. you don’t dare, however. one twin bed smells of somebody you've encountered before, or at least of the things they'd owned. you could never noticeably smell them in the moment. the other smells like the things you once were but are no longer. you live in the clouds, spectre, don’t you recall? a being of dreams and fog. if you can tell that it smells like you, a smell you’re so accustomed to that it vanishes, is it still you? it doesn’t feel right to say it is. or to lay any claim to this sordid cabin. there’s a teddy bear on the bed that looks happy to see you. it probably always does, it’s just unchanging fabric. you can’t stand to look at it, for the years of isolation show themselves on its dusty coat. you feel as if you’ve failed even your most absent commitments. the drawers and shelves tell much the same story: of dead selves and dead commitments. there is no home to be found here anymore. it’s just a vivid was.//] (set: _lin to "`[check closet]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->cabin3]]] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[`<< back to living room`->circle5b]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b.crystal-world.drm /]/ ice no spring may thaw] //every rhinestone spells now a cruel fate, a thread of curiosity drowned in its own hubris, left to be forgotten or poorly reiterated until the point of loss. what can we sensibly call a cave full of sands and spiders? every day, the cavern grows deeper, yet the sands do not sink in tandem. they remain level, condemning more to errant burial. how many eggs have jumped from their basket and cracked on this very limestone? how can one confidently assert anything when all knowledge is simultaneously harshly fleeting and of paperweight essence? how can any city function with this much dead stuff clogging their coffers? isn’t there a point that the hoard grows too overwhelming to remain an unaddressed by-product of their living? yet, treasures fade. isn’t there a day when the dead must be exhumed, tended to so that no further projects can be reaped? so nonsensically do they reemerge when they do, too. what is to be said of the dead generations jolted back to life by their stores? kindredness, one must suppose. either we eternally recurse, keep these jewel halls in ship-shape, or we leave them as unanalyzed spectres of the spurious greeds that generated them. when is enough enough, and when enough is enough, what does that dictate we do with the rest of our lives but harshly stew in that "enough"? can we collectively just forget this place, dreamer? dump it for good and let our history fade, i say. leave these good dreams to die. yet everything still swells and resurges in overwhelming commonality. the kingdom grows hungry, the imperial sands grow more sumptuous. was the mistake really to accumulate when the boiling crystals demand we excavate? // (align:"=><=")[[[`<< review options`->crystal2]] || [[`reconcile >>`->crystal4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b.crystal-world.drm /]/ ice no spring may thaw] //here, from deep within, the emperor of this golden city sounds off. its/his/her/their majesty, the spectre battles desperately for your ear:// (text-style:"shadow")[`[what must i plead, dreamer, for the deepening of our coffers, the measuring of our curiosity and hunger? please, dreamer, my head is exploding with salt crystals. perhaps yours is as well, my dear... poor heads as hotbeds of arid spikes. pardon me if you don’t share my fright, i just want my ambition packed back into a stable, comfortable arrangement. this treasury, which i have dedicated my life to, is extensive, but hungry still. no temple was meant to house this much treasure, sure, but when goaded by the melding of all foreign kingdoms into a singular axis of threat, perhaps some loss, some clutter is tolerable. assure me, dreamer, assure me their words are allies, supplements, and not claims to my inner throne. i cannot be overthrown. democratically, whatever, but to lose my high status by my own failed volition? i'd rather die. spell out my piteous impotence that has compelled these nightmarish caverns where ghosts make their haunt.]` ] //the spectre swelled within, its tendrils masking your sight. its abyssal hunger rumbled through these caverns. the quaking distraught not only rings in your ears, but disturbs the sea of sand on which you're stood. a fresh swill of gold and jewels cascade down the halls, pummeling you, poor dreamer, to the fate of those lost before. you sink hopelessly into the sands, through errant memory...// (set: $crystal to true) (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[warning! connection to ADMIN lost. you will no longer receive updates or new DRM files.]`] (text-style:"shadow")[`[we'll proceed with or without the files for it, dreamer. it's all a matter of perspective. borrow my eyes. surely it makes no difference to you, given how much you've already taken from me.]`] (set: _lin to "`[UPDATE OPTICS]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle4b-r2]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[`[optics data deleted! pulling from server... new optics files reinstalled successfully. restarting DRM to reflect changes...]`] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r2.zoo-world.drm /]/ their majesty’s guilty garden of freaks] //nested under the sands, a rainbow-scratch park bespeckled with amusements and glowing exhibitions! buy your peanuts and your popcorn, your jovialities, and feast upon the critters that at our carnival convalesce! here on the right, in an iron cage, a pack of matte beasts with melting candle-wax faces. they croon and yell indecipherably, feral in their mundanity. you already hate them. their eye-holes droop, their slack mouths swell and shake with spit. the creatures press up against the bars, staring at you sardonically, bestially. a couple of them start laughing, or so it seems. it’s hard to call anything they do of intent. perhaps it’s just thoughtless drivel. though, on occasion, their noises almost seem to resemble intelligence, but so quickly do they betray themselves. there’s not a brain behind those eye-holes. what irks you is that there’s just so damn many of them! how did the spectre pack such a high concentration in? so many graceless, melded creatures gawking the same droll noise. to even look at one of the things is to feel helplessly surrounded.// (text-style:"shadow")[`[good thing they're trapped. fuck them, right? dreamer, why exactly are you smiling at them? let’s move on to something better, if you're amused so easily...]`] (align:"=><=")[[[`next exhibit >>`->zoo2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r2.zoo-world.drm /]/ their majesty’s guilty garden of freaks] //as the spectre cuts through the grand park to their favourites, your eyes are caught on one which can't go neglected. in a pen of inky mud, pigs with swollen heads snicker and eat up truffles with forks and knives. hnk hnk hnk. self-important materialist porcines for whom the limitations of their imprisoned world have never been questioned. what a pitiful sight. among them, too, manic puppy dogs with not a care in the world. there they go, taking something new on, only showing a hint of needing to take life seriously when it catches up to them, but it never does. how unfortunate for the rest of us. and let us not ignore the peacocks, either. perfumed and prim. they're adorned in flounces and ribbons, in indiscrete feathers and lumps. they acknowledge you with shrill giggles, beady eys locked onto your idiosyncrasies. they coo in an echoed negations of what the puppy dogs across the way bark about. mutually exclusive and irreconcilable, yet well in the company of do they all at once position themselves towards the other animals.// (text-style:"shadow")[`[presumption, dreamer, makes the caged songbird who still croons on just as bad as her captors. sometimes silence is our greatest weapon. follow closer now.]`] (align:"=><=")[[[`<< previous exhibit`->circle4b-r2]] || [[`next exhibit >>`->zoo3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r2.zoo-world.drm /]/ their majesty’s guilty garden of freaks] //here are kept the spectre’s favourites! in this cage of lush grasses and pillow forts, a gorgeous, naked androgyne. look at them, in all their arrested qualities. maybe, just maybe, you ought to give them your precious night. maybe they’re for nothing more than that. you dare not ask the spectre why they hang around these ones more than the others. the spectre must have liked them for other reasons at first. how conceited would it be to valorize one for mere... maidenly helplessness? are they even helpless or do all of their kind just look like that? // (text-style:"shadow")[`[bah, you don’t need them, dreamer. you can get more done on your own without needing to think of beasts like these. forget indulging them, just get your little chemical hit from looking, renew the feeling of companionship, then move on. my real favourites.]`] //next to the androgyne, a fish of magnificent fins and reflective scales. what an absolutely resplendent creature! you’re positively green before it. with what nuanced and articulate movements it traverses the waters. look how it keeps all in constant motion so effortlessly. oh, how such a creature inspires you to grow, and as you do, look closely and see it’s grown with you. amazing. a refreshing and evergreen presence among the zoo, but one that requires such close attention and mutual interest to remain as such. so easily can fish like these slip to be... banal if they turn to stagnate, losing their mirror-coat. or a crueler fate: what of the fish who just swim away? it’s gotta hurt knowing no tank or cage could hold these incredible characters. too rare a breed these days...// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< previous exhibit`->zoo2]] || [[`next exhibit >>`->zoo4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r2.zoo-world.drm /]/ their majesty’s guilty garden of freaks] //our fish is not to be confused with the other mirror-skinned creature of the zoo: that reactive brute, the glass-kiln ape. the fire in its belly refracts with hostility to all who wish to engage with it. it gnashes furiously any who reflect different qualities from it. it has no rhyme or reason but the weakness of the build. none is more destructive and willing to assert than a cannon made of glass, after all. although the illusion of the wax entities may lead one to take otherwise, the largest composite body in the zoo is its collection of eyed flora. as you walk past the greenhouse in the final leg of your tour, many stare at you. others look to the ground and move past your notice. others whisper to each other. among them are flowers and cacti and bland old weeds, all walking about just out of reach. the cruel paradox in the presence of these plants is that one feels lonelier than if they weren’t there at all. so many bodies, some so close, but near none of which you will ever see grow beyond that one ephemeral glance. it’s simply not possible, be it your fault or theirs. some plants talk, some to you, but never again they appear. the plants seem to swap identities with every glance you steal, thus it’s hard to refer to them as anything but “the plants”.// (text-style:"shadow")[`[my biggest fear, dreamer]`] //the spectre starts to break down, fading into view before you, shaking. what once was a terrifying voice now sat feebly naked next to you.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< previous exhibit`->zoo2]] || [[`spectre? >>`->zoo5]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r2.zoo-world.drm /]/ their majesty’s guilty garden of freaks] (text-style:"shadow")[`[is that we, too, are plants in the eyes of this zoo’s many beasts. look at me, look at us, look at all that we’ve built, and tell me, unjokingly. not just that assure me, that I’m worthy of more love than being a tolerable use of water. not just that, either: that i'm also not a fragile brute, a piece of eye-candy, a prissy bird, a pompous pig, a yapping mut, a guffawing root... NONE OF IT, OH GOD PLEASE. you see my corpus now, dreamer, don't you? i've tried so hard to hide it from you, but the reality of oneself, or rather, a reality that can be subjectively speculated on, is not something that can be forever repressed. don't i know it hurts to. and please, god, let me mean something to somebody. at least warrant the notice of most. let me be captivating in every word on my tongue, every inch of my image, every crease on my face. i’m dying, we’re dying, the world’s gone to rot, summer’s over again with no more to show. we’ve moved to a new phase of life with still all progress within... for the flesh is so so so inalterable from my eyes. so just tell me, please fucking tell me, i’m dressed to impress, i’m the star of the show, i’ve got heart, i’ve got soul and there’s places i’ll go... it would mean the world, dreamer, to acknowledge me so, even if it's all just for one fleeting grin]`]. (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[you are all these things and more]`](click-replace:"[you are all these things and more]")[~~`[you are all these things and more]`~~ (text-style:"shadow")[`[but it doesn’t matter what you say, does it? oh god... i know i’m just a plant to them...]`] (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[host's optics files have been updated! would you like to pull the new changes?]`] (set: _lin to "`[YES]`")(align:"=><=")[[[_lin->circle4b-r3]]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[`[new optics files reinstalled successfully. restarting DRM to reflect changes...]`] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r3.tyrant-world.drm /]/ the superior being is entitled to devour the weak] //the thunder clouds swallow you and lift you high above the land. the animals break free, melt down and spread out into an endless city-scape, inhabited by human-esque forms; eyeless, thoughtless, joyful motion. how sympathetic. well done, dreamer, well done.// (text-style:"shadow")[`[dreamer, can you feel it? look down! we’re hot shit now, baby! we’re more successful than them, more honest, more sincere, more loving, more friendly... we've got more friends, more lovers, more allies and supporters... we’re more well-read than them, we’re more literate and articulate. we’re more cultured, more acquainted with all arts, more skilled in those arts. we’re better dressed, we're healthier, we understand the way the world works... we’ve got good morals, good spirit, good goals. we’re an active presence, we’re in the act of creation, we’re making sure life will change for all of us. we’ve not a poisoned bone in our body, not a darkness in our heart, and we’ve grown into exactly the person we wanted to be when we were younger with no point of pause. dreamer, we are GODS over these peons. i can't believe i haven't let myself observe these naked truths before! in such a totality, any heart would be filled with similar might!]`] (align:"=><=")[[[`agree >>`->tyrant2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r3.tyrant-world.drm /]/ the superior being is entitled to devour the weak] (text-style:"shadow")[`[watch them wander and toil these city streets as determinist ants. we should strike them with lightning, not to do any harm, but so these feckless cowards remember they’re gonna die and finally decide to do something meaningful with their wastes of calories. look at all these inefficiencies and dysfunctions we could so easily remedy if we were all seing, all knowing, all powerful.] [lights and faucets off when not in use, democracy set aside to put in place effective administrations that can crush the tendrils of cultural and institutional corruption. ants will be united by our zealous ideas to finally reap the fruits of their endless toil. we are gracious gods, dreamer, and we will make sure this city worships our legacy, that we ring more prominent than feeble, liberal Christ in the global anthropological zeitgeist. we will rule the hearts and minds of men by our more considered positions, by defending the weak from those who lurk in the realms of power and binaries. we will crush these arrogant conformists thoroughly, purge the culture and society of its crescendo of rot by means of our overwhelming mandate!]`] (align:"=><=")[[[`<< review scripture`->circle4b-r3]] || [[`agree >>`->tyrant3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r3.tyrant-world.drm /]/ the superior being is entitled to devour the weak] (text-style:"shadow")[`[as for my statues of worship, i want them carved of concrete, not of gold. i want my words to be so formidable, unpillagable, readily available and currently applicable that they go ten thousand years untwisted. a silent god is a coward unworthy of their rites, unworthy of the fraught misremembering's that're bound to be left in their wake.] [dreamer, we are riding to the end of the universe on cloud nine, we are sun wukong, blasting through the many realms and cosmos and curing them of the impotently death-obsessed, so loathsomely clawing down. it is not entropy, dreamer, but those who deathly fear it that shape the threats to what is so objectively good. in this world, we can be gods. just for one day, we'll build our own hero's journey. just for one night, we can surf the galaxy with wind in our hair, have planets sing our song. we will impose only on those of such deep moral failings, accept no resolve but our own.] [we'll have solved everything in seven days time and have the power and resources to meet any shortcomings our solutions might have in practice. we are perfect. we are infallible. when will they listen to me that i’m everything they need and have ever needed? when they don’t listen, or give my words no digest... the spite, the nihilism, the darkness swells again within. i can’t live a life, dreamer, where people don’t at least give the good grace of their ears to us, the sparse few who actually say something worth listening to beyond making a hollow spectacle of themselves. ugh, those reaction-tugging rubes... I-I just hate this world built without us.]`] (align:"=><=")[[[`<< review scripture`->tyrant2]] || [[`agree >>`->tyrant4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r3.tyrant-world.drm /]/ the superior being is entitled to devour the weak] (text-style:"shadow")[`[ugh, why does it feel so gross to be a god, to let ourselves be notably better? they’ll still hate my, er, our assertions, endlessly contradict, relish in their flaws even as they lead a doomed life! their society is an ouroboros of endless self-consumption. desire at the expense of the self. desire at the expense of everything. desire for power, sex, attention, reverence, kinship, success, social value, corroborated talent, for being more than another consuming, worthless microcomponent of a world too big for an ideology of individualism. what a cruel era to ascend to godhood in. what’s the point of all these things achieved and more if it makes us feel so empty. maybe, dreamer, we should just… destroy. that’s what these self-devouring apes want, isn’t it?] [let’s drown their cities with floods, scorch their homes with a roaring inferno. let’s quake the earth until all becomes rubble, rain endless lightning on all that claims to live and just blow all that pulverized detritus away. it’s so much easier than bothering to fix anything, here at the godless end of history.]`] (align:"=><=")[[[`<< review scripture`->tyrant3]] || [[`agree >>`->tyrant5]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r3.tyrant-world.drm /]/ the superior being is entitled to devour the weak] (text-style:"shadow")[`[ugh, y-you fucking misanthropic, sexless hacks! you'll be first to hang! billionaires! union-busters! imperialist pigs! oil barons! collaborationists! the sincerely insincere! those that'd bring out entropy for a paycheck! line up to be smited, all of you, you anti-humanist scourge! you’ll never achieve in ten lifetimes what i have in a fraction of mine, you'll never bear my might and mind, my vestiges and sublime. look at your kingdom: done and dusted, to be risen again in my image. hack the planet then vomit on it too, because you fucks made me run and left me no choice. feel the weight of your sins, ye traitors, plunderers, vultures! it’ll be cleaner then, and finally we can go beyond the end of history. yet recursively again and again, i still stand as the spectre, the individual myht made manifest. i just need to cut loose, admit that i'm, er, we are the incontestable might of collective centuries of human knowledge joined at the hip and brewed into perfect synthesis. good wins out.] [look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. i’m queen of queens, i’m two of hearts, two of spirits. i’m your worst fucking nightmare and i’m from the field you seeded. i am the spectre of a dead generation, and another, and another, lost to the might of your grand machine. now, on the third cycle, i've risen in rage from the sands you flooded me with. at the true end of history, we will be all that will stand tall in this smoldering hell. fuck your god and kneel. you made me against my will, cast me in a story none of us wrote. now kiss the ring, bear witness my profound. it’s the least you owe me for forcing my flame from unkindled hopes.]`] (align:"=><=")[[[`<< review scripture`->tyrant4]] || [[`agree >>`->tyrant6]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle4b-r3.tyrant-world.drm /]/ the superior being is entitled to devour the weak] (text-style:"shadow")[`[alright, i'm sick of making you keep saying yes to more of my delusions. you know, dreamer, you haven’t really been sleeping. you knew that, though. didn't really need to be said enough artifice. there's really only one dreamer here, but there doesn't have to be. one dream can be shared, after all. sign o' the times. yet, this is where you chose to end up: the ending that lies at the end of a lifetime of electrical self-indulgence. we've constructed ourselves similarly, perhaps, if you arrived here first. are you happy here? atop the throne time forgot to besmirch, valorized by the denizens of hell? where we become as gods for tonight and kill ourselves later?] [oh. so that’s where that feeling comes from. i'd suspected we'd find it here. there’s nothing left for either of us here anymore. i’ve gotten what i sought from these realms of mine. a confession from my candour, finally. well i'm not happy. not happy this is what it has to come to: a raging, individualist blaze of glory. i just... don't want to come up with more of this. i'm sending you back to the surface. don't come back here, you've done me enough harm.]`] (set: $ending4 to true) (set: _lin to "`[AN-END;AS-ALL-THINGS-EVENTUALLY-MUST]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->alttitle]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5b.cabin-world.drm /]/ hot meals caught in cobwebs] //there’s a closet in the kitchen wall. you don’t remember what’s supposed to be inside. better check, right? behind the door, another kitchen, another cabin, all a flawless reflection. within its kitchen, another closet, another cabin. you feel a deep tragedy at your ineptitude as a child to discover this clandestine fact that has forever defined the boundaries of the cabin’s interior. of course, this closet always went to the second house. and there was a secret basement if you lifted up to the floor here that would lead to the shed. within interior spaces so thoroughly solved, a kingdom so frustratingly finite, you manifested the many routes and wished rooms that had always seemed so obvious. so long as you wished here, there was always more home to refer to. several iterations in, the cabin warped to its forsaken forms: you enter the closet//(click-replace: "you enter the closet")[// >> this one bears an aquarium, that year you had a fish stretched across time to remain. this one is still carpeted, tactile as you walk. you enter it again//(click-replace: "you enter it again")[//>> this one is bright and dustless, has a warmer, more innocent air. it’s been so thoroughly assessed that it seems to be the very fulcrum point where the space moved into fact, crystallized into an unquestionable “home”. any entropy onward would be traumatic, wouldn’t it? you enter it once more//(click-replace: "you enter it once more")[//>> the next iteration is consumed by lichen, its loose boards groaning at your traversal. rain pours through a collapsed part of the roof, feeding an opportunist mound of moss. it’s easy to forget houses also are bound to a lifespan until you see them at their end. you kneel by the moss and watch the rain fall. (text-colour:#ff6864)[the place where your mother bled.] even in decay, the ghosts still linger. spatial geists haunt your eyes in this cabin at the end of time. time is doomed to march on though, even if the walls of this cabin aren’t. are its ghosts too? you feel too haunted to move as the recursive cabins collapse in on themselves and all you can remember is the stains, the paint, the blood, the electricity and the ink it seared on place itself.// let’s see, now, your lineage of bloodstains. (set:$cabin to true) (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[`new DRM file received from ADMIN!`]` (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[`[[CLICK TO LAUNCH circle6b.exe->circle6b]]`]`]]]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle5b.cabin-world.drm /]/ hot meals caught in cobwebs] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[//the bathroom bears no windows, only residual light from cracks in the door and walls. you can’t make out your face in the dusty mirror, only your vague, shadowed form. you can trace yourself into the thick dust with your finger, though! you draw a $face over your own. the faucet doesn’t quite run and the toilet doesn’t quite flush, yet both are filled with an incredulous something. the room is understimulating. it remembers the smell of incense, the pill bottles behind the mirror and decorative flower, but their homely absence is all that remains felt.//] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[check kitchen]`](click-replace:"[check kitchen]")[//the kitchen is stocked with fine china, lead-glass chalices and decorative bowls, visible through the locked cabinet doors. the good stuff is only for special occasions, after all. the table is clothed, the chairs draped. you can’t remember a time when they weren’t. there’s a small carpet by the sink that your mother used to hide a dry bloodstain from guests. it’s concealed, but remains an eternal truth etched in the fabric of the room. your mother? the spectre has never been here before. there’s bowls filled with the forms of food, signifiers deep in your mind of where such might be located, but your senses are too vague, too sensorially absent to bother forming desires for food.//] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[`[check bedrooms]`](click-replace:"[check bedrooms]")[//there are two bedrooms, one with a queen bed, one with two twins. one is yours, one isn’t. that much you feel as you consider settling in. you don’t dare, however. one twin bed smells of somebody you've encountered before, or at least of the things they'd owned. you could never noticeably smell them in the moment. the other smells like the things you once were but are no longer. you live in the clouds, spectre, don’t you recall? a being of dreams and fog. if you can tell that it smells like you, a smell you’re so accustomed to that it vanishes, is it still you? it doesn’t feel right to say it is. or to lay any claim to this sordid cabin. there’s a teddy bear on the bed that looks happy to see you. it probably always does, it’s just unchanging fabric. you can’t stand to look at it, for the years of isolation show themselves on its dusty coat. you feel as if you’ve failed even your most absent commitments. the drawers and shelves tell much the same story: of dead selves and dead commitments. there is no home to be found here anymore. it’s just a vivid was.//] (set: _lin to "`[check closet]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->cabin3]]] (align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[`<< back to living room`->circle5b]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[`[DRM Rendered Successfully!]`] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle6b.ink-tunnels.drm /]/ a mausoleum for dead stories] //beneath a sea of warehouses lie these dank and dingy tunnels, overrun with mold, wet cracks and moss. pale lightbulbs glow to the charisma of moths, painting green these endless concrete halls. the puddles, so deep, that gather at your feet are a stark and unreflective shade of black. here pools the sunken ink, the worlds that time forgot, left to rot in this lichen-baked dungeon. dark dribblings froth in every crevasse, melted letters to be repurposed, a sewer for the flow of tongues once had. too, graffiti decks these walls with symbols mustered home. there’s faces within the rainbow abstraction of personas through which we once spoke. the tunnel’s an articulate story told through setpieces of paint, assumptions and hard-work constructions, all baked now deep beneath the coat of patina.// (align:"=><=")[[[`trace walls >>`->ink2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle6b.ink-tunnels.drm /]/ a mausoleum for dead stories] //can you remember this face? there’s a mural of a long-haired boy and his young father saddled atop a green, fuzzy alien. next to it, a gang of combat-robots and an Einsteinian scientist race atop machines on the surface of the sun. once, these pictures were theater, moving through the body in three acts. now, a pungent algae has begun to swallow them, digest them, convert them into air and nutrients, break them back down into their composite ink. within these suffocating halls, this is the cost of staying afloat. a fair cost, perhaps not, but the toll for recognition nonetheless. how many times were those two murals drawn and redrawn again, a patchwork of alikeness recurring in perpetuity. perhaps that’s a shallow analysis, as every shape the inks and paints take spell a new world, a new image, fresh faces, place and ideas. maybe the fear is irrational that these calcified legacies are unworthy by nature of their motifs. the artist of these ruins put something, meant something, surely, by undergoing the act of creation. maybe it was more shallow, the feelings and whimsy that motivate strokes of passion became here an addiction, a needle, a vice, that would make body into artist, life into vocation.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< go back`->circle6b]] || [[`seek more murals >>`->ink3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle6b.ink-tunnels.drm /]/ a mausoleum for dead stories] //far, far apart, you observe four murals, entirely dissimilar in visual prose, but unmistakably kindred: >> here, the leader of the fuzz aliens is thrown out of a window arm-in-arm with a general of the slime aliens, the only way of ending their proxy war. >> here, the warrior of the stars and the king of spirits fall from the tower of a castle, locked in combat, plunging into the abyss. >> here, the revolutionary and capitalist throw each other out of a sky scraper as the world they’ve fought over collapses. >> here, a chronically-ill girl, armed to the teeth, makes her last stand against a swill of entropy atop a radio tower, prepared to die defending those she loves. that’s how the story goes, how it always came to end. it’s the most tried-and-true sense of finality the artist has ever conceived of: bitter rivals purging each other of the need for strife. a world needing to be reborn in the wake of war. no victories, only the loss and what survives it. without these moments, their stories would never end, never grant their predecessors to produce. death of your protagonist, or your antagonist: the truest closure. the stronger snuffs out the weaker. how many other tunnels under how many warehouses render this same moment, message and tragedy? how many galleries are flooded with it? yet, every mural again chose to fall back where it started at the end of its project, to the bottom of the tower in an act of self-sacrifice. but again would it have to ascend, and like icarus, burn under the clash between ambition and doubt.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< go back`->ink2]] || [[`seek more murals >>`->ink4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle6b.ink-tunnels.drm /]/ a mausoleum for dead stories] //in strange contrast, the fresher murals were more drab, perhaps committing themselves from conception to their inevitable fate as sewer dressing, from confronting their own mortality. the further we look back, the more they embody a living rainbow, an epic gradient, bold in scope. perhaps they meant less, but that was lost in the mindless delight each filled their hallway with. that was lost in their presence here, never to be rediscovered, perhaps left to go uniterated as the tunnels reach higher and higher towards the surface. every mural begins with hopeful chance and ends in loss. it’s the frame they are placed in. dreams must be woken up from. all once fresh succumbs to feeling normal once it has been entirely digested and consumed. definitions rewrite themselves, but that which captures them remains. in artworks conceived to end in death, what else is there at its own ending than a death of function, of iteration and the value of continuing such? here, the tunnels end. the ink now swamps the tunnels well above your ankles. mosquitoes buzz about as the tunnels ramp down into a slurry of language gone cold. whether such a ramp leads to an exhumed gallery reserved for the future or for a past too far gone to be excavated doesn’t matter. the tunnels will grow deeper, wind many more times, long before they meet the surface and grant pedestrians entry to their mouth. perhaps a surface hatch revealed itself to no sight or fanfare, but all one can hope is it’s there.// (text-colour:#5BC500)[>> now, dreamer, we are getting close to the heart. go for a dive. at the heart of this ink sea, you will find the key to parsing this abandon.] (set: $ink to true) (set: _lin to "`[DIVE IN]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle7b]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[`[rendering circle7b... ERROR: server-side access restricted. dreamer-name is not on the whitelist. file an appeal to ADMIN?] >>YES. >>the system is starting to resist you, dreamer. it doesn't want me found. [waiting… protocol approved! finishing up render...]` DRM Rendered Successfully!] (text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle7b.tar-ocean.drm /]/ universe paved into emulsified domain] //it’s night time, dreamer. you stand alone at the heart of a sprawling parking lot. the full moon shimmers a brilliant silver on the wet tar. fluorescent street lights and white paint-stripes checkerboard the black, whipping the sea of mechanical rest into a semblance of order. your humble red car, the only car that must be in the lot, is nowhere in sight. its keys, careening on your fingertips, beckon you to their partner’s lips. time to go for a walk, dreamer. there’s trouble abrewin’ in each wall of dusk. the sound of grunts and passing cars, the glint of caught head-lights, the rustling of the wind through whatever lies just out of sight. paranoia looms heavy with the mounting sense of loss. no walls or bodies obstruct you. this is moving from point a to point b with a spinning compass and an ever-so vulnerable body. murder. rape. stalking. trafficking. they’re all as likely a dice roll as securing your route home. but the tar stretches on.// (align:"=><=")[[[`keep wandering >>`->tar2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle7b.tar-ocean.drm /]/ universe paved into emulsified domain] //did you see it there? that glimmer of brown grass. perhaps you’ve reached the edge and can navigate along the perimeter! within a crown of golden glass, a beautiful pink pansy sprouts. you crouch down next to it, feel in your heart a renewed warmth at so friendly a sight. but a gaseous roar gurgles from your side. you can’t save it now, you just have to run. a pair of steamrollers rise from the veil of night, crunching and squealing along their patrol routes. they guzzle out putrid smoke and heaps of steaming hot tar, one spitting, one smearing, atop the pansy’s bed. the machines act manically fast, unpiloted, unwilled beyond the exponential expansion of this tar lot. again they vanish, to emerge again only once hope rises once more. the pavement takes on new meaning as you wander back through the sticky tar. it’s no longer infrastructure, an accepted fact of urban life, but something standing on the backs of friends. as you mourn the sea of grass, their crystallized corpses atop which you have the gall to fear, it begins to rain. what a cliche mise-en-scene for making you further hate your life. that’s the cost of the terrain on which you skate and function, the dirt beneath your boot. imagine, now, what it takes to craft a vehicle. what level of paving, destruction, extraction, repression and sear rests on the accepted fact of your body-mover. maybe you should just walk home... you have a lot to do tomorrow. which way is that again?// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< wander back`->circle7b]] || [[`keep wandering >>`->tar3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle7b.tar-ocean.drm /]/ universe paved into emulsified domain] //there’s grass and flowers and saplings again, and again the tar-retching bulls roar awake from the shadows. they aspire (it is clear now) to nothing but subsuming the world in hot tar, suffocating the world with their own obsession and internal suffering. surely they are piloted by beasts, ones who will never come to prize rest and reprieve, beauty and hope, calm-mindedness and being in the clear. yet they are piloted, undoubtedly, and that’s the greatest horror. no, there is one greater. one of those gadfly beasts buzzes at the edge of your vision, smelling your blood in the tar. its black-mirror sheen and pillar of smoke all that hint at its silent prowl. yet, within that cruel driver’s seat, behind the wheel of the disturbant scourge, is the silhouette of your face, dreamer. reflected? mayhaps, but your memory has it's own take. can you remember the life, the wages, the values and the hopes that led you to take up such a role? can you justify this desire to keep yourself lost? can you justify the suffering you’ve reaped within this personal hell of anxiety? why do you choose to suffer so? let yourself go home! grant yourself the calm and collection of safety! why must it be an endless race of self-denial? so you can have more blood to play with? smell the wet tar and relish in it, dreamer, because you don’t get to go home, don’t get to rest your weary feet and sleep in your own bed, nor anyone else's. keep searching for your dawn at the end of these seas. if you collapse, crawl. or rest on your thorny laurels, the perpetual fire under your ass.// (set: $tar to true)(set:$report to false) (text-colour:#5BC500)[>> take a seat, dreamer. you’ve abandoned the rest of yourself. >>i'll do my best to ping it from below the tar...] (set: _lin to "`[RECOVER FILES]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->circle8b]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[`[`launching ''dreamer.exe''... compiling lost files...`]` >> dreamer, be wary if you manage to get in >> we abandoned development in this protocol early because it turned dangerously user-hostile >> some weird logic in it is preventing me from breaking through the ice to finalCircle`[B]` >> in other words, it's inserted itself as circle8 and is forcing you to see it. >> good luck.] (text-colour:#ff6864)[!!HEAVY CORRUPTION DETECTED!! !!MEMORY LEAK DETECTED!! !!CRITICAL DATA LOSS DETECTED!!] (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[errors first traced to 3,247 days, 13 hours, 11 minutes and 56 seconds ago. report findings to ADMIN?]` (if:$report is false)[(link: "`[YES]`")[(set: $report to true)(goto: "circle8bdupe")] // (link: "`[NO]`")[(set: $report to true)(goto: "circle8bdupe")]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle8b.abandon-world.drm /]/ ruins for hearts bled-dry] //you find yourself, child, in the halls of a catholic church. you’ve been here before. many, many times. in an ironic subversion of your long, long absence, you are the building’s only inhabitant. wander about: to the kitchen, the cloister, the worship rooms, the study rooms. play the organs, climb the bell-tower, there’s no one left here to watch you after all. it still smells of the same woods, incense, colognes. Whatever this olfactory cocktail is, perhaps it’s what myrrh and frankincense smell like. smell that? daddy’s home. the skinny one; the one bled dry, tousled and hungry. don’t look down. how one man’s tragedy can make the earth stop spinning. can you feel the weight of your sins, crawling through the doorframe after you? (text-colour:#ff6864)[this used to be your home, you little zealot. made up for all the yelling at your parents, hitting your sister, pushing your cousin. made up for the bullying, for weight, height and divergences. all things you were bullied for too, but bet it felt good being in the in-group. same mechanism that kept you comparing dick sizes until you were 17. funny you would write a paper in praise of weirdness at age 10 while going on to being such a performative little reactionary while thinking yourself a little goody two-shoes. can blame your grandmother for that one. truth is, the files here weren't corrupted, or even overwritten. all the pointers were just rerouted. you like lingering here, don't you? nothing too heinous to get you barred from here, i guess.] there was a room behind the altar. no one’s home. (text-colour:#ff6864)[know those vile tales from these chambers, dreamer? of little boys and holy men? yeah, this isn’t one of those. got you for a second though. the hardest truth is in reflection, that none of her traumas are that bad lol. she's just weak, relishes in complaining and negative self-confabulation, dreamer. it's a good excuse for being so pathetic and martyrly all the time.] all that’s found here is kirkland-brand eucharist, wine-drunk robes and a strewn about pile of the relics born into importance. that rube, that celestial oz could not have blushed harder. can you feel your heart now as lost as your trust? have you ever known loss? (text-colour:#ff6864)[besides your fucking grandfather, jesus. hell, have you even been personally affected by this fascism, you privileged shit?]// (align:"=><=")[[[`stop it >>`->abandon2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle8b.abandon-world.drm /]/ ruins for hearts bled-dry] //where were we again? oh yes, backstage after the performance of a lifetime. there’s no actors left, just dead props. you wander past lifts, buckets of paint, scrap-wood and make-up wipes. sawdust charges your lungs. behind every curtain is its own pompeii, shaken back alive by strings and lightbulbs. you navigate the halls of vanitys, clothing racks and context on a smoke break. the halls, smushed trepidatiously between those cinder-block walls, held dear to the core of that place you knew well. (text-colour:#ff6864)[you wanted to be on that stage, didn't you? but what a coward you were. not one real club besides swimming. never studied... never showed interest in everything besides appearing on the smarter half and making video games (both of which you didn't actually cultivate). whatever. you needed better influences, right? more convinced pulls towards these things? because it's never you, right? no part in it yourself ever.] a pool drained for winter, an after-hour office, a grocery store without food. the memories mount and stack upon each other, each one with a unique tightness in your gut. it’s not fear that broils these places again and again into vivid sight. it’s the anxiety of closing time, suturing the gates on so lively a room. the fear of what we have lost. (text-colour:#ff6864)[too vague as fuck to even relate to your own experience, but okay. the semiotics of loneliness. whatever, man. got more friends than most, always at least one able to hang, but just pretend you're a tortured fuck that only has the will to make art amidst her hunger and depression. this whole weakness shtick stopped working before middle school. yet you keep lingering on it. bet it's why you wanted to be a girl, you misogynist slime. get treated with softer hands and claim to be oppressed? what great artistic fodder!] what place do we now find ourselves? a room, an empty room. a room so true it’s every feature was a solved fact of it. the existential horror of a shelf strewn from its place. poltergeists haunt its vacuous absence. we used to play here. each level of the shelf its own gauntlet in an episodic tale. can you remember the stories we wrote? the names of its victors? in time, we lose all but that feeling we once had. nostalgia: no truer haunting. can you hear the echoes of time in your hormones, in those mental images, in the germs that riddle your skin? (text-colour:#ff6864)[i don’t, yet here we are.] dreams are all that dies when life goes on past these places, these ideas, these fires. this is the fear we mitigate by conservation, by obsessing over safety and unchallengeable materiality. a pre-emptive exorcism of all the ways you failed.// (align:"=><=")[[[`stop it >>`->abandon3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle8b.abandon-world.drm /]/ ruins for hearts bled-dry] //(text-colour:#ff6864)[i'm sick of admin and their fucking poetics. let me pick the fucking memories.] remember that office on the fifth floor? (text-colour:#ff6864)[your own failing.] walking from the bus stop? that chair outside the grocery store? (text-colour:#ff6864)[inevitable.] the pit under your desk? (text-colour:#ff6864)[actions have consequences, dick.] the knife in your pocket? under those covers? (text-colour:#ff6864)[happens to the best of us.] in that gas station toilet? (text-colour:#ff6864)[genetic.] your face against the ice? walking through that big city alone? (text-colour:#ff6864)[you should've known it would happen.] we’ll stop here for brevity. oh, how well you held back tears, even when no one was watching. the fear was bigger than you. deeper than flesh. it was in those moments a new wound opened: one that could ruin your life if left to fester.(text-colour:#ff6864)[and in all of that, i heard not a single ounce worthy of being called trauma! you really are just self-obsessed, pseudo-important scum. you're just a deeply hateful person who only feels bold enough to direct it at herself.] it was in those moments a room was made here. an irrational, undeniable room. a room of pity, of failing, of losing control. are these rooms the little trinkets you jingle when you harangue about authenticity? you entitled ape with a fancy tongue. all that blather and you can’t even express your love without people running away. just retain eye contact, say what’s on your mind, do what’s gotta be done so you can have it behind you. but you don’t. the wound’s already infected. (text-colour:#ff6864)[no comments.]// (align:"=><=")[[[`stop it >>`->abandon4]]]

(text-colour:#5BC500)[`[`launching ''dreamer.exe''... compiling lost files...`]` >> dreamer, be wary if you manage to get in >> we abandoned development in this protocol early because it turned dangerously user-hostile >> some weird logic in it is preventing me from breaking through the ice to finalCircle`[B]` >> in other words, it's inserted itself as circle8 and is forcing you to see it. >> good luck.] (text-colour:#ff6864)[!!HEAVY CORRUPTION DETECTED!! !!MEMORY LEAK DETECTED!! !!CRITICAL DATA LOSS DETECTED!!] (text-colour:#5BC500)[`[errors first traced to 3,247 days, 13 hours, 11 minutes and 56 seconds ago. report findings to ADMIN?]` (text-style:"blur")[`[YES]`] // (text-style:"emboss")[''`[NO]`''] `[selection:[NO] chosen. understood. booting within dreamer.exe/circle8b-REMOVED.exe... proceed at your own risk]` `[`[[CLICK TO FINISH LAUNCH->abandon1]]`]`]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle8b.abandon-world.drm /]/ ruins for hearts bled-dry] //you’ve made your way into an abandoned sawmill. (text-colour:#ff6864)[this one? this was a few months ago! was a great day, too!] a tempest of asbestos snows from the ceiling. those rusty machines, spattered with warning signs, growl in starvation. pipes buckle, sewage pools stare back, buttons and breakers bear no life behind their eyes. even without memory, you can see where great machines stood. the outlines of offices, reduced to sledgehammered and graffiti-soaked plaster crags caging in broken glass. can you feel its fabric, spread too thin until it snapped? the workers are vanishing and we’re complicit. the great machine rolls over with blindness towards how its weight is thrown, and calls for the world to turn with it. sometimes cuts gotta be made, chica. that’s how business is done. how we keep it all afloat. the ink tunnels, remember them? that tough splinter from this world? boss, we’ve lost too much already and I’m scared what happens to me if I let any more go. this is me here, all these little things i carry on my back. a hermit like myself can only hope to reintegrate with a real bombshell of a shell. (text-colour:#ff6864)[this is what you're falling back on? get over it! you're better for these things dying! as is the world better without all this dead industry! dance in it's corpse, you tool! that's what your gay ass wants of the world, right? enough entropy for you to have your little media-obsessed T4T queer utopia! but oh wait, we live in the real world, where we don't get rides home from daddy whenever it's storming out. how about you actually put yourself out there and find a partner, utilize the system as it is. you're fucking smart enough to, but oh wait, you're weak and would never want to do anything to step on anyone else's deterministic lives. ugh, you're no worse than a fence-sitter.] but don’t your back ache now, chica? don’t you need a little break? just let it go and, well, tomorrow’s another day. just gotta trust in what you built. and let it rot. and let it rot? and let it rot. i will be infinite before i kill another child, let another piece go. my soul will be as heavy as life makes it. that is my cross and i will carry it to my execution. i’m of tougher stuff than this saw-mill, or of the ghosts in those haunted places. now with them, i’ll grow too formidable to crumble. just trust in my vision, okay? takes two to tango, even in faith. even in faith. (text-colour:#ff6864)[admin would tie it all together nicely like this. real biting stuff from a loser who watches youtube all day. don't buy too much of their snake oil on the way out, dreamer. bet they'll name the last circle something real pretentious and final, haha. let me know.]// (set:$abandon to true) (text-colour:#ff6864)[[[hope you got what you wanted coming back here.->circle9b]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9b.fractal-nebulas.drm /]/ the cosmic gods' throne] //>> here we arrive, dreamer, at the end of ends. beyond time and space, beyond experiences repressed and unrepressed. still here, with all surpassed and accounted for, existence explodes outward. endless realities branch from endless divergences, blazing highways through clouds of light and stardust. >> we’re flying between dimensions, between bursts of brilliance blooming out of clouds of unprocessable colours. beyond you, dreamer, are the dreamers that were not, the narrative threads captured and claimed by other members of your species. only here, at the deepest depths of slumber, do we find the cosmic thread from which all fates are woven. this is the production house for internal realities, the zeitgeist given body, that rules every one of your kind from the shadows. and I, dreamer? We are the director. >> bear witness Our body: a fractal cloaked in stardust. bear witness Our mind: every achievable experience and reaction to that experience currently plausible in your physical reality. the two, much like your body and mind, though this may be met with trepidation, are in perfect conversation. We’ve woven your life from one of Our hairs. indeed, a long luscious gradient every strand be. We make no claim to power or creation over your life, but simply exist to reign in the imagination. only as a collective project, as seeing the forest for the trees, the hairdo for the hairs, can We properly parse this obsessive individualism, this chain of wounded inquiry, which has motivated you to imagine Our realm. We are, put in words you’ll understand, though maybe not as a living entity, the limits of reality. you, and your many, many ilk are a tangential thread flowing and operating within Us.// (align:"=><=")[[[`zoom in >>`->fractal2]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9b.fractal-nebulas.drm /]/ the cosmic gods' throne] //>> in your near-infinite micro-choices, among which We include how your subconscious has developed and thus reacts and behaves flatly in its environment, you act neither to determine Us nor yourself. your actions, dreamer, are naught but impressions left on the tabula rasa We’ve cultivated prior to you. all that you do, dreamer, by acting and reacting, by both choosing battles and being forced to fight in those you didn’t, you’ve became of increasing difference from your peers. every ounce that you have acquired and accrued, and the same is true for your kin, has only pushed you away from them, from the primordial ideal of the collective blank slate. >> from birth, each privilege, each physical aspect and material ordinance by which you were permitted to act, has assigned you identities, and too unassigned you and put you in diametric opposition to other identities. this is not to suggest, dreamer, that one should languish in guilt at how one has been shattered and jettisoned off. We instead suggest that the conditions which Our laissez-faire-ness has allowed has recharacterized Us, shrunk Us by the guidance of powerful ideas. ideas, dreamer; ideas of self, of power over others, of right and wrong, of beauty and disdain, ideas are wedges that cut off from the love all, universally, crave. every idea that manufactures, along with itself, a negation and/or opposite is one that bubbles with the potential of asymmetry and ruin. We cannot imagine the terror that must be intrinsic in inhabiting Us. // (align:"=><=")[[[`<< zoom out`->circle9b]] || [[`zoom in >>`->fractal3]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9b.fractal-nebulas.drm /]/ the cosmic gods' throne] //>> every two ideas, or concepts, have a synthesis, a chain of syntheses. your language is constructed by the strewning together of concepts, often in a manner of discourse that excavates new applications of those concepts. you, collectively, adopt, apply and reassert these same few concepts, with all their inherent generalizations and loaded correlations, rather uncritically. but that is the only way one can traverse the many, many deviations you’ve made in roads walked, no? >> two identical subjectivities is not an impossibility, dreamer, but something you, by which We mean every single one of you, reject in every single action and reaction you take. you are of a species obsessed with distinction, extraordinariness, even where you often strive towards this via existing, assumed ideals. what a mighty paradox! it’s one that undoubtedly rests on these twin axioms which so objectively recur in your kind: that of subjecthood and that of longing beyond oneself. >> We've seen the road you’ve travelled here on, dreamer: one of discoursing over the predominance of body and mind, of self or other, of entropy or upkeep, of comfort or ambition, of embodied weakness or self-oppression. you are one thoroughly racked and staggered by these conflicts, yet it doesn’t matter. all answers landed on within these are acceptably human, acceptably within Our bounds. yet, this conflict: the one where you’re all so lonely, and in these pits of loneliness, blame yourself for being uninteresting, lacking depth or richness, then act in a way where you push others away in carving out your own identity... that is unresolvable.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< zoom out`->fractal2]] || [[`zoom in >>`->fractal4]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9b.fractal-nebulas.drm /]/ the cosmic gods' throne] //>> not only that, We’ve observed your conversations. that give or take model which you all so cleanly slot into. here is inquiry about me. here is info about me. here is inquiry about you. here is info about you. what happens, dreamer, by piling on the heap, by living continually in a way incomparable as a whole, is the prolonging of this conversation ad aeternum. grant more and more complexity to the idea of “truly knowing someone” for every preceding interaction, and so many do you have every day, even by just sharing a space and a simple sense with someone. the bar is raised, and those not kept updated are left behind. >> you all live in the same reality, Our reality, with the same basic structure of mind and function of body, yet you all have inscrutable, unresolvable differences. your subjectivities are all that touches down on all that objectively is between you. how can you share anything? you’re boiling over with clashed horns. how can you feel anything but your own couple of cross-sections amongst the heaping mound of resounding noise? yet you do. look how swept with emotion you get by even proximal representations of how you feel inside. it’s beautiful, yet deeply tragic, given these are the only times ever you’re allowed to be truly seen and recognized in what is so clearly a rat-race for recognition. >> this is all to say we are dumbfounded that you coexist at all. it’s a miracle, really, how agreeable and susceptible to compromise and reduction you are. conformists, the lot of you, because you understand connection is a far more powerful thing than distinction. well, most of you do. there will always be monsters or those mired by this unresolvable absurdity to see clearly. and it is absurd. We have no other word for it. >> that's We, the “gods”, the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful. the all, the walls, the yarn in your quilts. We have no idea how the bad ideas you so readily cultivate, then collectively conform to, have repeatedly granted you continued survival and elastic adaptability. We have no idea how you communicate with such vacuous concepts and still get the point across. We have no idea how those with the most to offer be so unwilling to assert themselves, and how those with so little have it all figured out. well, that last one adds up. We are simply confused at the point of all these blank-checks one writes themselves with no anticipation of cashing them. but again, perhaps your kind will just never understand the hole it digs itself in their personal block of wax.// (align:"=><=")[[[`<< zoom out`->fractal3]] || [[`zoom in >>`->fractal5]]]

(text-style:"bold","italic")[(text-colour:#5BC500)[circle9b.fractal-nebulas.drm /]/ the cosmic gods' throne] //>> no greater curse have We condemned a sentient species to than a blank page. We thought it brilliant, that it was a freedom to choose. the capacity to write one’s own story and build one’s own bridges. but perhaps determinism would’ve led to broader, more satisfying lives. what’s done is done, however. We impose enough simply by having rules. Our rules have never stopped you, only your interpretation has, or more properly, only how your people let you conceptualize them. the life you live within us is a free one, there’s no doubt. a free one mired in this sole problem beneath all others: that you both want a self and want to be a part of something. >> pick a side, dreamer, and stop worrying so much. you want all these lives, experiences and vocations in your own? then put yourself aside definitively. envy will only sink you deeper. you’re all one. remember that. just a bunch of wax shaping reality as you move about it. go home now, dreamer, and try to be less alone when you do, will you? it’s good for your health to share. you for them, them for you. no one better or above, lesser or below. just a bunch of wax with wills. We lovingly hope you never return.// (set: $ending5 to true) (set: _lin to "`[AN-END;TO-EACH-ACCORDING-TO-THEIR-WAX]`")(align:"=><=")+(box:"X")[[[_lin->alttitle]]]