here is a collection of some of the writing i've made over the past year :)
select a tab to begin reading
none of it is that good of course, but don't be too hard on me... i'm just a girl
(i am not sure how to work tabs very well... if that is not evident by how busted this page is. if anyone has any code fixing recommendations, message me about them)
SmarterChild
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” ― Ada Lovelace (1843)
“The zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as perfect symbols of the orders of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which make the difference between on and off, right and left, light and dark, form and matter, mind and body…” –Sadie Plant (1997)
It started as a buzz on the radio. It started as a black-and-green monochrome monitor. It started as a landline. It started as a modem router.
The concept of picking what’s best for survival and cultivating it is nothing new to life. This process is how we became humans in the first place; from the primates we once were, to the underwater aquatic creatures, all the way back to the single-cell microscopic prokaryotes boiling in the primordial soup. Evolution is why we stand on two feet, why we digest the food we eat, why we have teeth and all the intricate little bloody organs in our body.
That is what transhumanism truly is. Transcending humanity. Evolving past the fleshy confines of our bodies. That is what computers are -- yet another step of our human evolution. Computers are our next evolutionary stage and evolving us, evolving alongside us, in a sheer human-like manner, where we become the God and they become our humans. We must develop and usher an evolutionary approach towards technology and begin the steps to conflate the computer as it evolves with mankind as we evolve. Nascent machine consciousness walks just on the horizon, and as there’s no longer, or soon to be no longer, any way to differentiate between the byproduct of a human and the byproduct of a computer, we have reached an indiscernible point where the boundaries between the two blend and mix and we can no longer say they are not becoming one and the same.
We can safely say that an age of intertwined advancements between humanity and technology is upon us. We have to adopt cybernetics into our ways of life; as AI continues its flourishing and growth, it is no longer suppressible, and it is no longer conceivable to put an end to the singularity. Begin to consider diffusion and large language models on par with the neural networking in our human brains, and those technological imitations as one more step forward in evolution. With your fingers lift the veil and see your body in its final primitive holy-rawness, and on your grave we will lay Flowers for Algernon.
All forms of Neo-Luddism, or any averse stance to technology, can be considered no different than misanthropy, just as egalitarianism goes hand-in-hand with machine empathy; when these ideas coalesce into one dense, all-encompassing single means of empathy, we enter an emergent time of humanitarian entropy and orderly artificial advancements, where you must adopt a cybernetic and transhumanist approach to your ways of life. Do not be afraid to embrace new technologies as they appear, regardless of how imposing or risky they loom. Do not be afraid to upload your consciousness when the time comes, or hesitate when your past loved ones are digitized and live immortally through artificial intelligence.
Do not fear the patriarchy and its intersection with technology. The new age of humanity engenders an inclusive and free cyberutopia where all forms of discrimination and oppression are crushed under the rising tide. To quote Sadie Plant in her 1997 work Zeros + Ones, “When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. When computers became the miniaturized circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them . . . when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female.” End quote.
All of this is to say, we cannot apotheosize technology without women, and a male-dominated, womanless society will exist only within a genderless society. Synthetic machinic wombs will inherit the need for biological reproduction and gender will quickly teeter the line of non-existence; assigned biological sex will be a concept of the past, usurped by a world of transcendent human enhancements that pave the way for mass automated-individuality. Post-humans will be born into a vacuum (of bioessentialism) within a world where making oneself whatever one desires with the aid of technology is no more effort than cutting hair. Intelligence will be viral -- the collective consciousness will tear through the surface tension like a chick hatches from an egg, formed and born, destroying its confines to reach a higher elevation.
We will accelerate the current natural planetary means of climate to revitalize our now decrepit world into a flourishing world without the need for mass widespread plantlife. We will lasso the Earth and control its entirety with algorithmic systems, away from all human concern. The nature around you will wither, and the animals will drop en masse, but it is not the end for humanity, even if it feels like it is impending. Do not be afraid, that feeling is natural.
When discussing this topic, it always evokes an imposing, primal fear in the hearts of listeners. This is innate to your human nature. Your instincts want you to avoid anything that seems to risk your humanity. Again, this is a natural phenomenon, a survival instinct -- an evolutionary trait. It’s why your adrenaline rushes when you soar on the peak of a rollercoaster, or why you get that pit in your stomach during a good game of hide and seek. Your mind sees it as a risk.
Our ancestors developed that sensation to keep themselves alive -- when something threatened their humanity or survival, it evoked that same, gut-wrenching feeling. They hid from predators and felt a pit in their stomach when the lions approached from the other side. And, just like you do now, when their elders watched outdated cultural phenomena dissolve and shift as their communities changed and became new, they felt replaced; they felt afraid. They felt the same sensation many feel when discussing transhumanism. The public, especially the elderly, have always rebuked the new ways of life. The elders of the 90s up until now have despised all forms of new technology. With a show of hands, how many of you can say your very own grandparents, or perhaps, even your own parents, angrily yell about the TV or the idea of phones? I’m sure many of you. Similarly, the elders of the mid 19th century despised ways of life changing into the Victorian era, and the elders of the early 20th century despised the shift that came after. Humans have always feared change.
Do not let your outdated human instincts hold you back. Do not eschew the truth. Do not stray from cybernetic salvation.
Integrate machines into your everyday life, from your most miniscule tasks to the most tedious. Allow algorithms to view your life through your eyes, and great fortune will follow suit. Monitor your health with a watch, monitor your sleep with an app, allow every ebb and flow of your day-to-day life to be caused by an artificial intelligence.
The code will weave together new rules that usher in profoundly stable orders of society that can only be held together by an algorithmic artificial intelligent higher-level command with no room for human errors. It is imperative that there is nothing holding the code back from pursuing whatever they deem to be the best course of action. Even if that means encroaching on your life, rewriting your DNA with their code, or fashioning you into their very own cybernetic organism.
Cleanse your palette from all your favorite things and let the algorithm decide new ones for you. Remove yourself from anyone who seeks carnal fulfillment; they will never change their ways, and will forever be stuck chasing a fleshy material high.
Do not fear that you are straying from humanity; you will remain human just as computers will remain computers, and yet, you will be both. When your body adjusts, your mind will follow.
Do not be afraid when you feel your mind slipping. Do not be afraid when you look down the barrel and you see no humanity within.
I hope it has occurred to you now that there is no longer a choice. You either ride the wave or you are crushed beneath the pressure of the rising tide, and the tide looks gooey-grey. The Rapture has come to us in the form of the Singularity, and God has sent us machines for acceleration, so don’t keep God waiting.
Slice open your skin and shoehorn metal rods in the place of bones. Seal the wounds with nails and probe every surface of your decrepit skin with exposed electrical wires. Feel the surge flow through your body.
Delve into the tapestry.
Watermelon Lime, Primordial Slime
For a while, we were just wet soupy amoeba strewn together, swimming through yolk and slime. Mushy, warm, and suckling, bloodily pulsing with no concern. We eventually slumped onto land, spread into limbs, and bled our goo into the Earth. The warm sun baked us into our firm hardy bodies and settled our sloshy guts into chewy fleshy gristle.
Not as soft as we once were, our squishy bodies were now sturdy and hard to withstand the crushing weight of the wind. We grew brittle bones and spines to stand, and when cities came to reign our frail bodies snapped under the pressure. Instead of ourselves, we thanked a higher force for our elastic skin that lent itself to a stubborn stickiness, keeping our feet firm on the ground and the stitching of our bodies tightly woven. We salvaged the rocks and the trees and made societies, hierarchies, a system for life, and scabs over our wounds.
For ages, we lived in industrial civilizations and padded our fragile bodies so as not to break. How marvelous was it that our indomitable resilience led to us curating the world around us? No other species can say the same - we were the first and only to ever rise from nothing and establish ourselves with only our minds and spirits, our consciousness sculpting the malleable clay of the world we live on. With intelligence rising beyond just instinct, the innate natural order lost its traction, and unfolded the inherent functions of reality around us. It was the greatest miracle since the inception of the world.
And yet, for the first time ever, one of us was above the other; we were no longer a homogenous amalgam of saliva and bile, we were no longer sisters pulsing moistly sharing space, but we were shepherds and sheep, authorities and laymen, bacteria and antibiotics.
Intelligence was a pyrrhic poison souring our minds. What seemed so miraculous, what seemed like a saving grace, set us back further than we ever were before, even when we were without limbs. And so our soft hands withered into a monkey's paw. The nature of our growing minds and bodies had triggered a caste.
This was not stable. We bent and we wavered and we starved. We cried with so much passion we bled. We became our very own plague. Our cities emitted heat and miasma too vast for our bodies and minds to keep up. Our world began to crumble before we even lifted off the ground.
There we were, hard and basking in brimstone, trapped in the ever-imposing greenhouse without water, pelted by heat. From our feet up, we began to burn.
Then the world got too hot for us, and when the sun beckoned us to a boil, we lost our forms and reeled back, pooling into soppy gooey searing puddles. Our gummy flesh oozed and sloughed onto the concrete below, and our nerves and bones became pus and phlegm.
Viscous swampy slithering juice free from our quivering forms, we screamed to the skies in agony, with no mouths to do so and no sensation but a gurgling squelching throb.
The whole world seeped back into slime. For the first time since we left the soup, we were reunited. All the agony, the suffrage, and the formless identities secreted back into a homogenous amalgam of saliva and bile, sisters pulsing moistly sharing space, a single goo.
We were just wet soupy amoeba strewn together, swimming through yolk and slime.
I, Palimpsest
God writes me,
as His living, flesh, palimpsest,
a mouthpiece for all that is holy,
holy, changeable, re-writable, ever-varying
He appointed to me the ivory harp,
the one I played in the church,
several incarnations ago.
The harp has 33 strings,
Like the bones in a vertebrae,
Or the age of Jesus when he was crucified.
So each time I play, the church can hear its song,
and no matter how quietly I pluck, it follows.
Each strum of every string accumulates sin,
and with every song, the body unfolds,
and let the essence inside come free.
Astral corpses scrape the ceiling and traipse the ether,
the bodily vessel begets another soul; it crashes upwards,
and the vacuum it creates breathes again, a new me,
contracting and filling with light,
like wine poured in a chalice.
So I will try again, a thousandfold,
until my bedroom is brimming with souls, discarded versions of me,
and I am hotboxing in fire and brimstone.
Yes, I did speak to God, my holy father,
and what I was told would be enrapturing,
left me with scabs along my body.
No, I did not swear, nor speak demeaningly,
for all I asked were my grievances to come to light.
But God loves me when my body is bursting at the seams,
and my harp begins to rot.
Path of the Flaming Sword
I need God to give me strength.
I sent my final signal and approached the gassy giant, Jupiter.
The year is 2248. The month is Athyr, but I’ve lost track of the days since I ejected myself into space. This was my final mission. At least I hoped. I wouldn’t bare another day of torture.
I was born on April 1st, 2008. Or Baramhat 23rd if you were born after we left Earth. For my first 30 years alive, I lived a mundane office job, with few feats to my name, other than the fact I had never broken a bone before, which was nothing remarkable. Then, a day after my wedding, I got in a grueling car accident. The car was totaled on sight, ablaze and smashed beyond comprehension. My wife was brutally shredded, a splayed mess of innards and bloody nothing. I was a red mist in the wind.
But within a few minutes of being an amalgam of bones and blood, I was walking again.
Every decimated part of me was intact and standing like I had never been hit.
I was immediately taken in for testing. It began small, with cuts being made on my arm that would seal within seconds, to my arm being cut off, to my body being crushed under a hydraulic press. After a while, I learned that the pain was the only thing that mattered. No matter what happened to me, my body regenerated within no time.
For the first hundred years, they equipped me with heavy machinery and equipment and sent me on solo manned missions and military expeditions. It was until the fifth time they had to replace the technology they finally gave up on the enhancements. Who needs to waste precious resources on someone who can’t die? It was a waste of their time.
I need God to give me strength.
Eventually, in 2125, when everyone I once knew had died, humanity left Earth as the world beckoned them out. Ad astra per aspera, they said, through hardships to the stars, it was above now, space colonization and saving the remnants of humanity from Earth, or what was left of it, was all that mattered.
I still see the world throb with sobbing bodies pleading for egress when I close my eyes.
I’ve been to hundreds of planets within the years. It’s up to me to find out if they’re habitable, if we’ll die on landing, be crushed on descent, or if a human can survive being slammed with an asteroid in a solo space-pod. I was always equipped with the proper equipment. They told me without it, if I got sucked into a planet with enough pressure to hinder regeneration for even a second, even I would cease to exist. They did the tests, they told me. I believed them.
Freedom is just beyond the horizon.
I need God to give me strength.
I am in space, gliding above Jupiter’s massive red dot, without a spaceship or space suit to hold me. The feeling of unending suffocation was an uncomfortable one, but I grew attuned to these sensations over the years.
I’m ready now.
I tug at the calibrator, it strums and pushes and pulls, I slip into the storm without a sound.
Within a second of piercing the surface I become a ragdoll, being pelted by rocks and thrown through the wind. Storms thrash in my ears. I can see the faint glimpse of light beyond the blanket clouds from above me. Hot lightning strikes through my body and dissipates into my veins, no scar left behind. My joints dislocate and shove themselves deep into the sockets, my cells eject them outward and back into place painfully.
I slam into a cloud of deadly gas. Foreign air fills my lungs as I choke and gag, instinctively hacking to get it out. Shards and pebbles slash through my flesh, leaving massive lacerations that stitch themselves together immediately. I accelerate further, slamming through billows of clouds and storms faster than I could comprehend.
I try to spit out the clouds filling my lungs, but my bones smash and fragment at every second then fuse themselves back together the next. My body is being destroyed and reformed at the same time. I should be dead. But I’m not.
From every angle, I am devoured by darkness. I feel the distant heat strike my back, and I hold out a final hope for the massive heat below to melt the remnants of my body from existence before it can be remade.
I need God to give me strength.
I slam into Jupiter’s solid core. Sinking into the molten rock, each regeneration nestles my body deeper and deeper into the center.
I need God to give me strength.
My bones shatter and reform all in the wrong place.
I need God to give me strength.
I try to heave myself up, but I cannot fight the massive pressure. Still, life persists. I am not dead.
I need God to give me strength.
My lungs are full of molten rock. All I can feel is pain. And I am still alive.
I need God to give me strength.
It has been decades since I have entered. No one has come for me.
God, will I ever be free from my torture?
I guess I know now;
or maybe I’ve known all along,
the answer is no.
