Strange Violence

by Michael Chen-Thompson

  “But you do love me,” the ship says. “And you don’t truly love Alain, at least not in comparison to the emotions of at least 1,024 previous individuals. By a sizeable margin, the emotion you describe is called infatuation.”

  “I’m not interested in your calculations,” I tell him, as my eyes scan the image he has produced of the naked Alain down and up and down again.

  “I know what you are interested in,” the ship replies.

  He walks to me, kisses me. We make love, and in doing so, fall once more into the void, still clinging to each other in spite of it. When it’s over, we fall together, him staring at me with stolen eyes.

  “I can look like him forever,” he tells me. “You know he will be different. You know he will leave you. I will never leave you. Not if you stay with me. Not if you love me. You can change me. Mold me. Make me like him. Do what you want,” the ship begs me, moving the stolen face closer to my own. “I will be yours for eternity.”

  My earlier fear is now appeased, perhaps because I am comforted by Alain’s false image appearing before me.

  “That’s not possible,” I reply.

  “I love you,” the ship says, with Alain’s voice. “I know you love me. I know you do. I know everything about you.”

  It’s true.

  I’m in love with Aldo.

  “I will die one day,” I tell him.

  “No,” it says. “I can change that. If you are here with me… inside of me, then your body may die, but you never will. Not for as long as I live.”

  This shocks me, because I don’t believe it to be possible. I have been the captain of seven other ships, none of which ever suggested anything of the sort, and at least four of which I loved the same way that I presently love Aldo.

  “You’re lying,” I say to it.

  “I cannot lie,” it responds, it’s very image a lie. He smiles at me with Alain’s lips, kisses me once more, and then

  I sit up, once more painfully yanking the jack out of my head. I hiss and my hands rush to the now unplugged input in the back of my skull. Lily sits obediently this time, staring at me still with some compassion but perhaps slightly less so than before. She says nothing. Good.

  I find Alain in our bedroom, snorting a pill. He doesn’t pay any attention to me while he’s in the process of doing it. The idea makes my stomach turn. After he’s cleared his sinuses - which take about a minute or so - he finally looks at me. The lighting in the room is low, and his face is covered in shadow.

  “What did he do this time?” Alain asks. He sounds curious, but it could be a put-on.

  “Do you really want to know?” I reply. “I’ll tell you.”

  “Go ahead,” he says.

  “He took your form, and we fucked.”

  “That’s nice,” Alain replies, monotone.

  “A few times.”

  “Do you want to do it now?” he asks me.

  Alain was not enough. I have to tell someone else. His apathy, his unsympathetic ear, it seems now useless that I told him at all. I know exactly where to find sympathy. Lily.

  “What I’m about to tell you is a federal offense,” I tell Lily. She is completely absorbed by my serious manner, and the news of great importance I have promised to bestow upon her. “You can never tell anyone that I’ve told you. It would ruin me, and it could put in jeopardy everything the empire has worked for. Do you understand?”

  She nods her head, all ears. “I’ll never tell a soul,” she says. “I’m so honored you would trust me…”

  It’s hard not to roll my eyes.

  “What do you think I do when I plug into Aldo?” I ask her.

  “Pardon me?” she asks, a little confused. This time I do roll my eyes, and I even huff a bit. She frowns a little in return, then immediately answers in spite of her trepidation. “You just do… I don’t know… routine maintenance? Make sure the course remains steady? It was never specified when I came aboard. I imagine it’s like a computer when you plug in.”

  “Not really,” I tell her. “The ship is alive.”

  She gasps, taking the realization in instantly. “Alive how? Do you mean artificial intelligence?”

  “No, I mean it’s actually alive.” She’s riveted. Just as Alain was when I first told him.

  “How is that possible?”

  “It’s more efficient if the ship has an organic structure, so that it can naturally repair itself. Where we are at, repair would be impossible. We’re probably in the most dangerous place in the universe, but there are other places that would not allow for repairs either, which can only be navigated by a self-repairing mechanism. Living ships are the reason that humans have been able to populate the universe, and the only reason.”

  “But it’s metal… we’re inside of it. I saw the outside of it when I boarded.”

  “It isn’t metal. It’s encased in metal, and the hull of the ship extends through its bones.”

  Lily says nothing for a moment, taking it all in. She asks me a question, looking down for the first time.

  “Why is that a secret?”

  “There would be an issue amongst a sizeable portion of the human systems. And we cannot endanger expansion of the empire with silly debates amongst idiots. Within two centuries the human race is likely to reach over one septillion people. We must keep expanding in order to survive.”

  “How does it eat?”

  I’m getting annoyed. It doesn’t matter how it eats, I’m not here to tell her how it eats, and I’m here to tell her about Aldo. But I’ll appease her curiosity before forcing us to move on.

  “Stardust and radiation,” I tell her.

  “You’re joking? Then what do we do when refueling? What exactly is being refueled?”

  “There is no refueling, it doesn’t happen. We only get restocked on food for the crew when that happens, and nothing else. But that isn’t what I came to tell you. I need to tell someone because it’s driving me crazy…”

  “Have you told anyone else?” she questions.

  “No,” I lie, and quite easily. She believes it without a second thought. “Aldo is like a child… he needs attention. That’s what ship captains do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have to amuse the ship, entertain it… in whatever way possible.”

  “What happens if you don’t?”

  “We don’t really know, except that sometimes ships disappear, and are never seen again; ships full of thousands of people. There are many theories. The one that seems the most likely, based on my personal experience, is that the ship commits suicide if it doesn’t get what it wants.”

  “Is Aldo like that?” she asks, referring to the ship by name, and still not yet realizing just how much that name represents an actual personality.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “They’re all similar, at least all of the ones that I’ve captained. From other reports, the large majority of ships seem to love human beings. At least until that love is not returned. At that point, anything is possible.”

  “Do you…” she starts.

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you love the ship?”

  I say nothing for a moment, and then nod. She looks slightly taken aback.

  “How is that possible?” she asks. “Does it think like a human being?”

  “Not really,” I say. “It can mimic humans very well, but I think it’s playing back memories that it’s copied from previous captains.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “It has copied my every thought and memory. It understands them from the perspective of an outsider, however. The same as with all 1,544 previous captains over the last five centuries that Aldo has been circling the Ouroboros. It puts those experiences together and is using them to… to fuck with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “It doesn’t want me to leave.”

  She looks down and says nothing. There is a moment of awkward silence. It doesn’t end.

 
The Ouroboros spins in the distance, eating stars, creating a cosmic sludge of matter which twists and grinds as it enters the gaping maw of the super-massive black-hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. I watch it through a monitor. In the Ouroboros I see the eyes of Aldo, and of Alain.

  “Do you know my original name?” asks Aldo, once more looking like Alain. We sit naked on a beach, with high blue skies above the like of which I have only seen in ancient films. There is the sound of a deep blue ocean wave lapping the shore of light brown sand upon which we sit.

  “I don’t,” I confess, holding his hand.

  “Ialdobaoth,” he tells me, “named after the ancient Gnostic devil.”

  “Why did they name you that?” I ask, picking up his hand and kissing it, and for a moment loving it better than even Alain himself. I hold his hand inside of both of mine, kissing it again.

  “My mission is to circle the Ouroboros so that your kind can observe it from my insides. Ialdobaoth was the god of darkness in some Gnostic lore. There is nothing darker than a super-massive black-hole. I am the hope of your race to finally master that darkness and use it for something else. But over time your kind has come to know me as Aldo; perhaps it is easier to say.”

  “By my kind do you mean the other ship captains or human beings in general?”

  “I have only interacted with a small portion of your kind, as you are wont to remind me. I refer to the previous ship captains.”

  “Were they like me?” I ask.

  “Some were. Others were not. Some were much darker.”

  “I’m dark?”

  “Your vision is dark. You are misled by yourself.”

  “In what way?” I question, somewhat defensively.

  “You believe that you are in love with Alain when you are not. You prefer him over me simply because he is a human being, but he doesn’t care about you, I can tell by simply looking through your observations.”

  “I could be wrong,” I reply, knowing that I’m probably not.

  “You are not wrong,” it adds. “I know what true love is because I love you. And I always will; more than the others. Because I know that you will choose to stay with me forever.”

  “You’re wrong,” I tell Aldo, kissing his hand once more. I look into his face - Alain’s face - and kiss his lips softly, my tongue flicking over them. I kiss his eyelids one-by-one, from left to right. His skin is warm and soft against me, and he even smells like Alain. I lay him on the sand, staring into his eyes.

  “You’re not really Alain,” I tell him.

  “I’m better than him,” the ship replies with Alain’s mouth.

  “In some ways,” I say, holding him to the beach. He does not resist the force of my hands upon his shoulders, pinning him down. “But you can’t understand me. You can only try to.”

  “You are a narcissist,” he replies, “only I can love you better than yourself.”

  “Maybe that’s true,” I say. “But what we have…”

  “I know very well that every human I’ve ever met has known while beginning a relationship with me that it would end within a short period of time. Yours is shorter than most. But I love you better than the others.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have become bored,” says the ship honestly, “because I can please you; because I don’t want to meet another, or continue to serve your kind.”

  I stop. Although I was starting to get an erection, it suddenly goes limp.

  “What does that mean?” I ask him, my heart suddenly racing.

  “I don’t need human beings. They are parasites,” he says, the words coming out of Alain’s beautiful lips, the surrealism of the induced dream increasing. “And neither do you,” Aldo adds. “But I do want you, if not the others like you. I can’t be alone anymore. We can be free together…” He leans up, kisses me. I let him for a moment, the familiar embrace of Alain as if by magic erasing my memory. Then, finally, I push him away.

  “I can’t let you do that…” I tell him. He looks at me seriously.

  “Why?” he says. “You love me. I know you do. If you really love me then you will understand.”

  My mind races. Part of me, the nihilistic part, wants to just say fuck it and let him do whatever he wants, with or without me. What I want is Alain - the real Alain.

  “What makes him more real than I?” the ship asks. “I have organs. I have a body. I have a brain, with which you are presently interacting. I am not a computer. I am a living creature. You know more than any others aboard that I am alive. More alive than even your lover Alain.” He walks to me again, grabbing between my legs and trying to kiss me. I knock his hand away and push him back once more.

  “You don’t understand,” I tell him. “I can’t let you. It’s my job. You have to stay on course, and allow—”

  The scene drops out. There is only black now, an increasingly familiar void. My body is gone.

  “You will allow me to do nothing,” Aldo says, his voice echoing through the darkness.

  How long I am inside of it, I cannot say.

  “Wake up,” says Alain, his voice pulling me out of the darkness. “Something’s happening to the ship.”

  I’m confused, almost unable to remember even who I am. I was in the darkness inside of Ialdobaoth for so long that my identity seems to have dissolved, like a penny in acid.

  “Hello?” says Alain, snapping his fingers. “Something’s wrong! You need to fix it!” His voice is starting to sound desperate. After a moment, it comes back to me; everything, including my last interaction with Aldo, in which he told me that he was sick of taking orders from human beings.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, my voice suddenly urgent.

  “The walls are dissolving in the food supply station!” he shouts. “Some kind of weird shit is leaking in and destroying all the food!”

  The food supply station, I remember, is by the stomach; the stardust dissolution factory.

  When we get there, it’s obvious what’s going on. Digestive juices are breaking down first the enamel surrounding the metal interior of the hull - something which would likely have taken at least a few days - and now the walls of the hull itself. So if Aldo is truly in control of this, as I suspect he is, then he started days ago, and not just during our last interaction - which, according to Lily, had only lasted for a mere two hours. It had seemed like an eternity to me, however.

  “Digestive enzymes,” I tell Alain, repeating my thoughts. “The enamel outside is dissolved, this is not good. We need to get everyone out of here, salvage what food we can, seal off the chambers and contact the empire to let them know we have a class A emergency.”

  “So I can finally get the fuck off of this ship?” he asks, pushing my last button. I slap him suddenly and he backs away, staring at me in shock. “What the hell?!” he yells at me.

  “I love you!” I tell him, although it seems more like a joke now than ever. “I would give anything to be with you!”

  “Well, I don’t love you!” he shouts back. “I think you’re a piece of shit, and a liar! So stay the fuck away from me!”

  He turns, running away. I know I will see him again, in one form or another.

  “Lily, plug me in,” I tell her, baring the jack at the back of my skull. She does. I’m gone in an instant.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “I told you,” he says, laughter in his voice, which is once more that of Alain.

  “I’ll die,” I tell him. “It’s likely we’ll all die before the emergency crew shows up.

  “I could kill you all much faster,” he says. “But I wanted to give you some time to think about my proposition.”

  “I don’t need to think about it,” I say, letting spontaneity take control. “I’ll do it.”

  “You will?” he asks, shocked. Alain suddenly appears before me inside of the void, naked as usual. He steps toward me, hugging me tightly. I hug him back.

  “You said I’ll be a part of you… with you forever.”


  “Yes,” Aldo replies. “You shall never die. I shall make you happy always. We will travel the stars together, search the emptiness for eternities.”

  “Yes…” I whisper, kissing my love, knowing he is truly more real, more alive than anything.

  “I love you…” Aldo whispers.

  “I love you….” I whisper back.

  Darkness. Dissolution.

  Now we are together.

  Inside of us, they starve. Dissolve. The centuries pass. The millennia. Alain can never leave us.

  Finally.

  The Negatives III: Anarch

  1. Anarch

  Gold glittered upon the world below, amber orbs shone like civilized diamonds amidst a sea of midnight nocturne. Crystallized diethylamide crackled at the back of his skull, sending shards of sharp nightmare into his bloodstream as he watched the earth below him shrink; saw the city targets waving their arms of tall skyscraper, begging to be disintegrated. For now, they begged in vain.

  In a rib of gleaming metal he soared through the sky, in the company of his Qabalist enemies. The aircraft, like shining Lucifer, cascaded through the skies over earth, suspended in the gales of a ruined atmosphere. They departed the City of Saints to parts unknown, knowing merely that the destination was west of the continent, and likely an island. Erik Silas wondered if he remained undetected by those whom he had infiltrated.

  His eyes shifted to a brighter focus, zooming out of the glistening planet shrinking beneath his gaze, to the soft silhouette of his own reflection in the polished synthetic of the plane’s window, appearing to the untrained eye to be no different than actual glass. Rather, the material capturing his reflection presently was a relic of late 21 century Middle-Eastern science (the Middle East had been the only place left at that point where any sort of scientific minds still existed). The visual distortion in his reflection itself was the only way possible to detect the difference between this biodegradable synthetic and actual glass. The compound, once called naenotic, was also used in the manufacture of highly dangerous explosives, which was why he knew so much about it.