hex_m_hell

During the transfer of power from a legitimate to illegitimate rule, the illegitimate power must maintain an illusion. It must maintain a belief in the persistence of legitimacy, running through the transfer and to the new regime. If this illusion is broken, the people become aware that their power has been usurped, a pretender has taken power, and the new authority lacks the legitimacy to rule.

To justify the illegal federalization of the national guard, Donald Trump cited 10 U.S. Code § 252:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

In doing so, he highlighted a contradiction within his justification. The specific justification was that the protests “make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States.”

After years of voicing support and meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian agents hack the Democratic Party and spend two years manipulating social media. After directly coordinating with Trump and his collaborators, the Russian government again hacks the Democratic party and escalates their social media manipulation campaign. When Trump is elected, he appoints Russian government assets to government offices. Before even taking the oath of office, Donald Trump begins violating the Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

The power of the federal government to enforce the law had been under attack for years. President Nixon was impeached for his attempt to subvert the electoral process, but the actions he took to forward his party's objectives were never reversed. President Reagan illegally bribed Iran with weapons to sabotage the hostage negotiations then under way with president Carter, in another clear case of illegal election tampering. Yet his presidency was never challenged, nor were any of his actions or appointments challenged or reversed. Post concession recounts showed clearly that President George W. Bush lost in 2000 to Al Gore, despite Gore's concession.

Russia understood how to exploit this power to take over the American government. While the federal government struggled to enforce constitutional protections before 2016, Trump's appointment of 3 Supreme Court Justices ultimately destroyed all ability to enforce any constitutional limitations on presidential power.

Given that the power of all officials in United States is explicitly limited by the law and no people are excluded from said legal constraint, one element of the legal definition of insurrection is the inability to enforce laws, the Constitution and all laws restricting presidential power has not been possible to enforce since Trump took office in 2016, Therefore Donald Trump is leading an insurrection on behalf of the government of Russia, has levyed war against the United States, on behalf of the Vladiamir Putin, the government of Russia successfully overthrow the US government in 2016 using Donald Trump as a proxy, There is currently no legal president. Given that Trump appointed officials to illegally maintain his power Trump selected collaborators to forward his illegal agenda Trump acted at the direction of Vladamir Putin as an agent of the Russian Government, Therefore all appointees and collaborators are equally participants in a successful foreign war against the US government. Given That a war need not be declared to be enacted, to overthrow a government on behalf of a foreign power is always, necessarily, an act of war by that foreign power, Therefore the Russian election interference that allowed Donald Trump to take power was necessarily an act of war against the American People.

Be it resolved that Donald Trump is not the legal president of the United States, and never has been legally the president, the last legal president of the United States was Barak Obama, Donald Trump is a traitor who levied war against the American People on behalf of Russia, Donald Trump must be tried for treason, all appointments made by Donald Trump since his election are necessarily null and void, all laws ratified by Trump are null and void, all land and property sold will be repossessed by the Federal Government as stolen property all land that cannot be repossessed or for which repossession is not pursued by the US government will return to the domain of it's previous authority, all executive orders enacted by Trump are null and void, all appointees and collaborators who interfered with the dutiful enforcement of constitutional restrictions of presidential power must also be tried for treason, a new president must be identified following the 25th Amendment process of succession. Any president who takes office must first execute these resolutions. If the president does not follow the above resolutions for any reason, succession will pass to the next in line who does.

Be it resolved that additional steps must be taken to address the vulnerabilities exploited by the Russian government. These steps are abolish the electoral college and elect presidents directly by vote count remove all judges appointed by Donald Trump remove all other Trump political appointees replace the Senate, as a body that represents each state with two members, with a legislative body that represents the nation by party-based proportional representation, all government elections, at all levels, for which a only a single candidate can be chosen must then use ranked choice voting, universal suffrage for all residents over the age of 18, regardless criminal or legal status, the constitutional definition of treason will be amended to include voter suppression and those who have been convicted of voter suppression will be classified as insurrections for the purpose of holding office, corporations will explicitly be not be recognized as people with constitutional protections

States that pass these resolutions will hold the Federal Government responsible for enacting it within 90 days of passage within the state, or, the Federal Government failing to do so, will secede from the conquered union and form amongst themselves a new union carrying on from the fallen state with vulnerabilities addressed.

I put the notebook down on my desk and let out a long sigh. The look I gave her only lasted a few moments but felt as though it drew on for days, “I think you mean 'Whereas' rather than 'Given That,' just stylistically I mean.”

“You know that's not what we're asking for.”

Straight to the point, always the spitfire.

“Sure. Yeah…. you could go farther. Why don't you nationalize the military industrial complex, make college free, abolish all debt, and summarily execute Thiel and Yarvin while you're at it?”

Her eyes cauterized as they cut.

“OK,” I replied carefully, with another long sigh, “I don't even want to be holding it right now. Do you have any idea how dangerous something like this is? I don't even know how much of this is legal right now.”

She flashed a wide joker's smile, “Shouldn't you?”

We always had good rapport, perhaps that's why she trusted me with this.

“High school teachers aren't known for their law degrees.”

“It doesn't matter. What's legal and what's not doesn't even matter anymore. Anything he doesn't like is illegal. Anything that brings him more power is. The whole system simply serves power now, and that's why this is so important right now.”

I crossed my arms, “I said this about W. It's different now, but in quantity not quality… You were in elementary school when he first took office…“

I nodded at the menacing portrait of Our Leader glaring down at us. I could feel the grey hairs sprout as I trailed off. Every year under him had felt like 10, and I was already old enough without the help.

She got up and leaned across the table, “A constitution is a contract between the people and their government. It grants the government the monopoly on violence and the license to define and enforce those laws using said violence. However, the violation of that contract without mitigation or redress nullifies it. Without this authority, the perpetrators of violence are little more than petty tyrants. The violation of this contract authorizes the people to redress their own grievances against those who illegitimately wield authority in the their name.”

Two other students were in the room. One sat leisurely at his desk, the other curled up in the window sill. The one in the window sill wore a studded leather jacket a size too big. The leather squeaked a bit against the window as they leaned forward, “You almost sound like one of those slavers who wrote the original.”

“Dee,” I remarked as I held up my hand and they smiled a bit, “let's stay focused, please.”

“This,” I continued hesitantly, “can't be a citizens initiative. This lays out the legal basis for a civil war. Do you have any idea how dangerous this is right now?”

“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to keep going like this?” She stared with amber pools of rage, “We should actually be able to vote on this. When I finally get to vote, I know for a fact that it won't mean anything. At least you got to choose between two puppets, we don't even get that. He's looting everything he can and leaving corporations to steal our futures.

“You act like there isn't already a civil war going on right now,” she raged on, “You act like there hasn't been a civil war since before he even took office.”

“If anyone found out you wrote this, you could be arrested. Your family could be arrested.”

She smiled a bit, “'For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.'”

“You could be sent to the camps.”

”'He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.' But who would he send to arrest us again?”

I sighed deeply and sat back in my chair.

She pointed out the window at a group of troops outside, “'He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.'”

I tapped a pencil on the desk and thought for a moment. Her curls bounced as she sat back down. After a long pause, I spoke again, ““Even if I wanted to, I couldn't submit this. I couldn't ask for signatures. Someone would probably kill me before I was even able to collect enough signatures if I tried. It will be censored by the algorithm. We would all be arrested immediately. What do you expect me to do with this?”

“I don't care if we're arrested. We're going to die anyway. It's probably already too late for most of us. 'It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees'”

I hadn't noticed the Che Guevara shirt she had been wearing, nor did I realize those were back in style. She wore the uniform of a young radical. I wonder if she will also look back at that shirt and cringe. Then it struck me, I wonder if there will be a world for her to look back from.

The studs tapped against the window a bit as the student in the window sill shifted again and spoke up, “Enlightenment thinkers dogged censorship by presenting their ideas as stories and dialogs. You can never really tell what side someone is taking in fiction. The 'savage critic' was one of the most popular literary modes of the period.”

I looked over to the window, “You've been reading Graber again, haven't you?”

They smiled a bit and and settled back in.

“What are you even doing with something like this? Aren't you an anarchist Dee?”

“Yeah, aren't you Mr. Brand?”

I leaned forward a bit, “Don't say that too loud. I could loose my job. I've never talked about that for a reason.”

“You do on your Mastodon,” they replied slily.

“How do you know about my Mastodon?”

“Dee is a furry,” the curly haired girl piped up again.

“Ez,” I snapped at her, “not everyone on Mastodon is a f-”

“Mr. Brand, that's not important right now” Dee cut me off. I hadn't noticed the Kitsune Luigi shirt under the leather jacket until now. Cleaver. “I know you're a bit of a writer yourself Mr. Brand. I suppose that's expected for an English teacher.”

I sat back again as they continued, “We won't survive if this keeps going. We're cut off. The crops are rotting in the fields with no one to harvest. If we don't starve, you know we'll all die in the camps. It has to break. It has to stop. These changes will destroy both parties. We have an opportunity to not only survive, but come out the other side better.

“During the first Civil War, progressive states were able to pass a lot of legislation after the Rebel states left. This government can only collapse. If a few states pull out, it may be enough to topple everything. When the rest of the country joins the New Union, we could have jumped decades forward.

“To be honest Mr. Brand, I don't know how much time I have. You know people like me are pretty high on their list. This doesn't fix everything, not even close. But I think it gives us a fighting chance. They're not going to exterminate us all if they can't even keep the country together.”

The boy sitting leisurely at his desk adjusted his sweater and sat up. “I just want to know my parents will be safe. I want to know I'll be safe.”

Ezra leaned back in her chair again, “Honestly, I just want a chance at a future. The current road leads to death and I'll do anything to get off it. Will you help us Mr. Brand?”

I sat for several minutes and thought about the question before answering quietly, “Yeah…. I'll do my best.”

“Notice the sensations in your body. Do any of them have an emotional charge?”

I went to a meditation group this evening that focused on emotion. It was a group for men, put together by a men's group focused on dismantling patriarchy. Suppressing and disconnecting from emotions is deeply connected to oppression. The emotional burden of oppressing others is easier to bear when you feel nothing, as is the shame and anger of being oppressed.

Feeling people don't make decisions to ruin people's lives, poison the land, steal the future from their own children. Feeling people can't tolerate others doing the same. Numbness is the bedrock of authoritarianism.

“Put your hand where you feel the sensation.”

It's hard for me to notice emotions most of the time.

My dad was happy or angry, sometimes disappointed, or asleep. I saw him cry once, when his dad died. I love my dad, but there's also a distance. I don't really see him or talk to him much. I didn't talk to him for like 5 years.

I recently watched a video that resonated with me pretty intensely. My mom completely failed to prepare me for life, but my dad pushed me hard to be independent. I respect and appreciate him for it, even when I have some issues with it.

It took a while to find it, but eventually I did.

Anxiety.

I touch a scar on the left side of my belly. There was a tube there draining some fluid or other. It was the second one they pulled out, some days after the one in my right lung.

There's not really a way to describe that feeling. The tube was up against my intestines. It slid against them and hit them as it came out. There was a bit of pain, like the lingering ache after being hit in the stomach, but perhaps a bit less. The real feeling was anxiety… overwhelming anxiety.

Somewhere, somehow, deep in our animal brain, the feeling of even the slightest intestinal trauma is intimately connected with death. Any human, or almost any animal, who felt something like I had felt, any longer than, say, 100 years ago, would have died a slow and excruciatingly painful death. Somehow, even knowing consciously that I am safe, my body knows and can't help but bring this to my consciousness.

In the book “To The American Indian: Reminisces of a Yurok Woman,” there were a few passages about Yurok beliefs (as she held them) on death. The part that's stuck with me is roughly this. When a person dies, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they're not good people, the dogs will eat them and if they're good people the dogs will let them past. But sometimes, the soul runs instead. If it escapes, the person can come back to life. But even though they escape, for the rest of their life they will be pursued by dogs. Eventually the dogs will catch and kill them.

It's a pretty spot on description of the experience of PTSD.

Trauma tunes people to spot threats, to see danger. Under normal conditions, they see danger where there isn't any. But under extreme conditions, we see danger that other people are too complacent to see.

“Give the feeling space. Ask it what it needs.”

I'm afraid. I'm afraid and sad. My youngest is 6 now. She's growing up so fast, and I push her hard to grow up faster. I feel like I'm missing out on her being young, like I”m trying to race through it, and I know it's vanishing quickly. I feel guilt for pushing so hard.

A staple in my intestines came out. Before I came out of the bathroom, I hit the emergency button. I walked a couple of steps and then crumbled to the floor. I lay on the floor unable to move, trying to yell with all my might but barely making any sound. No one came as I struggled to whisper “help.” When they finally came, they picked me up off the floor and rushed me to emergency surgery.

The blood they put in me was cold. My arm was freezing as they put bag after bag of blood in to my body, and I bled it out almost as fast. When I was first shot, I didn't think I would die. I thought it was possible, I prepared myself for it, but I knew there was a good chance I would make it. I knew that if I did die there, I would be proud of it. It would be a good death. I could die peacefully, if I needed to, but I was going to fight because people needed me. When I was bleeding out in the emergency room, I knew I was going to die and I was terrified. It was a completely different experience.

I was shitting gallons of blood. I thought of the Don Hertzfeldt “My spoon is too big” animation. I thought of the part where the character says “my anus is bleeding” as the room fills with blood. It was slightly funny, but mostly an unimaginably horrible way to die. And I was sure I was going to die.

The anxiety never went away.

I push my oldest hard to be I can't know how long I can be there for her. They saved my life, but it's not that simple. The x-rays, the surgeries, the things they put in my body, all of it shortens my life. I won't live as long as my dad, and I don't even have a guess how long he'll live.

My dad was abandoned as a baby. He was left at a bakery where my paternal grandmother worked. A lot of their kids were adopted.

My dad went through some pretty crazy things. I can count the number of times I've almost died, a couple before getting shot and few in the hospital. He served in Vietnam, but even before that his mother was schizophrenic and deeply religious. There were a few stories of her trying to kill him because she thought he was possessed or something. She also saved his life once, or so the story is told, when she killed a rattlesnake, cut off it's head, and threw it in a creek. (Apparently the loggers in the camp wouldn't go near the creek anymore because they were afraid of the snake head or some such superstition.)

I realized later that it's not just that I don't know how long I'll have with her. I see how things are. I know there could come a time when she has to leave me behind, when she has to save herself. I will keep getting older. I don't want her to get stuck trying to save me and miss an opportunity to save herself.

My dad couldn't leave the US. The Empire broke him to prevent the threat of a good example. Now he survives off the crumbs they let fall to vets like him. As they dismantle everything, how long will that last? The US will be a death sentence for a lot of people.

Sadness. Grief, loss, sadness.

There will come a time when I'm too old to move, to leave, to support myself, to save myself, as the polycrisis continues to evolve. I want my oldest, no matter how much she loves me, to be able to leave me behind. I want her to be able leave me behind because I love her. I want her to be able to leave me behind like I left my dad.

As my daughter takes pictures of the mosaics in Park Güell, studying them and saying how beautiful they are, I wonder if this place will be something that influences her. At 6, she loves to draw and do basic paper crafts. Her mother went to art school, I went a different route but I loved art as a kid. I was originally studying English before I decided to switch to computer science. She has roots in a few worlds that intertwine beautifully. So much potential, if we can keep up with it. If...

I think of the career aptitude test I took in highschool when they told me I should be a sniper, I think of the military recruiters constantly in the halls handing out pamphlets, of the impossibly of imagining going to college. Then I think of the joy I find in math... A joy that I didn't discover until years after I left school. I wonder at the years I've worked in my ducttape job in the security industry, an industry that is a monument to the wastefulness of capitalism, an industry that rightfully shouldn't exist.

What would the world be like if Kalashnikov lived in a time when he could have worked on farm equipment? Could he have revolutionized agriculture instead of combat? There is a world in which Nazis never existed, and farmers swear by the indestructible Kalashnikov tractor. It's impossible to calculate the loss of technology and culture that war and authoritarianism continues to impose on us all.

The Stephen Jay Gould quote is evergreen: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”.

Looking out over Barcelona, at Sagrada Familia from Park Güell, there are so many beautiful things humans have created with only the smallest portion of the population free to create them. Meanwhile, the majority of our abilities are wasted to make sure that pool of people stays small... And even those few privileged people spend most of their time and effort figuring out how to stay on top. It's as though the myth that humans only use 1% of our brains were true, but at the global, not individual, level.

How much more could we have if we stopped wasting so much on maintaining involuntary hierarchy? How many generations of children will we betray to keep it?

I love the joy she finds in her art, her pictures. I hope she learns to find the joy of math that I only found so much later. I hope her love of nature lets her make beautiful things for humans. I hope she inherits a world that's free because it's cruel to leave it to her to fight for it.

I spent years alone, hour after hour, a latchkey kid from second grade. Reagan took my mother away. I was just another of so many at that time, families squeezed dry and ground raw to feed the unsatiable hunger of Mammon. It's no wonder my generation basically invented school shootings. But the hunger has only grown... When will we let our children grow?

I am beyond tired, and I feel as though I have yet to even begin.

“If you breathe in, your lung will collapse.”

The bullet went through my diaphragm. During my first surgery, a tube had been put into my right lung to support me through the initial healing process. The diaphragm heals quickly, or at least mine did, and I was strong enough now to breathe on my own. It took me a minute to process the words. They had me on a heroic dose of everything they could find to kill the pain.

I asked the nurse (doctor? whomever..) to wait a second so I could take a couple of breaths, in order to prepare myself. So many parts of the story are a blur now. I remember I was sitting up. Was I in a chair? I was out of critical care again? This was the first of several tubes that would be removed from my body, adding fluids, draining fluids, keeping me alive.

This nurse had told me I needed to breathe out all the way, he would pull the tube out quickly and put a bandage (really, just a sticker) over my wound. The wound would close in a couple of days and the bandage could come off. My lungs would be back to normal, but one mistake could leave me suffocating and rushing back to the ER again. I took several trips to the ER during that month I spent in the hospital after the shooting.

I took a few deep breaths, said I was ready, and breathed out all the way.

There was a brief moment in my life where I learned to breathe.

Some time in 2015 or so, I cried. I let myself be vulnerable. The survival skills I had developed to deal with neglect and abuse served me well in the security industry but meditation and a few years of therapy made my personal life sustainable.

For a while I was able to experience a full range of emotions. I developed, or perhaps discovered, a deep compassion and patience. I was no longer quite so chaotic and self-destructive. I was, for a moment, the person I wanted to be.

When I heard Trump speak, I knew he was going to win the nomination. I knew because I recognized him. He is every crooked rural sheriff, every good ol' boy mayor that rural America is used to.

I spent a lot of time in Trump country. I bought the leather jacket I wore to that protest from a guy at school. After I got shot, I told him the jacket was full of my blood and in police custody (they never gave it back). He told me it was fake news. I deleted my Facebook account shortly after that.

I can't overstate how detrimental those places were to my mental health, how many horrifying things I saw, how many horrible things I heard. There's nothing I've seen as destructive as generational hopelessness. People talked about that town as a vortex, a black hole from which almost no one escapes.

Trump brought everything back. I had escaped that hell, and he represented turning all of the US into the thing that had almost killed me… and his stochastic terrorism did almost kill me.

I took a deep breath, and I organized like my life depended on it. I got shot. I gave interviews. Protests, street medic trainings, hand-to-hand self defense, armed self-defense, food security and gardening, we organized everything as fast as possible. The trial happened. We had our first child. It was all a blur. We moved out of Seattle. I slowed down, and took a few breaths.

There was a moment where we thought we could stop. We could settle in and work on the long term project of making sure this would never happen again. Then the pandemic happened, the George Floyd uprising, the murder of Michael Reinoehl, the DHS kidnapings in Portland. J6 was shocking but not surprising. I wondered when the RWDS would start murdering us like they had been promising to.

We dreaded the election. I put my fist through a window. I took a mental health leave, then we realized we didn't have to be in the US anymore. We could be free. I didn't breathe again until we were renting an apartment in the Netherlands. Now it's my family and friends I'm holding my breath for.

I can't focus. I don't sleep. I can't think of words. I forget what I am doing. My mind is full of static turned all the way up, overwhelmed with anger and despair.

How are so many Americans still going like this is normal and OK? Did everyone Heather Heyer and George Floyd? Did Everyone forget Trump telling the police to be more brutal or saying that there were “good people on both sides”?

We fought, and we won last time. Did you lose the ability to get off your knees? Did you forget how to riot? Are you ready to apologize to Willem van Spronsen and Aaron Bushnell? When will you no longer be complicit in genocide? When are you going to take action against the forces of evil? The only appropriate response to systematic horror is unquenchable rage.

I've been out of the office for a few months now, unable to work. Folks have been checking in, but I can't really explain it. I just don't have the capacity. It turns out unquenchable rage isn't well suited to an office environment and office politics. It's not conducive to long hours of sitting, careful analysis, and thoughtful critique.

I can't be polite about what's happening. There are people who are following in the footsteps of the greatest villains in history… but doing so with their eyes completely open. I feel the weight of a terrible machine crushing me, crushing everything good and hopeful in this world, and I am not allowed to scream. When will my friends be murdered? When will my family be murdered? When they finally murder me like they promised? Technology leaders stand next to the stochastic terrorist responsible for the attempt on my life, the doxxing that followed, the threats, the reign of terror. Now go read a 70 pages RFCs and write up your comments.

Once you understand a bit of what I've been through over the last 8 years, you can probably understand why I'm not able to work right now.

What I don't understand is, given what's happening right now… how can you?

So here I sit, an ocean away, holding my breath and wondering when this fucker is getting pulled out already.

It had taken decades to recover enough to even understand what they were looking at, reading bit by bit with an electron microscope. It took years to decode the bits once they had them. There had been theories about the meaning of the plates ever since their discovery. Finally, professor Zadrand had an answer.

“It’s hard to believe that such an advanced civilization existed, millions of years ago, on this very planet.

“The mathematics behind these programs are astounding. By interacting with this layered statistical model, we will be able to learn a lot about their history and their civilization. Even what we were able to recover so far will launch our science and mathematics decades in to the future.”

The interviewer shifted, “Does it tell us anything about what killed them off or about our own story?”

“It does,” continued professor Zadrand, “and it also explains the global radiation layer we call the HT boundary. As we’ve hypothesized, their extinction made room for our own evolution in to the dominant species on this planet.

“What we don’t understand is why. The dominant hypothesis had been that the event was triggered by some sort of resource conflict. But this new evidence contradicts that,” the professor’s antenna twitched and carapace shuttered a bit, “Apparently they put this very statistical model in control of unimaginably powerful weapons. The result was surprisingly… predictable.

“The most surprising thing is that so many of them knew what would happen and did nothing to stop it.”

Watersmith collection The ARC letters Item 17

The Murder Worm was not even named until long after containment ceased to be possible. In the preceding years, the concept of a type of malware that could cross the hardware/wetware boundary had occasionally been theorized among researchers. However, the idea had been non-existent in popular discourse. Even now, the infection denies it’s hosts the ability to recognize it’s existence.

Cybernetic technology, especially neural implants, was still relatively new. The promise of allowing people to directly share their ideas, thoughts, and dreams with each other seemed like it would unleash a utopia. It’s hard to remember that hope now, in the midst of our apocalypse. Perhaps if we could have interpreted history, we would have avoided this. Perhaps it was always unavoidable for us. Perhaps you can avoid making the same mistakes by recognizing the problem earlier.

While the Murder Worm has evolved an emergent intelligence, it is unclear if it was crafted by a conscious being or if evolved from a memetic prion. We had once believed that emergent intelligence could only arise from a complete connectome, but we have since discovered that human consciousness is structured as a fractal: memetic graph segments, sections of a connectome, have their own intelligence and the interaction of these segments manifests what we call consciousness. An individual identity rarely, if ever, consistent. Memetic graph segments often conflict. These conflicts can be mediated in different ways by the default mode network to create the illusion of a consistent identity.

Within a healthy memetic biome, memetic graph segments compete with and mutate each other regularly. An overly dominant default mode network, attempting to enforce a false consistency, can sometimes reduce memetic interactions within an individual. This forced consistency can lead to memetic prions: memetic graph segments that mutate or kill other memes that they interact with. Memes mutated by memetic prions become prions themselves, existing to replicate the prion rather than themselves.

Prions can only mutate memetic graphs that are similar enough to themselves. When these prions occured in individuals, before direct neural connection, they would mutate the individual’s connectome rapidly. Mutant graphs would diverge so far from the social connectome that the prion could not replicate. The individual would experience psychological collapse. Some could be treated with memetic detangling therapy, while others could never recover. But direct neural connection has allowed memetic prions to spread more rapidly than anyone ever imagined. We just didn’t understand the danger.

We lacked a comprehensive model for memetic prion evolution. We didn’t even have the term “memtic prion.” We knew that some graphs could be dangerous, so the CyCon corporation included signature based memetic graph filters to neutralize these elements. But, of course, these signatures couldn’t keep up with the rapid evolution of the memetic environment. New prions developed faster than signatures could be maintained.

Within individuals, reduced memetic diversity increases the risk of prion evolution. The same is true, we have now discovered, for social memetic biomes. Memetic inbreeding maximizes the risk of prions, and rapidly adapts them to cross graph boundaries… and we created the perfect environment for this. CyCon’s FriendLynk matched similar memetic graphs, creating incestuous pools that bread memetic prions at an alarming rate. The Murder Worm appears to be the synthesis of multiple prions, mutating each other into a prion complex that exhibits it’s behavior as a syncretic death cult.

As described earlier, under normal conditions a prion infected individual would either self-isolate or be isolated as a result of their infection. Isolation reduces, or eliminates, the risk of contagion. However, repeated exposure to prions eventually leads to infection in over 80% of cases. Social conditions, such as individual isolation or reduced social mobility, can also decrease prion resistance.

Today we know that it is hypothetically possible to contain and destroy the infection. By isolating infected notes from the network, we can stop or slow the spread of the infection. We could then inoculate the uninfected section of the network. Once inoculation reaches heard immunity, we can slowly reconnect infected individuals to the network and flood them with a memetic phage to unfold the prion. Infected network segments must be destroyed. Those who are beyond treatment will, unfortunately, experience psychological collapse and need to be isolated or taken to offline treatment programs.

We know how to treat it. Our initial trials even worked. Unfortunately CyCon administrative network has been overrun by the Murder Worm and the network itself has been turned in to a tool to spread the infection. With the defunding of the Cybernetic Epidemiology Center, we will no longer be able to continue our research or propose treatments. Many of us have begun to move outside the cities to form containment colonies. Untreated, memetic prions always destroy the host. We hope that collapse will come soon.

Our hope is that we will survive the ravages of the Murder Worm and rebuilt human society from whatever ruins remain. CyCon has already destroyed much of the research related to this topic and evidence of our existence. We have replicated this message to all ARC colonies.

I hope that you are reading this from the future. If you are, be hopeful. If we survive this then we can survive anything.

Professor J. Stakhorn, Rogue Scientist, Former Head of the Cybernetic Epidemiology Center ARC-14, location undisclosed EOF

The behemoth were not always so large and unwieldy as they are now. The first behemoth ever captured could hardly pull a dry sled with two dozen stones, stood shoulder to shoulder with a man, and could only walk a bit faster than a person could run.

Early behemoth were captured from the wild and highly prized. Early tamers mastered their beasts skillfully. Though their animals were still unpredictable, tamers were cautious. Even still, people were wary of the creatures. They watched from a distance, in both discomfort and awe.

One of the most skilled tamers captured an especially beautiful behemoth and gifted it to the king on the anniversary of his coronation. The king’s behemoth rider was always trained by the riders guild, but not all riders remained so skilled.

As the behemoth became a signal of power and prestige, tamers began to sell captured behemoth to nobles who would ride them carelessly. Behemoth are omnivores. When not well controlled they are prone to charge and attack.

There was much outrage after a young child was eaten by a behemoth while she danced near the street. The lord paid the family’s debts, and no more was said of it but whispers. Many such events happened in the kingdom.

The peasants would wonder, “why must we now fear our own roads? Why can the lords not ride the slender weilu that does not hunger for our flesh?”

But the nobles did not feel their pain and mocked them for letting their foolish children be eaten by monsters. Even still, the nobels felt the need to address the mumbling for fear it might escalate. So they seized common roads for their beasts and blamed peasants who were trampled or eaten by them.

The riders guild eventually learned the secret to breeding the behemoth in captivity. By giving some commoners low breeds, the people began to accept and even like the beasts. The highest breeds were always kept for the nobles, and the commoners learned to admire their ornate features.

Commoners learned that they were safer on the monsters than near them, so behemoth began to fill all the available space. People would ride their beasts to a neighboring house for fear of being killed while walking.

One, seeing how common it is, may believe that the king had proclaimed that all must ride the behemoth. But after so many years, the kingdom has simply been built around them. No law enforces their use, but no force can protect those who choose not to ride them. All who could, did.

None ride the graceful weilu, for behemoth have a taste for it as well.

Yet, even the riders of the beasts are not safe. Behemoth are prone to quarrel. As their numbers grew, battles became more common. Breeders began to focus on increasing size so the behemoth could wear armor. Now the behemoth are so large they can consume a child in a single bite without a rider even taking notice.

Yet, this has not made riders any more safe. Quite the opposite.

Today every behemoth is armored and carries a grand litter to protect the occupants, but this only makes them harder to control and the inbreeding only makes them more clumsy, anxious, and violent.

Many times a day now one may hear outside, near any behemoth path, the terrible screeching of their taunts and the loud thud of their strikes. These battles often kill both behemoth and rider. In their confusion will sometimes charge at building, crushing themselves under the collapsing walls and killing those inside.

The behemoth are strange creatures. As I said earlier, they were omnivores. While they hunger for flesh, especially humans, they also needed to eat several pounds of a specific fruit every day.

Even the smell of the olapi was wretched such that none would imagine it could be eaten by any other living thing. The fruit contains the very essence of death. It was the key to taming the behemoth, for without this fruit they would lie down and refuse to work. When fed the fruit regularly, they can be promoted to any work.

In the wild, the olapi tree was quite rare. It only grew in old graveyards, battle fields, and other ancient places of death. In it’s natural habitat, it did not spoil the land around it, at least not much. But when grown away from these places of death, it is want to turn fertile land to stone.

Fields once reserved for food have been cleared to make way for olapi trees, such is the demand, and farms have been pushed further and further out of the towns and cities.

The spring rains can be quite intense in parts of the kingdom. In the old days, channels would divert excess water to the fields. The fields would store the water though the dry sunmers. But now many of these fields have become stone, so water has no where to go. Many villages have started to flood in the spring and winter.

But this is not the only problem with the behemoth and their fruit. The flatulence of the behemoth is legendary. The people of the land seem to have grown accustomed to it, but outsiders are surprised and repulsed by the stink. The noxious fumes can become quite dense at times, especially on hot summer days when many behemoth gather in one place.

Recently a cloud of behemoth fumes became so dense, on one late summer afternoon, that ignited into a raging firestorm. One of the richest villages in the land was razed to the ground, and the stampede of burning behemoths trampled everything else that remained. Though they destroy the jewel city of the land, few questioned their dedication to the behemoth.

But there is one even more sinister detail that I have not yet described. The olapi tree hungers for death to feast upon. The behemoths concentrate that hunger as they eat the fruit, and they leave behind a strange and Infectious madness in their dung.

Rain washes the madness out to the fields. It soaks in to the soil and infects the crops. It washes out to the rivers and poisons the fish. All the people eat has become infected, and by eating they become infected. The Land of the Behemoth has become overtaken by a terrible hunger. All they harvest brings death to the land.

So many admire the Land of the Behemoth from a distance, but so few know the truth.

And now we have learned thet the king has fertilized the Royal garden with the dung of his prized behemoth. His temper has grown wild and madness spills from his lips. He threatens his neighbors and orders his nobles to eat the dung directly.

How long can a kingdom survive in such madness? How long can a people live who spoil their own crops, burn their own houses, and feed their own children to monsters?

I left this kingdom to its madness, and it has troubled me to have seen behemoth in my new home.

Now that you know the truth, will you still praise the Land of the Behemoth, nation of pestilence, eaters of dung, kingdom of fools? Will you let your fool’s knowledge of this land lead us all to the same fate, or may we learn from their folly and free ourselves from the burden of this beast?

When it finally took her, no one was really surprised anymore. The mutation, the disease, the cancer, the infection, the curse, had become so obvious she could no longer deny it. Her battle had been quite visible and her loss undeniable. Now, it was in control.

Was this predestined, written into her fate at birth? Was it a result of her ravenous addictions? Perhaps both. Were they ever really different?

Some grow out of the selfishness of youth. They learn from their mistakes and try to correct them. Others, in their shame, learn to hide their flaws, to manipulate those who see, to silence those who speak.

One who lives a life of deception only fools themselves in the end.

Oh, how she had been admired. Even in her darkest days, she was a beacon of hope. So many had come to her for help, and now they had begun to fear the monstrosity she had become and ran from her. Perhaps, it would be more apt to say that they feared the monotonousness nature that she could no longer hide.

Oh, how she had been celebrated. She was one of the heroes who had slain such beasts as this before. They had cast her as Beowulf defeating Grendel, but she always knew, on some level, that she was Grendel’s Mother. She was the source of the infection, and now we all know.

How many of her children did she think she could she eat before she felt Saturn’s indigestion?

There were those who had pointed it out. There were those who had yelled, cried, screamed at the top of their lungs. But how could she ever do wrong? Even if these claims were true, what could anyone do? Were her allies, perhaps in some ways, also her hostages?

Now had she become the puppet, or had she always been controlled by some invisible hand?

She could feel death’s gaze, cold and yawning, the abyss that stare. She wanted to turned and run, but it drove her body forward, the worm, the cordycep, the nameless. Was there ever a time she could have freed herself from it?

Was there ever a way things could have been different?

She had protected it, this horror growing inside her, as if it was her own child. Perhaps the unspeakable truth is that, in some ways, it was. Had there ever been a time when she wasn’t infected? Was it in the blood she was born from?

Was she, like an aphid, born pregnant with this beast? Had it crawled up from the graves at her feet, those that she had dug in her youth, to haunt her in to her own? Or had it driven her to fill those graves in the first place? Perhaps it was an ancient curse, inflicted through her ancestors at their first taste of human blood. Was this the simple conclusion of some sort of original sin, an affliction carried by all of her kind?

Could this curse ever have been lifted, or was it a horcrux, a phylactery, a vital organ, perhaps even the true essence of her being?

The others could see the light drop from her eyes. All the humanity that was left in her screamed one last time before it was silenced.

“What,” they all wondered, “would become of her now?”

Wouldn’t we all like to know?

• for America

Some say that if you pile enough gold together, a dragon will smell it and come. Others say that dragons spawn naturally any time enough gold is together in one place. No one knew for sure.

In this mountain, long ago, a wicked king hoarded the gold he stole from his subjects. His advisors warned him of the consequences, but he was unable to listen.

Every day he became more and more afraid that someone would steal his gold. He couldn’t part with even one single coin. First he had his guards count each coin nightly. Later he had other guards guard them while they counted. Finally he couldn’t trust anyone else anymore, and he decided to start sleeping in the cave with the gold and count it every night.

One morning he didn’t come back to the castle. Guards were dispatched. When they returned, the guards reported that the king must have been consumed by the dragon as he slept. They found only the charred remains of the previous guards before they had to run for their lives from the dragon.

The kingdom had sent it’s best knights to fight the dragon, but none ever returned. Year after year the dragon demanded the king’s tribute and more. The kingdom sent for knights from other realms, promising the dragon’s hoard to any who could defeat this terror.

Though no one had ever conquered a dragon, one knight had fought many battles with great beasts and won. His bravery was only matched by his hunger for glory and riches. He would fight any battle to satisfy is craving, and there was no greater wealth than in this cave.

He had been observing the beast for some months, watching its habits, tracking its movements. He knew its patterns. But still, no one had ever defeated a dragon before, and never had anyone faced such a fearsome beast alone.

He collected it’s scales to build armor and a shield. He had his blade blessed and tipped with the most powerful poison of the most powerful wizard in the realm. After months of watching, he chose the night of the yearly tribute to attack.

He hid among the gold, in one of the chests. The dragon sniffed each one as the workers wheeled the cart in, but the dragon didn’t notice. The knight had worn gold and even eaten some to cover his scent. Perhaps the dragon had grown careless in its greed.

That night, when the dragon rested, the knight crept out. He moved silently. He had wrapped the dragon scales of his armor in soft leather to deaden the sounded as they moved against each other. He crept closer and readied his blade.

The dragon shifted, and awoke with a start. It sniffed the air, locked its eyes on the knight and out a blast of flame. The knight leapt forward into it.

The smell of burning flesh hung in the air. The knight stood again, sword plunged deep in the dragon’s chest. He took off his smoldering armor then collapsed from exhaustion, knowing himself to be the first dragon slayer.

He awoke the next morning as dawn’s light glinted off his glorious new treasure. The hoard seemed so much smaller than he remembered from the night before. He couldn’t find the body of the dragon anywhere, but instead only a frail doll that looked just like a tiny man, impaled on a tiny sword… A sword that looked so much like a miniature of the huge blade he had crafted to slay the great beast.

A new smell filled his nostrils. He had never tried to imagine what gold would smell like, but now the scent filled his being. He felt as though his hunger had awaked something inside him that had consumed him whole.

As I write this, in 3 weeks it will have been four years since an intoxicated Trump supporter shot me. After my third surgery, my surgeon told me how close the bullet had been to the artery that runs in to my heart.

“Most people shot there just bleed out on the spot. The blood just dumps out like rushing water. There's nothing anyone can do.”

His ability to repair a tattoo was top notch. His human skills were perhaps not quite as adept at times. This seems to be how surgeons are, in my experience, but I still enjoyed chatting with him.

This injury was not unfamiliar to me. In general, my dad didn't really tell stories about Vietnam. So on the rare occasions he did, I listened. He only told this story once, but I paid close attention.

No one expected the Tet Offensive, since Tet is Vietnamese New Year. An offensive in asymmetric warfare isn't always what one would think of as a military action. Though most of the offensive involved soldiers fighting each other, other things happened as well.

American soldiers were having dinner in the mess hall when the bomb went off. Apparently putting a landmine under a stack of plates in a mess hall wasn't an uncommon way to carry out such an attack. Aside from the shrapnel from the mine, the plates shattered and plate fragments became projectiles.

There was a tiny hole in the man's chest. My dad never talked about the blood, just that the hole was tiny and that there was no time. This man died in my dad's arms in minutes. There was no time to operate, no time to act. My dad, who was a medic, was completely powerless in the situation. There was just a tiny hole, the sound of rushing water, and then a dead man in his arms.

I saw my dad cry once, at my grand father's funeral. The war took away pieces of him one by one. He tore a ligament in his knee chasing a fellow soldier who'd just snapped and run off in to the jungle. There were no other medics in his unit, so he stayed until he could be relieved. By that time there was nothing anyone could do for his knee. After decades of pain, he's now in a wheel chair.

Growing up I remember how often he had knee or back pain. This body was permanently scarred by the war. I knew that story. When he told the story about the mess hall, I started to understand the other scars.

Now I have my own.

[Added 2025.04.10]

I couldn't convey the emotion. I still can't. There are simply cold facts. I stare off, after reading this, to some distant place with a gaze that lacks focus. I can feel it. It's the same stare, same cold recounting of facts, I recognize in the memory of my dad telling me about the Tet offensive.

He couldn't have seen this coming. I expected to leave his trauma in the past, not to see it revisited on us for another generation. I look at my daughter, who's six now, playing happily in the water.

There's a strange continuity to history, one that doesn't come through the stories of wars told from the perspective of nobles and presidents.

She asked me once, “papa, when will I get my scars like you?”