“REGISTRAR RECORDS INDICATE THAT SOME ANALOG SIGNALS OF THE CENTRAL LAYER (COSMOS) MAY PERSIST WITHOUT DISSIPATING INTO THE UNOBSERVABLE (OUTER). INSTEAD, THESE ‘ECHOED’ SIGNALS ARE REFLECTED BACK INTO THE CENTRAL LAYER AND, ESPECIALLY RARELY, INTO THE PSYCHES OF HUMANS.
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GHOSTS ARE SIGNALS. SPIRITS ARE IN THE WIRES.”
EROT OUTER LAYER MANIFEST VOLUME 1
Burning metal. Hot, coiling scent dancing up nostrils and assaulting the nervous system with fumes of iron and blood.
Albino children, veins pulsating in their heads. Coil burning, fire. Trees. A great tree. Empty tree - branches up and out further.
Reaching out, grabbing. Choking leaves. No leaves, empty branches. Empty sky. Black sky, black stars with negative light. Burning. Burning out, blinking out. Silence. The sky.
Toothless smiles. A thud. The sky opens up and swallows all of it. The tree, the children. All those little black stars exploding out into light absorbed from a lightless void like deep sea creatures. Light from a young universe, light from the first sun and the primordial mathematics that formed the first and last gods released in an explosion that then coagulated to form an image. An image created by the end of the universe, the stars sacrificed themselves to show him these things.
Their blood painted the image of two men, one standing barely five feet high with a death grip on his handcannon. Another lying flat, his head bleeding and leaving a trail that fell downward into the void through the floor. The small man climbs into a vehicle, a large truck with tracked treads and spacious windows that surround the cockpit from front to back. A vehicle designed to withstand this space, grinds it into the faintest resemblance of reality by utilizing the coil that now lies burning, flanked by naked albino children with no teeth.
They dance to the radio as the coil disseminates into the black sky in tufts of soul destroying death. Painful is their lust. The cherubs cackle and howl to Le Goumme on the radio. Then, with no sound or sight, they vanish. The coil, too. But the men remain.
"Love like mountains, love lives in Avalon."
The bleeding man stops breathing, and his body begins to move forward in fourth dimensional space. He becomes a hundred years old, a hundred and ten, two hundred. He is not but bones. Two hundred and fifty, black bones. A thousand years and he's gone. The man in the vehicle remains, though older. Le Goumme sings on the radio.
"Paradise in your eyes, I fall for you and the stars fall from the sky."
The small man screams. Not in his own voice, but in pure data. Resonant signals vomiting from his psyche, raw and intangible. Shaking whatever remnants of the world he came from. It sounds like static, or what is left when words are erased from paper. The small man is gone. The vehicle idles and an ad for a drug store plays.
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In the North Vostorian tundra, buried beneath concrete rubble, tons of undetonated artillery and the winds’ recital of frozen history climbing up into the sky in a vehicle of icy vapor, is a crumbled distillery left indistinguishable in a row of shattered buildings. A broken facade of a city that remains absent from but the smallest footnotes of an imperial census sheet, a name now unassignable and uncounted. It whistles through the shattered glass windows and rattles the basement hatch sealed in ice and rust where the trajectory of the entire world was decided for it, with none but the long dead and forgotten counted among its witnesses.
There, beyond the rusted hatch and down a small staircase lies the remains of five hundred and forty six men arranged in two adjacent rows of two hundred and seventy three bunkbeds. Each of them bearing a small patch on their jumpsuit breast pocket with a number that indicated the order in which they were to die.
Their bodies, scavenged by rats, many of whom would later join them in skeletal stillness across the basement floor, still bear some signs of their former youth, of pride and certainty in their place in history. Others lie contorted in pain with their frozen tears permanently burned into the surfaces of their feather pillows.
One particular man, fallen from his bunk, lies curled on the floor with his hands wrapped around his body as if seeking warmth. His jumpsuit is punctured with an array of crude holes dug by rats, who too were seeking a warmth that would not come. the remaining flesh on his face is frozen in a final contortion of utter pain.
Forty years ago, he stood in the windowless attic of the same distillery. Not in a jumpsuit, but in the garbs of a Salomean minister. His gold rimmed robe drawing a trail along the dust as he paced from wall to wall.
“Clerics will be busy maintaining the anti-artillery field and our entry point will be unguarded.” He turned to face Saratov Burkhard, who was wiping green absinthe from his mustache.
“The JVH9 bombs will be dropped in 2 hours, and our window will be brief. If our fortitude testing was accurate we should crossover at the appointed time.”
Saratov’s empty eyes looked to the minister, his gaze sending him into the familiar trance of vulnerability and fear that the prophet seemed to instill into anyone who met his unseeing eyes. It was almost as if what Saratov lacked in physical vision made way for a deeper kind of perception, the kind that could undress your soul. Absolute inhuman authority.
“The parasites are sending warning to their flock. I can hear it.” Saratov ran his fingers across the deep fabric of the prayer rug. “But there is no time for intervention, our liberation efforts draw to their inevitable conclusion.”
The prophet slid a small film photograph across the floor with a heavy scrape. A murder of crows taking flight in a grassy field, blurred in frantic motion.
“Humanity will be set free into a future of endless possibility.”
The minister paused for a moment to examine the strange photo before dropping it with a gasp. In the moment it took him to pick up the photograph and blink, the crows had vanished.
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