Johannes Flink REFLECTIVE ACCOUNT OF WHAT HAPPEND...

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From an unpublished novel:

Johannes Flink
REFLECTIVE ACCOUNT OF WHAT HAPPENED ON EARTH BETWEEN 2117 AND 2223

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At 4, the samples had been analyzed and we could see a film shot later by a robot hover. Watching the film on a giant screen, we received the data from the loud speaker system. The streets were ruled by birds, dogs and rats. Insect life was normal. Surprisingly, no animals, not even larvae, were feeding on the dead bodies. In the air, nothing strange except for an exceptional amount of zinc and sulfur. In the sample tests, an almost total absence of human DNA. Since the principles of the panoptikon were completely beyond our imagination, the theory that aliens were responsible for the attack was not even mentioned. It was concluded that all this had happened as a biological accident caused by human science. It was this announcement that really killed our motivation. No enemy. And those responsible for the immense “accident” were probably dead already. Our hearts sank at that moment beneath all that had been good and forceful in us. Suddenly disconnected from our entire history, both on the collective and individual planes, we were supposed to build some kind of new society amidst all this death and in some pointless geography. But could we even want to do this? And who, in fact, were “we”?

To get a grip on our situation, we posed this latter question to the computer system. It answered us in that same evening, making an official statement called “the survivor report”. That report stated that there were no obvious criteria for survival in terms of age, sex or race. The ratio of children, adults and aged people, of men and women, of white and other races, corresponded fairly to Paris before the disaster. The only exception to this was that there were no survivors under seven years of age. This latter fact had the computer system immediately scanning the Paris survivors for the occurrence of the Zurne strong nervous complex in the lower branch of the 34th gene-couple, which was forbidden to procreate since 2110. The result was clear enough to solve the whole “mystery”: the surviving part of the population was the little minority that, in spite of the three-decade efforts of capitalist science to abolish it, still had the Zurne complex. So what the Argenta had been speaking about with such trembling voices of expectation was in fact not just humanity as a whole, but most of all “us”, the nervous ones, the desolate shards of humanity of which the majority was now, this the report also stated, shaking in our little cells, unable to participate in any reconstructive action.

Zurne people were precisely the humans least capable of dealing with a situation like the one we were in. Since we had this “gene-defect”, we had not been allowed to participate in politics on any side. Without knowing it of course, our “kind” was already doomed to extinction. Now, many beings, in a situation like this, might cling to feelings of vengeance to help dealing with the trauma (“they were going to kill us but died themselves”). Zurne people, however, do not react like that. Locked out from vital functions that could only have been accessed through codes in the hands of people with power, everything we did from day one was a series of tragic failures. We were following an auto-pilot for the reconstitution of the old structure, but one which we were not in the position, either mentally or materially, to accomplish. Shocked, I realized that I was a member of the centre of power in the surviving community. There were only three functioning units, composed of the roughly 10 000 Paris humans that were still acting at all. Every day, we went out into ever more tired attempts at clearing the Bastille area for a re-colonization that seemed farther and farther out of reach as the days went by. Hover-load after hover-load of dead bodies lifted and dumped in the fields outside Clignancourt; streams of hot gushing water fighting an even battle with the dried, black blood. And every day, we came home to our hollow-eyed “husbands” or catatonic “wives”, like Odette, who were sitting in their beds and drumming with their fingers on the walls. After the first week, no single sexual intercourse between survivors was reported. In the safety stations, child-births generally resulted in miscarriage. We were a dying community with no direction at all. That is, until evil set in.

a) The Onset of Evil
Now, you might of course feel, like me, that we were naïve in retrospect, and that we should have immediately suspected an alien attack. But when we recall that era’s whole mentality, the biological shut-down fear and the hysterical tension between different powers, we also understand that our entire way of thinking was entangled in the hermeneutics of human conflicts and mistakes. After the “survivor reports”, there could of course be no doubt whatsoever that Earth was under an alien attack. Let us agree it says a lot about the shock of the planet, and of the survivors, that this conclusion should need a period of ten days to mature. And yet, we must remember that most of that day’s science was withdrawn precisely from us who survived, and that we didn’t even know that the Panopticon existed.

The realization of an alien enemy brought us even further down below ourselves. Defense systems such as laser or nuclear arms were out of our reach. Contacts between safety stations were slow and sporadic. The whole non-capitalist world had fallen into complete anarchy, while we in the powers tried, with ever decreasing motivation, to move back into the safety zones of our abandoned cities. That’s “probably” where we would have been “safest”. But probability and safety didn’t mean anything to us anymore. Connecting now the aliens with omnipotence and with black, dead eyes, we were now in the grip of a fear more terrible than anything we could have imagined. Death itself was not the focus of our fear anymore. It was suggested by the few real scientists among us, that we should use the shut-down system to commit collective suicide before “they” arrived. And as the general emotions were right then, this decision would probably have been taken, if only the shut-down system had been accessible to us. Attempts at access were continuously performed, but failing.

For two weeks, those of us who were able to do anything were using machines to get dead bodies into hovers. Then the whole development suddenly took a new turn. As announcements had it, some American scientist had been enough influential before the attack to know some things about the shut-down system. One of them was that the shut-down system was itself dependent upon reactivation once every year. The next was that such a reactivation was set to the 4th of August 2117, which meant that, unless we got access to the code system, we were all going to die that day. And we couldn’t get access to it. Even if we had had the science, the code-locks themselves had time-locks whose sum far exceeded the 40 days we had to go. The week that followed this announcement was the most disillusioned in the entire history of mankind. Unable to move, barely breathing, we all just lay in our beds and waited. The loss of our old lives and our loved ones, all the blood and the terror on the streets, the coming shut down or torture by evil aliens - it had all gone so fast. Our thoughts whirled and whirled, producing nothing but passivity, confusion and pain.

I don’t remember how the strange new sensation first entered into that dreadful situation. It is not known to anybody, and unrevealed to me by the Argenta, how in the last month before their arrival, mankind came under the grip of a bizarre kind of evil. It started as a rumor in the east, and found its way into the hearts of ten-thousands of the survivors. I know that the ugliness of this will bring you shame, and it is only the strict orders that can make me continue this narration. It was believed, as you will now become able to recall, that by sucking the black, dead eyes, we could save our biological clocks. What a cruel salvation! And in the beginning, most of us surely preferred death. I was one of the 100 first Parisians ordered to go into the city and test the black liquid. More than sixty refused, were sentenced by a brief court marshal for high-treason, and executed. In the end, 38 people went.

We landed again near the Bastille. It was a sunny day. The trees on the boulevard shone in sparkling green. The birds were singing. We marched to a side street that had not been cleared and took our safety-dresses off. The smell had changed. It was less terrible, or terrible with tints of something attractive. It was deep and rich, and harmonized strangely with the Paris summer. A teenage girl lay dead on the side-walk. She was dark-haired and slender. Her red short summer dress revealed her long, sun-tanned legs. Was it for aesthetical reasons that we made this choice? Was there a sexual component already in the eye-licking itself, that was preparing the way for our new abuse? We do not know. But remember with me now the first licking, and let the shame mingle with the remembrance of the pure taste of nothingness. We lay her on the back on the ground. The open, black eyes reflected the street like a dark mirror. Sometimes, the sun danced around in them. I was the first to bow down and lick. All memories of horror disappeared. Force like never before. Motivation like never before. Dark shades of joy spreading out over the world, rapidly, triumphantly. It was clear to me then, that death did not really exist. If we just kept in contact with it, the warm nothingness in the centre of everything would protect us from harm, and even from fear. Strengthened, but with damaged minds, we returned to our safety stations.

Unfortunately, strange drives were awakening in us. Nothing mattered anymore, except multiplying the pleasure of the black drug. And the black drug, along with its complex kind of kick, demanded death. Immediately after the first black trip, we finally arrived at the conclusion that we were not ruled anymore. Already in the hover back, twenty of us formed an inner circle of command. We opened the computer program and started building up, on principles of sexual attraction, a black liquid community. The chosen members of this community were then forced, under laser gun threat, to come with us and taste the new drug. After a week, the community consisted of about 35 000 people. The rest were kept in their state, the tired ones that we now planned to kill in the way so dear to the black liquid addict: first stabbing out their eyes, then hang them.

The whole Bastille area was transformed into a festival of death. The most beautiful 9/12 victims were picked out, undressed, and then placed sitting in rows against the walls of the Rue Laforgue. Their bodies were intact and pale like marble statues. Their eyes were free for us at all times. The religion inherent in the black drug was working with high speed and told us exactly what to do. Remember now with me the black flags that we raised over the scene, the military drums with their steadfast rhythm, the rows of tired, pale humans with snares around their necks and the insane, black liquid sex. The thing was to lick and lick the black eyes until the power really began to flow. The next step was to feel the sexual energy rising to the rhythm of the drums, whose sounds became increasingly filled with pleasure. When blood and ultimate tension was pounding in our sexual organs, intercourse started everywhere. The sex was wonderful. The buzz seemed to begin at the centre of the Earth and then to come in dark waves up through the bright summer. But most wonderful of all was to, in the moment of coming, press a remote control and let a dozen people hang. To see our victims hang there with their bloody cheeks and to kiss our partners with the tremor from the drug orgasm – this was life to us then. Dead, open black eyes; dead, closed red eyes; living eyes blinking and radiating an incomprehensibly powerful shine – the triangle was perfect and soothing. In the two weeks that this this religion reigned on Earth, at least twenty million humans met their death.

I have to stay at this subject for another paragraph because of orders. Don’t scan these memories too briefly as they rise up. The Argenta wants you to really go back to those scenes and re-experience them vividly. Close your eyes. Be there, in your death cult cities and with the beautiful bodies around you. Remember the three kinds of eyes: how you licked the first kind, stabbed the second kind and went into ultimate union with the third. Remember how all the strong bodies became appetizing to you, how they asked you through the warm air to make use of them. Remember that girl in front of you, how her body seemed to become the warm centre of the universe, and how you entered her from behind with a feeling of twisted bliss. Remember that man with his erection, how you sucked him with your mouth hot from the black licking, and how his eyes met yours when he released his power into you. And remember the hundreds you killed, how afraid they looked and how tender they seemed in their frailty.

See it both ways and pray to the mystery. First, pray to the powerful, throbbing pleasure, that lifts the soul to isomorphism with the panoptikon: “I am a living being – I seek pleasure – I let it flow when I feel it”. Then pray against the ugliness, whose karma might bury you on the inside of a black hole: “I was a human being - I was an evil murderer - until the Argenta came”.

Illustration: Johannes Flink.

Copyright ©Johannes Flink 2008.