QUORUM

Another grudging awakening-- another jaunt back to square one. No guarantee of relief in sight; just the cunning impalement of a javelin along the radial nerve, the weight having settled in the vicinity of the right middle thorax; the shaft of the weapon made of some jungle wood that oozes numb.

This was to be some kind of driver; some inspiration toward constructive action, yet even I have grown tired of its hackneyed vignettes. It is shameful to write anything at all. There is no space the awareness might find to rest upon in the first place, amid the vomiting catastrophe of human society. I can't even whimper without adding to the collective, idiot babble.

To act, then-- to commit the act of speech must be a crime. Perhaps it is like the Catholic notion of masturbation, of nocturnal emission-- the pollution of oneself. We just love the sounds of our own voices so much, we tell ourselves we-- us human beings-- represent some grand achievement wherein the cosmos may understand itself through the evolution of consciousness.

What a record-breaking crock of shit.

In fourteen billion years, we are what the universe managed to fart into being, because it needed content. Creators, makers, designers-- nevermind the greatest minds of the ages past-- this, right here is how we go out.

And we are going out. Like a switch being shut off. There is an actual singularity approaching-- a threshold beyond which we may not look-- and it isn't the fun one full of benevolent AI and wealth-distributing, ubiquitous nanoassemblers. No one in the White Wild West is even beginning to imagine what true scarcity will look like. We'll have plenty of guns, but no one to kill with them. And then we will turn them on ourselves.

You're gonna die. Probably before that happens, Mom and Dad will die, and you will watch it happen to them. Maybe it will give you some idea what is coming-- sort of prepare you for it.

But it will hurt you, and you will cry.

If I started crying now, I would never be able to stop.