Energie Cottbus

‘Energie Cottbus’ first appeared in Phase Change: Imagining Energy Futures (Twelfth Planet Press, ed. Matthew Chrulew, March 2022).

Virtual fixtures

I surveil them through my cheaters, an army of the dead in plizzits, manikins and respirators, marching down the street as if the laws of physics don’t apply. They call themselves working class, a nod to the past, but they’re richer and more influential than I’ll ever be. They’re protestors of some kind, but who knows. Outrage is so cheap, these days. It’s a skin-suit that can be worn by anyone.

Zooming into their word clouds, I scan a welter of circular reasoning, wet dreams of future crimes, conspiracist ideations, sub-normal analytical thinking, Machiavellianisms, and a vast sea of self-doubt. Some of these crackbrains believe in instantaneous star travel via local galactic portals. Some say that ancient AI are genetically manipulating humans with the assistance of interdimensional alien slaves. A rival group claims that elongated-skull giants from Scheat, a star in the constellation Pegasus, are harvesting organs in transplanetary underwater caverns. Others believe that optimal timeline realities can be induced with DNA upgrades.

It all beaches on the shore of some grand theory called The Great Awakening, which, as far as I can tell, anticipates the moment when our collective minds will be freed from the psychic dominance of The Swarm.

I snag a few demented ramblings that seem to explain the ruckus. The protestors are in the hood for the resurrection of some dead politician. Can’t make out his name. He was shot in this street one hundred and fifty years ago. They say he’s been in hiding ever since. He never died. Biotech advances kept him alive. In two hours, he will appear at the plaza down the way. He will address the mob and announce his intentions. With their backing, he will defeat The Swarm and restore order to the Linear Territories. The jobbernowls in the street are salivating at the thought. Some have erections.

Make no mistake, this crowd is a punnet of nuts. Sure, we absorb mixed realities, day in day out, but just because you can conjure something from virtual air, doesn’t make it real. There’s a reason no one tells ghost stories anymore. With a blinked command, the occult is yours.

Nothing stops them, not even the lice bots with their kill-crazy deth-tubes. Not even the truth. Most protestors cover their cheaters with plizzits, necessary protection for the great outdoors, especially if you don’t want your eyeballs fried like eggs, but some go without. The rumour is, they’re blind, but they have ocular implants that jack into the vision machine. They’re the far-gone fringe, the scar tribes. Their necks are covered with gaping wounds, after attempted garrottings by licebots, which they proudly display like actors clowning around on a porno set.

The neck-gashed used to be in needle gangs, terrorising all and sundry, but when The Swarm cracked down, they began to make a living by respectable means. ArtInt mechanics, cheater repairs, cronk spotters, autonaka fluffers. Whatever it takes. They’re still criminals, addicted to chaos. It’s in their genes. They’re war-thirsty battle angels, agitators who tip protest into mania.

Two have breached the boundary surrounding my cube. I see them up close, through the laparoscopic sensory apparatus embedded in my cheaters. Their neck holes are alive, crawling with locum mist, grey-goo micro-bots suturing torn nerve endings. The crazies stare at my cube, with its sentient lightpaint facade. I’m not a fighter, but I psyche myself, prepping for confrontation. I cradle my portable char-stick, fingering the actuator stub in readiness.

I stand at the entrance to the cube, waving the char-stick and defending my turf. One invader speaks in machine-slang, his mangled vocal cords filtered through dual-shift modulators.

‘Where’d you get the lightpaint? Who your supplier? What you got, bigly? Spill your beans!’

I laugh, uncontrollably. They’re admiring the workmanship, that’s it.

‘Got it from the Metal Guru down on Hickley Ham Street.’ I lockzip the Guru’s card and brisk it to the invader. ‘Shake him down yourself, tough guy.’

The moron, sated, rejoins his crew. You’d think The Swarm would wipe them out with a drone strike, but perhaps they’re useful idiots. I’ve never understood politics.

Two hours pass, and the never-dead fail to materialise. The protestors are finally dispersed, and then Spine Whip is hit by an earthquake. It’s a big one, I see the ground rise and fall, but all the cubes in my street stand firm. It’s the old, abandoned buildings that crumble. Not that anyone notices. They’re all galaxy hopping inside their minds, lost in private oblivion in the safety of their cubes.

A few protesters are trapped in the rubble, but the licebots simply separate their heads from their shoulders, as if they’re putting down birds with broken wings.

I’ve lived in Spine Whip all my life and I’ve never experienced an earthquake. It’s the wrong hemisphere. We’re not on a fault line. We are geographically clean. All the trauma is above ground, not below. As if the war with the Arctic Free State wasn’t enough, now this.

It’s so rare, I start to wonder if psychic energy from the protestors caused it, char-broiled outrage manifesting as geotrauma. I remember an old joke, a musicologist’s snobbish retort: ‘In the future, every home will be powered by jazz fusion.’

If only we could bottle the brain waves of conspiracists, power the grid with wasted energy from useless trolling.

Occluded prosthesis

There was one experiment they tried. Driverless cars. Autonakas, they’re called. Autonakas don’t burn oil or fuel. They receive wireless electricity particles, sucked down from the time-varied power beams that strafe the air every second of the day.

For all the economic benefits, the transition wasn’t peaceful. After being welded to the automobile for so long, our bodies rebelled. I’m old enough to remember the cars that once terrorised Spine Whip. Metal grilles over the windows, enormous spikes grafted to the bodies, chassis lifted metres off the ground by liquid metal robo-jacks. Cars were prostheses of the animals that drove them.

These days, autonakas are the only vehicles around, gentle, autonomous beasts that lockstep in and out of centrally controlled traffic beams. Driverless cars are the new singularity. They’re not an extension of the body. They’ve replaced it.

Autonakas devour you. You telepath your destination and away you go. If an autonaka breaks down, the AI locks the system. It just sits there, an enormous brick in the middle of traffic, waiting to be serviced, happily chatting away to itself in code-slang. Passengers can forget about on-the-fly mechanical adjustments. To mend a stalled autonaka, you must learn the algorithmic equivalent of brain surgery.

Divorced from the steering wheel, our physiologies did not go gently into the night. They greeted the new dawn with psychopathic mutations, a traumatic untethering from machinic fantasies. Once, the death trippers who piloted the spiked vehicles were directors in the theatre of vehicular chaos. Now, they are unseen technicians, hacking the autonakas of others, telepathing brute-force override commands, sending unsuspecting innocents on death rides through suburban streets.

Resumption of ambulation

I leave my cube, but I must force myself. I’m getting on in years and it’s hard to stay mobile. I use the bicycle, an ancient Specialized with carbon frame, around fifty years old but younger than me. I kid myself that I’m becoming fit by using it, but I’m just trying to outrun myself and the rapid decline of my body.

A man, even older, taught me the byways, but he is long gone. People come and go, and I don’t know where they end up. I think The Swarm cancelled him, but I can’t be sure.

He gave me a courier job, because he knew I liked to ride, delivering packages of nothing to faceless people that represent the interests of something I can’t fathom.

It’s my first day on the job. The task: ride to a power mart called ‘Regina’, about fifty kilometres away. I can do it in a day, there and back. They want regular deliveries, the same package every single day. The old man gave me the delivery, a metal box, magnetically locked.

‘Why not drive there?’

‘They are doing things by stealth. No attention must fall on them.’

‘Doing what, exactly?’

‘Know what a power mart is?’

‘They make the wireless electricity parcels that power the grid, then they zap them into the air.’

‘Got it in one. But this, what you’re doing, it’s something different. An experiment. You are transporting the raw material.’

‘About time they explored sidereal energy. Electricity won’t last forever.’

He regarded me, his leathery scalp cracking with incredulity.

‘You think there’s a limit on free electrons? That they’re like fossil fuel? That once they’re all used up, they’re gone for good?’

‘I suppose. I mean, I’ve never really thought about it.’

‘Once, electrons vibrated inside wires. They didn’t flow like water. They emerged from the air, and the wires conducted them across cities. Wireless air parcels changed all that. There’s an infinite amount of free energy all around us, which the parcels tap into. Raw electricity, like lightning. It will never run out.’

‘What’s in the box?’

‘Your mind.’ The old guy chuckled. ‘You forgot to use it in our little exchange just then.’

Experimental adoption of advanced energy instruments

I ride out to Regina, through the edgelands and reeds, scything through a place where no walker dares to tread. The air is rancid with the smell of burnt chlorine and dry excrement, products of bunged-up technology and malfunctioning humans.

The wildlife is off the hook. It’s all mutant physiology and back to front. Rats the size of cats feast on cats the size of gnats. Red-eyed boxing kangaroos stare me down, waiting to pounce on mistakes. They’ve developed organic body armour, a rock-hard exoskeleton forged through apocalyptic times, and their enormous tails could snap my neck with a simple flick. It’s not so bad. They hate unexpected noise, so all I do is ring my dinky little bell and the beasts scatter into the poisoned scrub.

The buildings down this way are long gone, but the Chronoslide Glideway still stands, as it does everywhere in the Linear Territories. It looms high above, a mag lev tube jammed with autonakas and ArtInt trucks. Constant arterial pressure. Nasty business, commerce gone wild. Capitalism as a viral vector, a lust for annihilation.

I arrive at Regina. It’s an unassuming place, just a couple of small admin buildings set among a massive field ringed by razor wire.

Someone greets me, a woman in combat fatigues. She asks for ID, and I brisk it to her cheaters.

‘Give me the box,’ she says.

I do so, and she waves her hand over it. The lid opens. Inside, a pair of heavy black goggles.

‘Take off your plizzit, then your cheaters.’

‘But the sun.’

‘We have shielding.’

I remember something the old man said about the Glideway. It sucks down the fruit of the sun to power the mag lev tracks. It is a vision of excess, tripled by the efforts of the human trash below. The Glideway consumes more than it generates. The solar economy that we plug into is barely offset. Evil accelerates when the social order is destroyed, and the balance is tipped beyond repair.

She picks up the goggles. ‘Put these on.’

‘Why?’

‘Security check. To see if they’ve been tampered with.’

‘Must I do this every time I come here?’

‘Every time.’

I strap them on, and the sky goes out. I see phosphorescent imprints behind the lids of my eyes, but that’s it.

‘Tell me what I’m thinking,’ the woman says.

‘You’re thinking that we don’t have it in us to maintain equilibrium. You’re thinking that we must destroy harmony as a natural solution to long-term boredom. You’re thinking that this is because when all the grit and dynamism have been leached from the city, when new energy solves one crisis, there is a swelling surplus, an excess of unreason that exists only in the psychic realm. You’re thinking if only it could be tapped.’

‘Not even close. That’s what you’re thinking. You are talking to yourself.’

‘Did I pass?’

‘That’s confidential. Put them back in the box and leave with it.’

I saddle up again, strap the box to my back, and ride into the distance.

At home, I try to open the box, but it won’t budge.

Electrical arcing of instruments

Day after day, month after month, I deliver the box, strap on the goggles, take the box home. I keep going, feet up and feet down, feet stuck to the cleats, circular motion. Limbs move, pedals turn, machine goes. There once was a pop group, electronic pioneers. They were called Powerplant, and they hailed from Koppari-Audun. They sang about the ‘man-machine’. Funny thing is, everyone thought they were cyborg fetishists, but it turns out they were hardcore cycling fanatics. Their bionic metaphors were about bikes not bots.

They cultivated an obsession with dynamic energy and forward motion. Repetition and propulsion, that’s all they cared for, listening to the limits of the body, to the natural sonics of the environment. Calibrating the wind for speed, the physical hum for endurance, converting the psychic obsession with movement into kinetic energy.

I think of them now, as the bike moves beneath me. In their philosophy of energy expenditure, to slow the bike is to fall off, so it’s preferable to keep going, to never release the handlebar, to never take the feet off the pedals or touch the ground. Forwards, always forwards.

Why then do I stop to explore the dank space beneath the Rosebell flyover? It’s a corruption of high place phenomenon, a mystifying compulsion to leap into the void. I’m praying my brain will abort the impulse before my body propels me over the edge.

There’s a little nook, a vee-shaped enclosure, where the bank meets the underside of the road. Despite the crude air, it’s inviting, a portal to a place where nothing remains. The road above is silent, all transport having fled to the Glideway years ago.

Beneath the flyover, there are some books, some ancient drink cans, a yellowing magazine. There’s an old, jagged knife, covered in brown spots. The smell assaults me, a gangrenous olfactory pocket that turns the air into cottage cheese. I move along the alcove, crouching low to avoid a head injury. I discover an old army-surplus sleeping bag. Inside it are two fused-glass bodies, like Pompeii people, real humans incinerated at the point of sexual congress. At first, I think someone has come under here and set them alight, sadists torturing the homeless, but then I see that their shadows have been seared into the concrete. Whatever did this had nuclear capacity.

Guidance fixtures and forbidden-region fixtures

I remember asking the old guy about the company behind the job.

‘Exceller 8, they’re called, one of the “invisible companies” off world. They were among the first to develop autonakas. Now, they’re branching into power marts.’

‘Swarm affiliated?’

‘You’d think so, but no one really knows.’

What was I transporting on my little courier run? I didn’t care to ask, I just wanted to ride, but the old guy did fill me in on Exceller 8’s history, because I was interested in that. That’s my special problem. I live in the past, hooked on nostalgia like a mainline junkie.

‘Believe it or not, Exceller 8 started as a rugby team. Nothing to do with tech. What happened was, a group of mongrel coal miners in Safək were looking to kick some heads on their days off. You know the type. Cauliflower ears. Pug noses. No neck. Everything squashed in from constant hits to the body. So, they formed a rugby team, joined an industrial league.’

‘Squashed bodies? Rugby players look more like robots.’

He laughed. ‘Before the Linear Territories, stupid.’

‘Unscyld Era?’

‘Yeah. No implants back then, no vat-grown muscle, no bionic uterine geography. So, there they were, competing in this industrial league against other teams: workers from unified Transport States, Food States, Communication, Housing, Luxury, Energy. Then, when The Swarm fell to Earth, the Linear Territories were formed, and the league was banned.’

‘Ennarel Island?’

‘You got it. The Swarm irradiated the stadia, then exiled all rugby dissidents to Ennarel. They forced them to become birther-cyborgs, a self-sufficient colony, and that’s the beginning of deth-sports as we know it today.’

‘Rugby boners giving birth to each other, what fun. Spectators more interested in the gestation period than the actual game. Crazy times. Where does Exceller 8 come in?’

‘Well, that’s the interesting part. Some of these coal guys, the originals, they lived to be well over a hundred and fifty, and by that time, they were doing the ops themselves. They’d learned all the tricks. Biomechanoid experts, they were. Some escaped to the Territories and set up shop. They say their DNA lingers somewhere in the algorithms today. The rest is history.’

‘Not to me.’

‘Well, ask inside your mind, and you shall receive the answer.’

But my neuromod wasn’t working that day, and I couldn’t be bothered to shake down the info even when it was, so the legend remains. That’s what it means to be high on the past. You’re forever huffing the fumes emanating from your pinched, irrelevant inner space.

Anaesthesia collaboration and robotic docking

I am pumping, really pumping. I’m zeroing in on the curve ahead. Massive tree trunks are strewn across the path, plus a few skeletons of an indeterminate species and the wrecks of burned-out vehicles. A man slides past on a hover bike, carrying a dead dog in his lap. He’s caressing the fur, crying like a jilted lover, fogging up his plizzit with hot tears.

Negotiate the obstacles, take the curve, keep going. Kilometres fly by. Shadows zip across the hills, thrown by a squad of electraglides in the sky, crewed by desperados and filled with refugees. They’re not going anywhere. Vee-drones shoot the glides down if they cross the border. All this jockeying for position, it’s purely for show.

Wind belts my face with the force of leather straps. It’s hard to ride in bio-cooling armour. You sweat your body weight. Every fibre is coiled tight.

I see a two-percenter on top of a suspension beam over the Glideway. His yellow eyes are horrible, like runny eggs spattered with chick blood. He’s yelling something in Patawelsh, which I’ve never bothered to learn. I just telepath through my neuromod, no verbals required.

‘Cnuchi hyn mundo!’ he announces, before performing a swan dive into a moving line of autonakas. It’s quite something. The fall has mashed his feet into his nose. Only scar tribes do public suicide, but this guy, he’s nothing. No implants, no cheaters or mods, no augmented overlays. Nothing. Two-percenters can’t see what we see. That’s why they suffer reality overdose, but usually they do it somewhere private. Now, this scumbag has ruined everyone’s day.

Around the bend, just over the rise, lies Regina.

Always Regina, day after day.

Slave unit (patient side cart)

Eventually, I crack. I do as the old man asked, and I search it up, and I discover the rumours about what’s going on at Regina, and it doesn’t sound nice at all. Apparently, they’re doing stuff with electricity in there, transcranial direct current stimulation. The Swarm is behind it, that’s what the conspiracy cults are saying, some new kind of punishment for recalcitrants. They electrocute their brains, and force-create tulpas from the psychic explosion.

You know what a tulpa is? A mental life companion—an emanation, a magical illusion—born from brain waves. A living creature, some say. The concept has its roots in Buddhist meditation, but, like everything, The Swarm have corrupted it. It’s their version of the reversed swastika.

The Swarm term for the process is ‘Vrillon energy’, a branch of something called ‘psionics’. They want to create ideal copies with these tulpas and populate the world with them. Sounds deranged. Mental life companions? Voices in the head, more like. Sicko schizo stuff.

Why create tulpas when AI exists? That’s why we have the metaverse.

The funny thing is, I’ve heard of psionics. A notion that was popular in prehistoric science fiction novels until no one believed in it anymore. Weird how The Swarm have pinched it. If you don’t accept the truth of something, how can it exist? Belief is how tulpas are born. I’ll grill the woman about it. Now that I have access to secret knowledge, I need more answers.

As I draw near, another cyclist passes in the opposite direction. He has only one leg, and it’s furiously working the one pedal, and he’s wearing a serial killer mouth guard, leather straps with metal bits in between. Slaughter-chic. Nothing’s shocking, nothing at all.

He’s really moving, much faster than me, and now he’s gone, a ghost of reality disappearing over the rise, scattering the dog-like rabbits and the roided-up funnel web spiders.

How long have I been riding?

I never noticed my life changing, or the world for that matter. I thought this was all there was and always has been.

Mechatronic support systems

‘Shut up,’ the woman says, ‘and listen to me. All you have is the bike. The freaks, all the other distractions, you only notice them on the periphery, because you live to ride. There is nothing else. Your wife left with the kid, and you can’t even remember when it happened or what they look like. You vaguely recall them, but you just keep going to blot them out, to bury the pain. You can’t remember when the skies weren’t blood red. There was a jogger you used to see on your early rides. He was as obsessive as you, every day, out on the track, up and down, up and down. Then one day, you passed his skeleton in a ditch, a trace memory of someone you vaguely knew on the way to nowhere at all.

‘You keep going, a year, maybe more, until your neuromod dies, and the only voices in your head are your own. You hear me talking, now. You hear me tell you that you are the psychic copy of a man named Simon. You hear me explain that he is you. You are his intrusive thoughts made flesh. You are his brainwaves brought to life. You are benevolent and kind. You are not like him. You are frippish and skittish, he is aggressive and intense. The Swarm made you, and you became him. Simon struggled with depression, as the virus hit him hard, the loss of his family even harder. You have replaced him. You thought you were created to become his psychic companion, but you are much more than that.

‘Did you know I have been watching you ride to the power mart, day after day, night after night? I tracked you with grain cams. The bugs you swallowed as you rode, open-mouthed? Those were the cams. You swallowed them whole and now I see inside you. I own your intestines.

‘I watched you go by until it wasn’t really clear why you were riding anymore. I watched you until you became him.

‘He is your host, and you will learn to think positive thoughts, to channel his negative energy into something filled with light and the power of a million suns.

‘In time, you and he will grow and learn together. We have brute-forced you into the world, and it’s okay for you to know that. Reliving the trauma of birth is like a memory you never knew you had. In time, the edges will fade, until there is only you. I mean, him.

‘Live inside him, live for him. Live through him, live with him. Don’t think about the sun. Swallow it down until the light is inside you. The light that is him.’

Compliant kinematics

On the way home, I suffer a flat tyre. I sit by the side of the path and cry hot tears. In the middle distance, the roos gather. The only problem with alternative energy is the skill required to make it work. The new mind set, the retooled brain, the initiative to start again among the ruins. Look at me. I have forgotten how to change a tyre. I can’t remember my name. I am as soft as a marshmallow, having never worked a day of physical labour in my life. With all support systems stripped away, my inadequacies are fatal.

The roos move nearer. I am too weak to reach for the bell, too depleted to scream. As I wait for my neck to be broken and my eyes gouged out, rays from the orgiastic sun continue their wanton journey to Earth. Soon, they will breach the epidermal topography that shields my organs from the inevitable combustion of all living matter.

I think of the grain cams that live inside me. They are filming the world’s most boring movie, a plotless psychodrama with no beginning, middle or end.

Art brut pornography for the inside of the body, screening for an audience of one.