He begs for the gaping maw of this gray-matter sky to expand and coat even the voided region of his vision with an acrylic layer of apocalyptic haze, shimmering thanks to the lure of oblivion summoned from a weekend technomancer’s simple prayer, whispered for the sake of conjuring a terraforming storm of sufficient size and strength to activate the force majeure clause of his ironclad keynote speaker’s contract, ignited by a thousand general admission attendees as they sign and seal his social media sermon with their digital sigils of participatory agreement, one thousand bloodless thumbs extended towards the obfuscated horizon line in response to a basic reactionary desire—typed and delivered in a post-midnight moment of viral power after losing track of the teenage eyeliner advertisement with a 3D-printed press pass in her possession— which reads:
She lurks on the fringes of this moaning murmur of hyper-fixated activity, “the highest concentration of autism in the world” according to one of her secondary sources, information bought with a handful of low-dose stimulants and the broken promise of a rimjob from that sniveling worm employed by BoingCoin as an electric wheelchair valet, a necessary position after crowdfunded intravenous injections of high fructose soy syrup burst the colostomy bags of retail investors all across OurMap, condemning the moonborne class to lives of limited lateral movement and enormous size, somehow a net benefit to both environmental pollution—credited to a new species of micro-plastic devouring microbes excreted from their clogged pores—and the hotblooded cult of consumerist prophets, appreciation due where it’s deserved to a gotta have-it-right-now-or-else urge for simple products such as pillows, coffee mugs, decorative quilts, and patchwork flair stitched on standard-issue slacks, collectively branded with the pithy slogan:
He listens to an early afternoon panel discussion featuring half a dozen dimestore web3 developers opining at length about their latest greatest decentralized disruptor, hosting duties assigned arbitrarily to a tokenized sexy savant hiding towards the far right of the seated mouthbreathers, gasping for air through the ol’ lecture-shaped hole not because of extended meatspace experience diving in the realm of Poseidon with scuba paraphernalia strapped to their faces like the ImpregNation of alien invaders disguised as cloth coverings from the ideologically-scatterbrained exploitation classic The Menace of the Masked, but because they’re quite simply the biggest fucking geeks in a room full of their ilk, like-minds bonded through shared style(s) and location(s) of their learning, rendered as a holographic visual on the ceiling of the venue:
She watches a presentation given by Concrete + Glass Architectural Governance Solutions, the networked firm made wildly famous for rigging the OurMap monthly lottery in favor of their translucent interim Chief Executive Intern, sole beneficiary of the windfall from the company’s advancements in applied information technologies with the award-winning mobile application HOMOphone, a Hoboken-based horizontally-integrated social messaging service for homeless homosexuals, allowing them to find community and connect to the grid via the buying and selling of HOBOtokens, virtual stores-of-value that retain their worth over time thanks to A) a limited supply floating in the ether, and B) exorbitant money laundering schemes sent through the slush funds of entrepreneurial extropic pioneers convinced that the final frontier is not space —as imagined by the ancient architects of 20th century science fiction—but the untapped marketing potential found on the not-yet-screen-printed backs of meta-modern street urchins, alienated by the OurMap economy’s rapid industrialization and even-more-rapid digitization; at the end of the sea of C.G.A.G.S. speeches she swore were selling swords for shell corporations, she gags when she sees the seers in Audience C:
He—being the author of a peer-reviewed research paper on the mass delusion of effective multitasking yet a total hypocrite in his personal life—fingers the plexiplastic barrel of his twenty-round homemade piece as the whispered sociopolitical leanings of an astroturfed pipe dream of Utopia circle the pit of despair tucked within his inner ear. He prepared haphazardly for his forthcoming keynote address, notes and doodles and other vague signifiers of an intelligent internal life scribbled on both the insides of napkins in red and the fertile flesh of his triceps in black, markings that grow more prophetic in nature each time he glances down and reads this mark-of-the-beast writing scrawled on his skin in its fresh context, emotionally divorced from the moment of conception by a vaguely fuzzy brain-fog aesthetic creeping across his amygdala the longer he spends in the rarified chemical air of this hype-fest circlejerk of an IRL meetup. His turn to speak arrives, an opportunity to disseminate a fashionable worldview plagued by the force of one thousand prepubescent cats gripping his tongue, coherent words replaced by a garbled delivery of inhuman screeching as the crowd hangs on every distinct noise in the attempt to decipher an assumed signal hiding behind the chaos, the tension of the three-day affair bubbling over with the swift draw of his illicit sidearm, barrel pointed directly at his own temple, an attempt at provocation and the allure of artistic immortality after he pulls the trigger immediately dashed by the widespread mimicry of those watching as the collective spawning of new-age death cult followers follow suit suitably, their source of inspiration appearing as:
She writes a hallucinatory account of the weekend’s events, ostensibly identifying the contributing factors and emergent factions—two in particular, the aforementioned army of autists defending their digitized feudal landscape from a dissident branch of social media influencers wielding weaponized memetics like Bionic Brando’s brandished blade in the deleted scenes from his audio broadcasting origin story The Podfather Part II, triggering a brutal bro-v-sis conflict in one highly specific theater of battle: the fiftieth patch to the fiftieth iteration of the original Roman LARP of a real-time strategy game Civilization, a cultural artifact replacing cigarettes as the unit of cool cachet at parties, kids hustling each other on porches and stoops with the request to “bum a Civ“—this locale serving as safe middle ground for virtual bloodshed between the respective camps of quirked-up gamers and glitched-out e-girls in what OurMap’s daily paper is calling Civ-ILL War 2.0 as a form of Overton-based charity for a disconnected readership, her obtuse-at-half-the-length ten-thousand word piece ensuring relevance through snitched-up SEO namedrops of the handful of Contras in attendance, plus pseudo-legitimizing backlinks to established outlets as some breached newborn’s idea of supporting evidence, in the process coining the sticky term “going schizopostal” to describe what happens when an otherwise high functioning representative of higher education blows his brains across the floor after succumbing to the digital ramblings of the Substack-o-sphere and this unmissable discount at the local branch of the ink and needle conglomerate TaT-2-Bux:
— Ryan Lambert is a writer, filmmaker, and propagandist (for-hire). Find more at https://idioteque.substack.com.
APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL 