by Mat Laporte
first edition
copyright © 2016 by Mat Laporte
all rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. BookThug also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Laporte, Mat, 1984–, author
Rats nest / Mat Laporte.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77166-244-4 (paperback).
ISBN 978-1-77166-245-1 (html).
ISBN 978-1-77166-246-8 (pdf).
ISBN 978-1-77166-247-5 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS8623.A7374R38 2016 C813’.6 C2016-904958-2
C2016-904959-0
This is how we branch out into anamnesis and are shaken by underground subcutaneous shivers. For it is only above ground, in the light of day, that we are a trembling, articulate bundle of tunes; in the depths we disintegrate again into black murmurs, confused purring, a multitude of unfinished stories.
—Bruno Schulz
BOttomless Pit
The 3D-Printed Kid was made for this purpose: to travel deep within the bottomless pit, to claw at the layers of rocks and dirt, the decomposing remains of other planets, other worlds, to fill up its mouth, nose, ears and throat, the whole time self-replicating, so that the moment one copy dissolves, another copy will emerge to continue the previous one’s descent. Its mission is simple: create a map of the pit’s interior while maintaining a detailed report on its progress, in the form of audio-visual recordings: scratchy black and white magnetic flickers, indexed and recorded for future study by the scientists on the surface of the planet.
Thirteen hours after it began its descent, the 3D-Printed Kid sends up its first broadcast. The images it sends are hard to discern: layers of nonsense, brown, red, and black earth, rendered in grey-scale, interrupted by bands of static. As the sequence progresses, these dislocated fragments coalesce and begin revealing more details about what the Kid is seeing and hearing down below; an abstract flipbook-style narrative starts to form, accompanied by the Kid’s hollow, tin-flecked voice.
After ten more hours of clawing through molten rock, ash, and dirt, the Kid finds an opening in the bottomless pit’s honeycombed interior. It looks like a baseball field lit from above by green phosphorescent slime. The Kid observes its first living creature in this cavernous room: it looks like a potato-head with one eye and a crude mouth-hole, out of which a thin, wet tongue extends like a bean sprout. This creature also sports a host of tiny arachnid legs that teeter around on the floor of the cave like an inky, living donut, kicking up small plumes of dust as it scuttles backwards and forwards.
The scientists are pleased with the Kid’s first discovery. They name this obscure creature Fed, because it was feeding off the walls of the cave when the Kid first found it. The scientists send down an electrical pulse as a reward. It stimulates the Kid’s pleasure centres and sends a lovely humming sensation down the length of its plastic spine. This electrical pulse also sends a message to the Kid’s emotion-to-plastic sense-processor that says, ‘Good job Kid and keep up the good work.’
At a press conference, the scientists deliver a briefing on their discoveries that includes this description of their first impressions of the bottomless pit, as conveyed by their digital proximity device of choice, the 3D-Printed Kid:
To say there is no light in the bottomless pit is to be overly generous to the word light. Down there it’s just black holes opening into other black holes and giant rocks that turn their impassive faces towards the void. In the bottomless pit there are only uncaring objects that persist in relation to one another through sheer presentations of scale. They make no sounds that we can discern. To say they stare, well yes, they stare, but that would impose a will onto a place where there can be no such thing. Physical laws exist down there but that’s the closest you’ll get to language in the bottomless pit. The vocabulary of this language is finite and severely limited. The only terms it includes are turn, collide, explode, spin, burn, and freeze. You could say that, placed alongside one another, these terms represent a sort of grammar, and that this grammar adds up to a sort of sentence, but it is a sentence that reveals nothing because it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. And besides, there is no one there to write it and there is no one there to read it.
The 3D-Printed Kid starts developing a disorienting side-effect as a result of its descent: it has these incredibly violent and sometimes prescient nightmares about the future that it broadcasts on the audio-visual feed. These broadcasts travel to the surface on reverse-direction microwaves that are then recorded on giant industrial-sized tape loops. The scientists don’t know what to do as they watch and listen to the 3D-Printed Kid’s hallucinations as they swarm onto their laboratory screens and fill their heads with intolerable screams.
The Kid’s nightmare projections cannot be blocked out and infect everything within a certain radius of the pit with an electronic signal. These nightmare projections reveal to the general public the gory details of their own deaths in excruciating, sped-up detail—the lengthy tortures they will undergo in the lead up to their deaths—all compacted into quickly digestible nuggets of terror.
Fortunately, most of these easily-infected electronic devices and their unwanted predictions can be switched off, but after a certain amount of exposure to the Kid’s nightmare signal, these images and sounds begin to bleed into everyone’s dreams and what will come to be their waking nightmares that, once seen, can never be unseen.
After twenty more hours of digging through fire-blasted metal and ore, the 3D-Printed Kid sends up images of a vast stone floor covered in green gelatins. Each gelatin is set in an individual petri dish and placed at the exact same distance from the others.
“There must be billions of them,” a scientist on the surface guesses.
Then the scientists become immersed in studying the origins of these orderly germs and what purpose they might serve. The whole time the green gelatins just dilate and sparkle under the vaulted roof of the cave.
“Perhaps they are a new life form that the pit is growing, one cell at a time, in a controlled setting?” one group of scientists guesses.
Another group of scientists suggest that, “Perhaps the green gelatins serve no purpose at all?”
Their hypothesis is the least popular and never gets mentioned in any of the press participating in a round of public speculation about what the discovery of the green gelatins means. However, their hypothesis garners a cult following and comes to be expressed, first in a secretly fetishized way, via subcutaneous tattoos, only visible with secret ocular technology built and distributed by a cult known as SubCon. SubCon expresses its system of belief in a precisely measured dictum called, unsurprisingly, The Dictum. The Dictum is said to be extremely long, so as to prevent anyone from memorizing it. However, a bootlegged fragment of The Dictum does get memorized, and escapes the intensely secretive grasp of the SubCon underground. This bootlegged fragment becomes known as The Catechism, and is eventually leaked to the public. It is transcribed in its entirety here:
Given an infinite arena (the bottomless pit) in which anything can potentially happen at any time (bottomlessness), surely it follows that some of the b
ottomless pit’s endless vaults might contain finite objects (things), the purpose of which is to do absolutely nothing (silence), except be perfectly still, and eerily quiet?
The 3D-Printed Kid is having one of its nightmare’s again. This time it dreams that it’s a beautiful day on the surface of the planet and it’s going to take a walk outside. But no sooner has the Kid taken a few steps in the sunlight than it finds itself at the edge of the bottomless pit, once again, looking down into its awesome, incalculable depths.
Everything seems to be swirling around down there: dirt, trees, scraps of infrastructure like concrete pilings; wooden and aluminum poles; plastic protective coverings for cars; what must be thousands upon thousands of windows that dot the spinning tableau, with dead leaves and every shade of house paint and turbines that belong to non-existent power stations; more aluminum light poles; and ream upon ream of dirty paper clogging every ravine, pool, lake and ocean, all swirling around inside the eye of the pit, amidst trucks, wires, and just about every other aspect of plant, animal, insect, and bacterial life.
In the Kid’s dream, it can see deep grooves in the dirt at its feet, where large objects have been dragged across the ground. Despite these violent gouges and the circling pit in front of it, the Kid feels fine. There aren’t any birds left in the world, but the Kid dreams there is one bird left and that it’s singing a beautiful song—a kind of ballad that tells the story of an imaginary town cut off from the rest of the world by a catastrophic avalanche.
The song goes on to tell of the townspeople’s belief in a benevolent creature that will one day emerge from the depths of the bottomless pit to dig them out. The townspeople’s belief, so the ballad goes, leads them to the edge of the bottomless pit every day, where they beg for it to release a benevolent creature that can dig them out and save them.
After many such unfruitful visits to the rim of the bottomless pit, a creature eventually does emerge, but it isn’t the benevolent creature the townspeople have been asking for. Instead it’s a horrible orange blob, and this horrible orange blob announces that no such benevolent creature exists in the endless nightmare of the bottomless pit, that no one is ever coming to save them and, furthermore, even if something did emerge from the pit to save them, there is no way it—the horrible orange blob—would ever allow that to happen, for it was they—the horrible orange blob—that caused the avalanche to bury their town in the first place.
The horrible orange blob pauses for effect and says, ‘I caused the first avalanche to bury your town just for fun, but this next one is going to be a doozy.’ Then the horrible orange blob levitates above them and heehaws, causing another avalanche to bury the town.
Nonetheless, the bird’s song goes, the townspeople do not lose hope. Instead, they continue to make their pilgrimages to the edge of the bottomless pit every day and beg for it to release a benevolent creature that will dig them out and save them from their plight.
With its ballad done, the world’s only living bird transforms into a mouthing pile of flesh. It sounds like a choir but looks like a pile of dough, sculpted into eight head-like mounds, sharing the same neck and singing from eight distinct mouth-like holes, with red tongues and a half-formed ring of teeth inside each mouth.
In its dream world, the Kid has a pair of binoculars out of which it can see a shadowy presence, barely illuminated in the middle of a dark forest. This shadowy presence looks directly at the Kid and lifts their hands to their face. They are trying to communicate something, but the Kid doesn’t understand what: to go up in a cup-like formation? To scoop some unspecified medium out of a bowl and bring it to one’s face? The shadowy presence, far away in the dark forest, lifts their eyebrows, as if to say, ‘don’t you understand?’ Then they make the exact same motion, but this time there’s something inside their cupped hands—another smaller, but otherwise identical shadowy presence, also making a cupping motion with their hands and bringing them to their face, lifting their eyebrows, as if to say, ‘don’t you understand?’
The 3D-Printed Kid breaches another layer of the pit, about eight weeks after it began its descent. It finds itself in a large, vaulted cave packed with identical bald humanoids, all speaking or singing in similar, monotone voices. There’s no organization to their speaking and singing voices—not one that the scientists can ascertain, at least—but under closer scrutiny, there seems to be a kind of incidental syncopation that arises in the interplay between their voices, and it sounds as though they’re all reading from a common liturgy, though all out of order and out of sync with each other.
The bald humanoids drone and bellow, under the vaulted roof of the cave, sometimes in unison, other times, one of them performs a high-pitched solo, while the others stay quiet, or continue murmuring deep bass tones in the dark.
On the surface of the planet, the scientists are perplexed by the Kid’s newest discovery. They call in linguists and cryptographers to analyze this foreign language, in order to determine whether or not it contains within it any decipherable codes, or some clues that may give them a deeper understanding of how the choir works, or of the bottomless pit itself.
While the scientists discuss the implications of this new find, the Kid walks around recording videos and taking core samples, until it finds a single bald humanoid, separated from the rest of the choir, crouched over in a dark corner of the cave, transcribing by hand the words and phrases being spoken and sung out loud, into an enormous leather-bound book.
This infernal scribe is severely hunched over and has huge magnifying glasses attached to their scalp, positioned in front of their eyes. The scribe’s wrinkled eyes bulge and strain, but there is something serene and measured about how they conduct themselves, as well. The scribe’s fingers are slender and nimble as they flip through the tissue-thin paper of the large book with expert skill. To the scientists it looks as though the scribe is compiling some sort of master list of the words and phrases being spoken and sung. The scribe also seems to be arranging these codes in some logical order, in long-hand and in real time, and it must be, the scientists guess, that the scribe can hold a very long string of words and phrases in their head as they write them down, all the while making note of the ones being spoken into the cold air of the cave, and straining their eyes.
The team of linguists, back on the surface, asks the Kid to get a closer look at the book.
At first, the scribe doesn’t seem to take any notice, as the 3D Printed Kid creeps closer, to get a better view of the pages. The scribe can’t do much more than adjust the magnifying glasses in front of their bloodshot eyes and reach for another piece of charcoal, as the words and songs explode all around them in the cave.
The scribe moves too quickly through the pages of the book for the scientists to follow along. The linguists suspect that there is a latent grammar and syntax present in the scribe’s transcription, but they need a copy of the book to confirm it. The scientists send down a direct order for the Kid to confiscate the book, so it can make a detailed copy of it.
But the Kid does not comply. Instead, it just stares, analytically, at the top of the scribe’s head: it is devoid of hair and looks soft to touch. Veins pump furiously beneath the surface of the scalp as they strain to concentrate, transcribe, order, and not miss a word.
The scientists lose their collective patience. They send down a barrage of violent electronic pulses that trigger the Kid’s pain centres, causing some of its more benign circuits to melt and drip out its ears and mouth onto the ground. The melting plastic forms pink and grey puddles on the floor of the cave. The Kid feels unbearable pain and humiliation for the first time. It reels around trying to stop the melting plastic from gushing out of its mouth.
The Kid has no choice but to comply with the order and when it reaches down in slow-motion, its perfectly formed synthetic hands cross the space between the scribe’s glasses and the spot where their charcoal pencil is about to touch the sacred pages of th
e book, and the scribe stops writing, the bald humanoids stop chanting, and the cave becomes murderously quiet.
Total Horror
There’s a blinking light. I get the feeling that my head is being restrained; my body hasn’t existed for sixty-seven years, and every 3.5 seconds I fall asleep and wake back up again.
I fall asleep because I’ve got one brain cell left. When I wake up, I have to re-remember everything. Fortunately there’s not much to re-remember: that I haven’t had a body for sixty-seven years; that I’m just a head attached to a power source that provides my brain with enough energy to fire one brain cell for 3.5 seconds before falling back asleep; that it will be like this forever.
I try to re-remember more, but it’s impossible. How did this happen? Who was I before this? What’s that blinking light? What’s outside this room? These are the questions I ask myself, every time I wake.
I invent a game to play inside the blinking light. It’s for one player. I make the light blink as many times as I can before passing out. That’s the game. Because I can’t remember any of the previous games, I’m a winner every time.
There’s a blinking light. I’m not sure if it’s there or if I’m imagining it. Could it be a visual phenomenon, triggered by my last remaining brain cell, as it fires over and over again? Whatever it is, I hope they check the power supply regularly. I hope it never stops.
As time wears on I realize that, in front of me, in the otherwise pitch-black room, I can see the edge of a window, and in the reflection of the window I can see the blinking light. Every time I see the light blink—on and off—beside me, I can see it across from me, in the window’s reflection, as well.
The blinking light is as close to me as my nose would be (if I had a nose) and every time I fade in and see the reflection of the blinking light, in the window in front of me, I get a clearer impression of the room. Then I fall asleep again.