Gender Drama at the Goth Club – By Rachel Haywire

Ionna texts me and says that she’s just fired her 3rd assistant. Her special needs kid has been having some problems lately, and she says that this has been triggering her PTSD. “I feel like jumping off a bridge,” she tells me. She asks me to come over and help her take care of her special needs kid. She requires assistance feeding him from a tube that her past 3 assistants have been fired for not understanding how to use properly. You don’t just take the tube and shove it. I figure I’ll be nice because we have mutuals but that’s always where things go wrong because I know way too many people.

There are Crowley books on Ionna’s shelves, decadent artwork that I might want to display at a loft event if I can rub off the dust from their frames, and the distinct feeling that something is deeply and morbidly off. Yet, who cares about feelings? It’s Friday night in San Francisco, and the Cat Club is hosting Industrial Reunion Night. I want to get my stomp on. This is our night. This is our night! I tell Ionna to hire a new assistant and that we’re going dancing together. “We’re hardcore goth bitches. Old school freaks, baby.” She asks me to help her choose an outfit like a jilted princess who has been reprimanded for being too attractive. I find the hottest corset in her closet and pull it out like the host of an obscure variety show. “This one. Definitely this one.”

“I look disgusting in this!” she screams to me like a porcelain vampire doll. I loudly tell her to focus on getting to the club with me, and she scolds me for upsetting her special needs kid with my loud voice. Whatever. I’m there for Ionna as she screams at me for being too loud because I know what it feels like to be abandoned by 3 assistants for being a high-maintenance scene queen. This is just me being cool and empathetic here. She puts on another outfit, and it’s a Satanic cheerleader thing. A crop top that says 666 on it. Ionna is 43 years old and eventually going to look mid, but she’s never had much competition in the goth scene. With her traditionally feminine features, it’s too bad her mind is so deformed.

Ionna doesn’t just have PTSD. She’s a PTSD therapist with a license to practice EMDR. Her PTSD is far better described as aggressive BPD. The body keeps the scene dramatic. We drive out to the club, and she puts on some horrible drum and bass track that was made by an audio preset on sedatives. She calls it industrial in a bizarre attempt to make me feel at ease. Who am I to correct her before Industrial Reunion Night? I’m not a scenester purist anymore because I’ve become a mature professional who works at the intersection of art and technology, see. Ionna is free to call her horrible music, whatever she wants. “I want to jump off a bridge,” she tells me again. She checks her makeup in the rearview window.

We arrive at the club. Ionna sees her friends outside and begins gossiping with them about her other friends. She pretends like she doesn’t know me, and I’m not even offended because she’s completely deranged, and the DJ is inside spinning Nitzer Ebb. I’m loving the energy. The sheer masculinity of it all gets me thumping hard. I’m stomping alone to the beats yet in perfect sync with everyone on the dance floor, including a girl who looks exactly like Tank Girl but even more industrial. Is she a fan of my music that barely anyone listens to anymore? The atmosphere is perfect, and the girl is a post-apocalyptic pinup fantasy from my hottest of nightmares.

Ionna finds me on the dance floor and acts like nothing weird has happened between us. Perhaps it wasn’t personal and she just really missed her gossip friends when she pretended not to know me a few minutes ago. I’m wearing a black cyber dress with white suspenders and metallic leggings under my giant New Rock boots. I do not look like I belong with this Satanic cheerleader. I try to keep dancing with Industrial Tank Girl, who is now being pulled away by her hideous-looking programmer boyfriend. Suddenly, all I have in my view is Ionna in her 666 uniform. It’s the ultimate horror shot. Yet I dance hard, and I dance fast. I kick, and I stomp, and I twist, and I punch. I’m here for the music.

“This music is too aggressive,” Ionna says to me over the cold hard beats. “I want to hear Miss Kitten.” She stops dancing and pouts a bit with her body against the DJ booth. I’m back alone on the floor, so maybe I can find Industrial Tank Girl and get her gross programmer boyfriend to go away for a while. Yet suddenly, Ionna begins shaking her booty to Lords of Acid, which is by far the worst music I’ve heard all night. Perhaps we can bond through the stupid and repetitive sex lyrics? Sit on your face. I wanna sit on your face. Sit on your face. I wanna sit on your face. She’s doing a “cleansing ritual” type thing with some divine feminine energy that is making me feel transexual. I continue to stomp and kick as I feel the force that I need to unleash. Ionna looks at me in disgust as if I’ve just violated her safe space. My dancing, at the goth club, is too masculine for her.

Industrial is the most masculine genre of goth, and I’ve been unleashing my masculine energy too hard for Ionna the entire time we’ve been at the club. There’s a subcultural divide. There’s a gender divide. There’s gender drama at the goth club. Ionna never cared about Industrial Reunion Night. She just wanted to see her gossip friends at the Cat Club and happened to be involved in the goth scene as a model. My empathy for her was a mere facet of my own narcissistic displacement. I’ve been entertaining her psychosis the entire night because we once modelled in a post-apocalyptic fashion show together in Oakland. This is how we have mutuals, and this is why I must suffer.

Ionna starts complaining to me about how the DJ won’t take her requests to play Miss Kitten. She used to date the DJ, but he abandoned her because he couldn’t handle her special needs kid. Allegedly. I go back to the main dancefloor to enjoy the music because nobody can take that from me. As the night starts coming to a close, I look around the club for about a half hour to find Ionna, who is, of course, my ride out. I eventually realize that she’s completely gone from the club. I go outside to see if I can find her there. She’s literally in the driver’s seat of her car in front of the Cat Club, waiting to pass traffic with her gossip friend in the passenger’s seat. It suddenly hits me. I’ve been ditched by Ionna.

“My son is having an emergency,” she yells to me from the front seat of her car. Maybe she’s bringing her gossip friend home with her to become her new feeding tube assistant. Maybe this new girl can do the proper tube job. I begin remembering all the times that I’ve ever been ditched. It’s the Getting Ditched Series of My Life being played on repeat. There’s a #basicbitch trauma drama element involved. I recall an event from almost two decades ago where a group of girls ditched me at some hipster shindig because I wasn’t “chill enough.”

I remain outside the club to figure out how I’m doing to get home, and a bunch of people come up to me and ask me if I’m Experiment Haywire. They tell me they’re huge fans of my music, which makes me feel a lot better about being ditched because, apparently, people do still listen to my music. I realize this whole night will become another piece of nostalgic scenester history. It’s the nostalgia of the present. These people are telling me how much they loved my last album and how they still have my first album on CD. This one guy is even quoting my own lyrics to me. I think I actually start to cry in #healingmode.

I manage to get home by luck of the draw, and Ionna texts me a few hours later. “I got really freaked out by all that masculine energy.“ I tell her that ditching me will never be acceptable and that her actions reminded me of every time I’d ever been ditched. I let her know exactly how she made me feel, in case she has any empathy in her pocket as a trauma therapist, though by now, I know she’s Goth Interrupted. Is she going to perform EMDR on me for her own behaviour? This PTSD therapist with BPD needs some real help. She’ll never be able to find the proper assistants for her special needs kid because her own needs are just too damn special.

I’m ready to grow a penis and oppress Ionna, yet I can’t go borderline on the borderline. I have to stay calm and refuse to become the oppressor who thinks she’s the oppressed. I can’t become the new Ionna, and none of that Patty Hearst starting her own gang stuff either. It’s too fringe. It’s too obscuritan. I’m too fringe and obscuritan. I question if Ionna has read any of her Crowley books or if she’s stolen them from her DJ ex. I no longer believe that she fired her 3 assistants. At this point, it’s clear to me that they quit.

Yet even here, I need to be the industrial musician, casting myself as the sexy villain enacting some twisted social performance piece rather than taking on the role of the twirly gothic feminine victim cosplayer. I have to view Ionna as a frail and fragile insect begging for her last bit of attention as she eventually realizes that being attractive for the goth scene isn’t going to get people to tolerate her after a certain point. Her time is running out, such a poor unfortunate soul. I decide that I’ve been ditched in a perfectly ironic way that’s reserved for these degenerate types of subcultures.

Our mutuals think we’re both a part of the same scene. I hope that they’re wrong, but I know that I’m guilty. I wonder if they know how bad she is, and they’re using her because she’s thin and knows how to walk a catwalk, a rare thing for any woman in San Francisco. Going to Industrial Reunion Night at the Cat Club was just too toxic for precious Ionna. My dancing was too aggressive, and she couldn’t handle my masculine energy. By now, it’s 4 AM, and I’m back at my apartment building. I blast my favourite songs into my earbuds while kicking and punching into the sky on the rooftop. It feels like I’m still at the club, only this time I’m alone. Everything is toxic, masculine, and beautiful.

Mental Health Awareness Week

It’s mental health awareness week, again. I have mental health issues and I find that, when I talk about them, even if it doesn’t necessarily help me, it does help other people out there facing the same issues. I hope it also helps foster understanding, and I also hope it helps underline the problems with mental health provision in this country (the UK), and how the systems that are in place can fail men.

I know that latter part is controversial and opens me up to criticism from those who dismiss all men’s issues as misogynistic or solely the concern of ‘incels’. Nonetheless it is true that men’s mental health – in particular – is in crisis, with men continuing to commit suicide at a high rate, to be exploited by gurus like Tate, and also lashing out and causing problems in the world around them.

I hope I’ve found a healthier way to exist and endure, and I hope my experiences and openness helps someone.

I HAVE

I have clinical depression and while I was first diagnosed in 2007 it seems likely I had depressive issues going back much earlier, with a couple of bouts triggered by life events (such as relationship break-ups) previously requiring medication in the short term. This depression, however, is not connected to any particular event, it happens for no reason on an irregular but recurrent basis.

I also have anxiety, particularly around social contact and especially when dealing with ‘authority’ figures such as utilities, banks, government offices – even something so simple as paying for things at the till in a shop.

I have, previously, been on antipsychotics for a time, to address intrusive thoughts related to my depression, suicidal ideation and self-harm. I was not psychotic or skitzophrenic, but those urges and ‘voices’ were so loud as to require supplementary medication.

I now also have certain physical issues as well, related to ruinously high blood pressure, but everything is somewhat interrelated.

WHAT IT’S LIKE

Depression is hard to describe and hard to get people to understand. It also manifests differently for different people.

For me it typically manifests as unshakable exhaustion and a total collapse of motivation. It is far more than just being ‘sad’, it carries the same weight as grief, but it doesn’t fade over time with acceptance the way grief does. Grief is a useful comparison because it is a crushing sadness you can’t really do anything about, what is lost is lost and nothing you can do will make a difference to that.

Depression can also carry physical symptoms with it, leaden limbs, physical aches in the muscles and joints. It can hit you like the flu, minus the mucous and fever.

Anxiety, for me, manifests as a fight or flight response – panic – to situations and issues that shouldn’t provide such a panic. It makes me avoidant of social situations where there’s any capacity to avoid socialising. While it’s primarily social anxiety, I also get helplessly panicked about travelling, driving and many other situations.

My heart hammers, I tremble, my legs get weak, my hands shake, I feel faint and I want to run away and hide. Again, this is a completely disproportionate response to normal events, but it’s something I have no real control over, and struggling on through is tiring in the extreme.

‘Masking’ is something a lot of people with mental health issues do, this is basically put, pretending to be OK. It takes a huge amount of effort, and can get us past the issue in the moment, but comes with a ‘hangover’ of even worse tiredness, or even worse symptoms, when you can finally relax. Sometimes you can even get ‘stuck’ masking, unable to express the emotions and distress that you really need to.

Masking can also make people think you’re fine, you get very adept at lying, when you’re not, and can contribute to suspicion and prejudice against people with mental health issues (and other invisible illnesses) even more than acting distressed in public.

THERAPY & DRUGS

I’ve been through the UK’s mental health system and I do not believe that it is fit for purpose. It’s easy enough to get onto drugs to flatten out and reduce the impact of your issues, but general practitioners are normally not especially skilled when it comes to mental health issues and provided you are ‘coping’ (on the drugs) there isn’t a great deal of interest or urgency in further helping you.

If you become suicidal, as I have been in the past, then something more might get unlocked for you. You may be permitted to access the Community Mental Health Team, where you might get to see a therapist every week or other week, and after several months you might get a short appointment with a proper psychologist.

Unfortunately the only care that seems to be available is talk therapy and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. A one-size-fits-all approach to a collection of very different illnesses that require more individuated care.

The problem with this approach is that the National Health Service runs on a triage system – and quite understandably. Mental health issues are long term, costly to deal with, and do not really have any sort of ‘cure’, making the cost/benefit analysis brutally slanted against investing more in it.

This is where the gendered issue also comes in. This emphasis on CBT and talk therapy better suits women than men. The short appointments harm men, who need longer to ‘open up’ and address their problems. These forms of therapy are known to be less effective for men, but they’re all that’s available unless you can find a self-funding group or can afford private care.

If it wasn’t helping me, why would I keep going, using up a slot in a stretched service that could be helping someone else?

The drugs have their own side effects and issues. They can make you extremely sleepy and ‘zombified’, they can cause nightmares and night terrors, can make you feel worse in the short term – which is less helpful in emergency situations. Some antidepressants can flatten your emotions so much that you can no longer cry, even when you might need to or it might be appropriate, or can become a bit of a ‘robot’. Some can affect your libido, either making you unbearably horny all the time, or unbearably sexless, uninterested, anhedonic and even unable to orgasm or even get aroused.

Yes, being unbearably horny all the time is just as bad, in its own way, as its opposite.

BEING PATRONISED & BEING IGNORED OR SUSPECTED

Our culture and political environment at the moment seem to embody the worst of both worlds.

On one hand you have the ‘right on’ activists and so on who will fight ‘for you’, eclipsing your actual beliefs and needs with the ones they project upon you. They will uselessly fight for ‘representation’ you don’t give a toss about, while being absent when you want to campaign for public understanding or more money for mental health services. These same people who claim to care so passionately about you and your problems, will ignore you and your disability if you disagree with them in the slightest.

On the other hand there are people who think mental health problems aren’t real and that you just need to change your mindset or go to the gym more. There are also those in this group who think you are faking it unless you’re missing a leg, or if you can mask well. Those who want to take away the scant provisions and benefits you do get because they believe you to be ‘scrounging’.

Somehow we have conspired to create a sociopolitical environment that manifests the very worst aspects of both ‘left’ and right-wing attitudes when it comes to marginalised and suffering people.

HOW TO FIX IT

You can’t, really, the will to do so isn’t there and those who could advocate for change and investment are too busy insisting that documentaries about feudal Japan cast a wheelchair-bound Peruvian as the Shogun. Social change is difficult, and both political wings don’t seem interested in doing what’s needed, only superimposing their own ideologies on the issue.

If you were to try and make things better it would take money, and spending money is never popular with British governments, especially in an already cash-strapped NHS.

You would give additional training for General Practitioners.

You would increase the number of Community Mental Health Teams.

You would increase the number of psychiatrists in the NHS and available to CMHT.

You would increase the number, and variety of therapists on the NHS, or create a voucher scheme to allow those unresponsive to CBT to seek out other more effective therapies at a discounted rate.

Men’s appointments would be longer, to allow the additional time to get comfortable and to open up.

Home visits would be available for those with extreme anxiety or agoraphobia.

None of this is likely to happen, but perhaps in putting it out there it will have some effect.

Maestro – Write a Screenplay – “SAWTOOTH”

I can’t manage a whole screenplay; short stories suit me better. So I wrote a half-hour-long, severely fucked-up horror Teleplay instead.

SAWTOOTH

Cyberpunk Fashion – The Chronicles

By Rachel Haywire, Cultural Futurist

High tech. Low life. High heels. Low cut.

As with every subculture under the sun, the definition of cyberpunk constantly changes. We have our usual suspects and household names in literature and film, whether Neuromancer and Snow Crash or Blade Runner and The Matrix. Then we have newer shows like Altered Carbon and The Peripheral that have been adapted from cyberpunk literature. Yet something is clearly missing from this picture. Fashion is one of the most influential yet often overlooked aspects of cyberpunk, evident in all these projects yet rarely discussed with equal complexity. I will do my best to change that and chronicle how fashion has influenced the cyberpunk genre and made it what it is today.

Let’s do this.

Present day. The video game Cyberpunk 2077 infiltrates the minds of a new generation, drawing inspiration from the cyberpunk fashion of the 90s and early 2000s. We see Instagram influencers cosplaying characters from the game, creating a cyclical cultural exchange. It’s all so Spenglarian. Yet where did the fashion element of cyberpunk begin? Indeed it wasn’t William Gibson or Keanu Reeves who brought it to the runway. Molly Millions from Neuromancer was iconic, and maybe she inspired Trinity’s character from The Matrix, but who and what inspired Trinity’s clothing?

Alexander McQueen, one of London’s most accomplished designers, comes to mind. A predecessor to cyberpunk, he showcased models dressed up as cyborgs in his luxury couture, crafting a world where underground culture could rise above. Elaborate headpieces and makeup facilitated this experiment, creating a vivid display of human/technology on the runway. Much like Andy Warhol’s use of The Factory, McQueen transformed the runway into a vibrant canvas, weaving together diverse threads of society under a unifying tapestry. A philosopher of high fashion, he infused his creations with vitality by orchestrating his models in dramatic, epic escapades in which technology became a chic component of artistic rebellion.

Louis Vuitton was another designer who brought cyberpunk to the runway. By embedding LED lights into jackets and dresses and weaving them into the fabric of shoes and handbags, he created dynamic patterns and motifs that pulsed and changed colour, evoking the futuristic noir aesthetic of cyberpunk. He became a household name among the elite and their aspirants, putting himself through the high-tech and low-life of society to build his own empire. Becoming a fixture on Parisian runways, he branded himself ‘the enemy of couture’. It was only a short time before the brand Louis Vuitton was anywhere and everywhere. As we all know, the counter-culture is always a few dances away from the mainstream.

These designers produced a distinct mixture of art and technology that influenced future generations. Cyberpunk fashion was unique before literature, film, and video games entered the scene. The style came first, paving the way for the following cinematic, literary, and cultural innovations.

From Body Modification to Biohacking

“There were 25 Body Suspensions with hooks into the skin over a period of 13 years in Japan, USA, Germany and Australia. The body was suspended in different positions, in varying locations and diverse situations. Not all the performances were static. The body swung, spun, swayed and propelled itself. It was also moved by motors and machines. And in some of the suspensions heartbeat and muscle sounds were amplified, providing an extended acoustical aura for the stretched skin body.”

-Seaside Suspension: Event for Wind and Waves”, Jogashima, Miura 1981 

Sterlarc, an iconoclast and performance artist inspired by the eras of McQueen and Vuitton, took the fusion of technology and the human body to a bonus level. He headhunted surgeons who could turn his fantasies into a reality by implanting an ear onto his arm. His body was remotely controlled through electronic muscle stimulators connected to the internet. During his live performances, he used a robotic third arm, creating a spectacle that captivated audiences of artists, entrepreneurs, and students alike. This agitprop hybrid of human and machine demonstrated the potential of human augmentation.

In a similar universe, we had BMEzine (Body Modification Ezine), which emerged as the most popular body modification website online, reaching its peak in the mid-90s. People showcased their tattoos, piercings, transdermal implants, and scarifications to the world, promoting their skills and personas to connect with like minds. Embracing digital ownership of one’s body as the ultimate cyberpunk statement, this early online period was accompanied by sensual and taboo IRL events.

Los Angeles nightclubs hosted cyberpunk-themed parties, where groups like AMF Korsets produced shows in which models were suspended by hooks in front of live audiences to the soundtrack of industrial and dark ambient music. Magazines like Skin Too and Propaganda Magazine captured this era well, blending fetish and fashion with music and machinery. While most people think of fetish culture as a sexual thing, it also represents an aesthetic that focuses on pushing the boundaries of both the mainstream media and the human form. In the tradition of Sterlac, the late Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle took body modification to a subversive conclusion, redefining cyberpunk by making transsexuality a posthuman statement.

Victoria Modesta, a songwriter and creative director who suffered a leg injury at birth, had her leg voluntarily amputated and reinvented herself as a bionic pop artist. Now sporting a bionic leg, she has performed at festivals across the globe, melding cyberpunk and luxury fashion while presenting at tech conferences. Her appeal is both creative and intellectual, embodying the DIY spirit of biohacking.

Cybergoths and Club Kids

In the mid-2000s, cybergoths began showing up at alternative nightclubs, acting as a living subculture blend of goth, rave, and industrial. Many were models for MySpace bands (you had to be there) or SuicideGirls (think OnlyFans for goths), while others simply dressed up as themselves. Cybergoth, unlike cyberpunk, did not have an entire canon of literature. Yet it had a rich universe of music from the goth, rave, and industrial realms that continues to influence what we call cyberpunk today.

Back to the present: Cyberpunk 2077 has drawn inspiration from cybergoth models and musicians, and we now recognize ourselves in these video games after witnessing our underground statements being propelled into the mainstream. There was a time when every girl in the scene resembled Lara Croft from the video game Tomb Raider – or maybe it was Lara Croft who resembled us.

There was also Lizbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a hacker who became a fashion prototype in the infosec community or – again – the other way around. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo featured this same archetype of the Empowered Female Hacker. EFH. Angelina Jolie, who played “Acid Burn” from Hackers, inspired Lara Croft as much as our bands and fetish shoots. She had the meta-experience of playing herself in the film adaptation of the same video game. How did we get so postmodern and self-referential? 

Repo! The Genetic Opera was a musical that featured everyone from Ogre of the industrial band Skinny Puppy to Paris fucking Hilton. Repo! The Genetic Opera inspired IRL performances in front of the big screen. Focused on the quintessential cyberpunk theme of genetic modification and the dystopian fantasy of surgery-as-trend, it became the Rocky Horror of our era. The costuming showcased a blend of gothic and futuristic styles featuring dark hues, asymmetrical designs, and an array of eclectic accessories.

Then there was Cyberdog, an avant-garde fashion company founded in London’s Camden Town. Cyberdog established its own cybergoth fashion store that was popular with the digital crowd. People would dance at the UK nightclub Slimelight, dressed up like cyborgs, while sporting Cyberdog clothing that included UV-reactive fabrics, neon goggles, and circuit board-inspired designs on latex and leather garments. 

Cyberpunk fashion has been with us for a long time, yet somehow its history has been obscured by the chaotic algorithms of Hollywood. It nods as far back as the club kid parties in NYC, seen in avant-garde films like Liquid Sky and modern retellings like Party Monster. Yet before Michael Alig murdered his friend Angel against a backdrop of heroin-chic-cyborg-models and military-fetish-drag-queens, girls with early access to the online world transformed themselves into living dolls.

Lolitas and Living Dolls

Like Alice in Wonderland became the default style for young women in the mid-2000s, Lolita fashion held onto a similar theme of curiosity and innocence in the 90s. 

Inspired by musicians like Courtney Love and Fiona Apple and Japanese street-wear magazines like Fruits, a new crop of girls could suddenly be found wearing brightly coloured babydoll dresses. The fairytale-like clothing turned them into feminist characters out of Nabokov’s Lolita. Again, we’d see the ownership of one’s body as both a political and fashion statement. Armed with poetry about self-mutilation and eating disorders, the lolitas took back the night by turning themselves into living dolls. Emilie Autumn, a gothic musician, stepped in to command the night.

“I’m Gothic Lolita

And you are a criminal

I’m not even legal

I’m just a dead little girl

But ruffles and laces

And candy sweet faces

Directed your furtive hand

I perfectly understand

So it’s my fault?

No, Gothic Lolita

I am your sugar

I am your cream

I am your worst nightmare

Now scream”

-Emilie Autumn

This rise of this taboo dark woman archetype, this cybergoth lolita girl now making waves at the tech conference, is a dollification of the #bossgirl. Join us at the Sad Girls bar. These dolls have now come to life. We have transformed ourselves into avatars of IRL models, who are the predecessors to video game characters and AI avatars. At last, after all these years, we have become ourselves.

Are you there, Neo? It’s me, Capitalism.

The creator class has long expressed itself through fashion, a language of beauty and self-expression, weaving stories of war and enigma that span centuries. A mere glimpse of a skirt or a necklace can transport you to another era or alternate timeline. We tell a story about ourselves, our culture, and our inner world with each outfit we wear and each accessory we curate. Whether we are being ironic, serious, or something in between, we are setting the foundation for a sincere future.

By incorporating our perspectives and experiences into our living personas, we create a visual language that speaks to the posthuman experience. Why has cyberpunk fashion been overlooked and undervalued in the broader fashion industry? It deserves its own research and chronology. It deserves its own lexicon. It deserves a place in the history books alongside the other great fashion movements.

The history of cyberpunk fashion is vast and spectacular, and it’s surprising that I’m among the first to chronicle it in this manner. Or perhaps, by writing this article, I’m unknowingly gentrifying it, with countless others having come before me. Everyone believes they’re Neo from The Matrix, but few are willing to accept the possibility of being Mr Smith. It’s a complex web of characters where your Mr Smith may be someone else’s Neo.

Yet I digress. As we uncover the roots of cyberpunk fashion, we can inspire a new generation to push the boundaries of what it means to be posthuman. We can inspire everyone, from the kids on the streets to the executives in Hollywood, to embrace this intersection between art and technology in the most transgressive ways possible. We can shift the narrative with the drop of an acid tab. We can build the hallucinations of tomorrow as we watch our creations come to life in the theatre of existence. We can watch AI generate sci-fi novels from our all-too-human posts. We can play ourselves in our video games and/or reinvent ourselves as new characters. Choose your own adventure, user. We can shitpost. We can aesthetically engineer.

We can do literally anything. 

This is cyberpunk. This is fashion. Cyberpunk fashion is the sphere in which cyberpunk film, video games, and literature have found their inspiration. It’s the runway. It’s the cosplay. It’s everything high and low and in between. This is us. The club kids, cybergoths, and living dolls. The pin-up girls of our story have emerged from the depths of the underground to star in the most popular film adaptations of our algorithms. Our story is a tale as old as time and a song as old as God. What is fashion? Fashion is the muse of the media.

Not This Shit Again…

Rape is a heinous crime that violates an individual’s dignity, autonomy, and physical integrity. It is a traumatic experience that leaves lasting scars on the victim’s psyche and can result from distortions in the perpetrator’s psyche.

You’d think this preamble would be obvious and wouldn’t need to be stated, but these are the Stupid Ages, and we have to get by without assuming the obvious and without nuance. So it goes.

The depiction and discussion of rape within art and literature have been a subject of intense and vicious debate for a long time. The last time I even entertained discussion of this topic, I was subjected to the worst kinds of hatred and sabotage by outraged morons, which has – at this point – now lasted over a decade. While some argue that such portrayals are necessary for various reasons, or at least the possibility of such portrayals (my position) or to raise awareness, others believe it can be triggering and exploitative and should never be represented.

So why would anyone want to create such a thing in their art?

Why is a story about a football team taking a plane ride boring, but a story about their plane crashing and them having to engage in cannibalism to survive more interesting? Why do most stories include conflict, violence or other challenging themes?

Because it is interesting because it is engaging, and because it’s powerful.

Mythology is full of stories that depict rape. From the Greek god Zeus to the Norse god Loki, many powerful figures in our common mythohistory have committed sexual violence. While these stories are often disturbing, they reflect the harsh realities of the world in which they were created and can reflect similar harsh realities in our history or our fictional worlds. They also provide an opportunity to explore the psychological and emotional impact of rape on both the victim and the perpetrator.

It is worth noting that rape fantasies are common, especially among women. While this may seem counterintuitive, it indicates the complexity of human sexuality. Rape fantasies are not about rape per se; they are a way for women to explore their desires in a safe and controlled environment. This can also be a way to reclaim power and agency because of actual rape or because society can often seek to control female sexuality. In the context of storytelling, rape can be used to explore these fantasies in a paradoxically consensual and respectful way.

Art and literature have always been powerful mediums of communication and expression. They can evoke strong emotions and provoke thought. Art has been used to comment on social issues, critique societal norms, and to raise awareness about social injustices. Similarly, literature has been used to provide a window into different experiences and to explore complex themes. Why shouldn’t this include rape?

One of the benefits of depicting rape within art and literature is that it can provide a platform for survivors to tell their stories. Art and literature can provide a space for survivors to express their experiences in a way that is meaningful to them. This can be an empowering process, allowing survivors to reclaim their stories and give voice to their experiences. By doing so, they can help others who have gone through similar experiences feel less alone. Rape victims are frequently blamed and shamed. By showing rape honestly and authentically, artists and writers can help break down these stigmas and promote understanding. This can be particularly powerful in raising awareness and encouraging action.

Moreover, the depiction of rape within art and literature can serve as a tool for education. Art and literature can provide a way to educate people about the realities of rape, including its impact on victims and the societal factors that contribute to it. Through art and literature, people can learn about the issue’s complexities and be better equipped to address it. This can include understanding the various forms of rape, such as date rape, marital rape, and sexual assault, and its impact on different populations, including women, men, and children.

It is essential to consider the context and purpose of the depiction, but even if it is depicted in a way you subjectively perceive as exploitative or gratuitous, you should still respect the free expression rights of the creator and its frequent utility to victims. Nothing about any piece of art requires you to consume it.

Why should rape be treated differently from war, murder, torture or any other extreme act, conflict or situation? These are the places where stories live, where they’re more exciting and engaging and therefore ripe for the existence of art, high or low, tasteful or otherwise.

Why would an artist choose to depict a difficult subject? Why wouldn’t they?

Why wouldn’t they?

Maestro – Big Bug – Texture and Cohesion of Fictional Worlds

As part of his BBC Maestro course, Alan Moore asks us to watch a film and to examine it for its ‘texture and cohesion’, by which Alan means the cultural and other artefacts within this fictional world that help establish its existence beyond the bounds of the film, pages of the book or the bounds of the comic frame. These include newscasts on in-world television, fake shops, fake products, etc.

I chose to examine the French black-comedy film ‘Bigbug’, which seemed to have an interesting world and vision, highly stylised and visually arresting in a way only the French seem capable of.

We are almost immediately introduced to the world through TV (or projected holovision as it turns out to be). We see a show called ‘Homo Ridiculous’, where cyborgs (reminiscent of RoboCop in style) walk their human pets and engage in somewhat comedic behaviour. This excerpt is one of many, and seems to be a cruelly sadistic joke at the expense of humanity, played upon them by the ‘Yonyx’, a transhuman group who appear to be slowly taking over the world, with increasingly dystopian hints dropped through the film from Yonyx-Human bullfighting to human foie gras.

Ironically, there don’t seem to be a lot of actual animals in the show besides Toby-6, a cloned terrier belonging to a neighbour. In place of meat, people are eating bugs, and we’re presented with a commercial example of this, ‘Kreekit’, roasted crickets in a can. It’s doubtful that any successful marketing of insect protein would be done this way, but it helps world-building and presents this as perfecting normal.

We find that we are in a lovely suburban home. Despite the French setting and origin of the film, this is a retro-futuristic building in the style of the ‘Gernsback Continuum’, a 1950s American vision of the future with chrome refrigerators, finned cars, bright colours and motifs and flourishes from right out of the Jetsons. These artistic cues are combined with more contemporary ideas about the future, an ‘internet of things, screens on everything, voice-activated home-help, innovative house technology and always-connected internet.

The one preparing the crickets, and other snacks, is a gynoid. This gynoid is humanoid in shape but does things like removing her finger to power a whisk and moving at an inhumanly fast speed when grating. Her colour scheme and angular clothing suggest classic appliances such as the KitchenAid standing mixer.

In our tour of the house, courtesy of the camera, we are treated to odd juxtapositions. The house owner keeps paper books, writes by hand and has ‘antiques’ (items familiar to us from our lifespans) such as a Rubik’s Cube or a rotary telephone presented under glass. Later, we find the daughter of the house also has a bunch of antiques, old computers on shelves and cupboard spaces in her room.

Through the eyes of the gynoid, we discover that everyone else in the house is putting up a pretence and a mask; they are as false in their way as the gynoid is. We know this because she can analyse their body language, voice and other cues to provide emotional probability read-outs. This device allows subtext to become text and gives us insight into the powers and capabilities of the robots.

Even the kitchen is like one big appliance, with the various surfaces able to rotate and turn about, almost like being inside one of those mixers, a further expression of the house’s automation. It incorporates ludicrously specialised devices, such as an egg cooker that rotates eggs and slices off their tops with a laser, ready for breakfast. It needs to be clarified whether this means that this is a particularly well-off household or whether everyone lives in such luxury. Still, given the extent of the suburb and the gadgets and other devices that everyone has, this is an affluent society, if not a post-scarcity one (given the lack of normal food).

Not all of our context comes through objects, robots or television; some is dropped in through conversation. Since the people in the house all have tangled relationships, and given that one man is there attempting to seduce the woman of the house, it makes sense to have introductions in conversation, which is where we learn that the dog is cloned and that the daughter of the house is adopted from the flooding of the Netherlands.

We also pick up other details like banning cheeses (which must hit differently in France). We are constantly interrupted throughout the movie by giant floating adverts that personalise themselves to the situation and the people in the house according to what is happening. It’s an obvious satire but exaggerated to an absurd degree. We learn that cybernetic implants can be repossessed (and that the ‘bug’ also extends to these prosthetics).

People are so utterly dependent upon their machines, even the antique-obsessed woman of the house, that one woman in the film almost suffocates because her meditation app glitches and doesn’t tell her to breathe out. We all know people who cannot unplug, even for a moment. All that’s missing is the social media aspect. However, people are encouraged to make fools of themselves online (Homo Ridiculous) or to subject themselves to more advertising from their appliances in exchange for free updates.

All very climate apocalypse and ‘live in the pod and eat bugs’ a very current paranoiac trend and very much in our current zeitgeist of the future. These homes are fortresses, climate-controlled pods of armoured glass where even the scent can be tailored. We get the idea that this sort of thing is typical, and even through an advert for ‘Isola Paradiso’, we learn that there are ‘pools of distilled water’ and ‘hypoallergenic beaches’. The increasing rate of allergies has been extended into the future to an even higher degree, a symptom of an artificial lifestyle.

Through news reports, we learn that traffic jams are afflicting the air and ground area. We are also shown more sinister antics of the Yonyx and their prejudice towards humanity and learn of their fleet of robot drones that they are set to deploy. It’s never outright stated, but the impression is very much that the Yonyx are staging a full-on coup over the world and are behind the in-house imprisonments and all the chaos outside.

Ultimately, the Yonyx are undone by their hubris, and destroyed by their drones due to an error. Frankenstein was undone by his creation, but in this, it is the monster’s creation that undoes him. Besides the point, but interesting nonetheless.

The film might be limited to a single house, but through the items in the background and on display, through the news items, conversation and products (some of which are also characters), we do get a sense of the wider world, outside the lines, the very thing Moore was talking about.

Maestro – Slang

https://greensdictofslang.com/ is a fantastic resource for looking up slang, and the online version is better than the paper one with quite powerful search functions. Here’s just a sample from me looking into the slang of the Gathercole period. Just be sure to right-click and ‘open new tab’ when looking at the detailed definitions, or you’ll lose your search.

Absent-Minded Beggar: Soldier.
Absquatulate: Leave abruptly.
Acid: Sarcasm.
Ack Emma: After Midnight.
Ackers: Money.
Act the Goat: Be foolish.
Adam’s Storeroom: Lady Parts/Womb.
Adzooks!: Exclamation.
After-Clap: Sudden and unexpected blow after the danger had seemingly passed.
Air Your Heels: Loiter.
All Beer & Skittles: Hedonism and fun.
All my Eye & Betty Martin: Nonsense.
All Sir Garnet: All in order, everything as it should be.
All the World to a China Orange: A near certainty.
Ally Slope: To escape, to take off.
Anchor, Swallow the: To reluctantly change course.
Anno Domini: Old age and its effects.
Anoint: Beat/thrash.
Apartments to Let: Crazy.
Apple Dumplings: Breasts.
Argle-Bargle: Argument.
Arkansas Toothpick: A large (bowie) knife.
Artful Dodger: Lodger, or penis.
Atch: Arrest.
Atkins: Tommy Atkins/Tommy, a private, a soldier.
Auctioneer: A fist, to knock things down.
Baa-Lamb: An amicable or pleasing person, esp used by women of meek, tractable men.
Backscuttle: To leave unobtrusively (out the back).
Bad Scran: Bad luck.
Bag of Mystery: A Sausage.
Baked Wind: Nonsense, eg ‘Hot Air’.
Baker-Kneed: Effeminate.
Baksheesh: A tip or gratuity.
Ball of Fire: A person with energy and determination.
Ballyrag: To bully and scold.
Banchoot: From an unspeakable insult in India, gentle insult in English.
Bandook: A rifle.
Beat Banagher: To tell a surpassingly good story or do something superlatively well.
Bantam: A young inexperienced man.
Barbary Coast: Red Light district, esp if popular with sailors.
Barber’s Cat: A sickly and malnourished person (the opposite of a butcher’s dog), also a gossip.
Bargee: Stereotypical bargeman, loud, coarse and rude.
Barking Iron: Pistol.
Barmpot/Bampot: An eccentric.
Barnacles: Spectacles/Eyeglasses.
Barrel Fever: Drunk.
Barrel-Boarder: Old drunk.
At Full Bat: Top speed.
Batchy: Silly or stupid.
Batwing: A Bow-tie.
Beachcomber: An idler.
Beano: A fight, or a party, depending on context.
To Know How Many Blue Beans Make Five: To be informed and aware.
Beat the Dutch: Do something outstanding.
Put to bed with a Shovel: To murder.
Beef-Witted: Stupid.
Beerage/Beerocracy: A pub’s regulars, a ‘peerage’.
Beer-Trap: The mouth.
Beetle: A madman, a stalker, a fanatic.
Beetle Crusher: A foot – a big one.
All Behind like the Cow’s Tail: Late.
Belcher: Handkerchief.
Bellibone: A well-dressed young woman.
Big Pot: An important person.
Bill: A name to use for an otherwise unknown person.
Birdcage: A prison, esp a temporary one.
Bit of Skin: A young girl or man who is one’s lover.
Bit of Fat: An unexpected advantage.
Blandander: To cajole with blandishments.
Blind Dragon: A fierce old woman or chaperone.
Bloat: A worthless, conceited person.
Blue Devils: A fit of depression.
Blue’O’Clock: Dawn.
Bluff the Rats: Spread panic.
Bobby Dazzler: Anything exceptional or wonderful.
Bog-Eyed: Tired, or drunk.
Bog-Latin: Fake latin, or gaelic.
Boiled Shirt: Respectable, upper class sort of man.
Where the Bottle Got the Cork: In the neck.
On the Bounce: Defaulting on a payment.
Box of Dominoes: The mouth.
Brickish: A good sort of person.
Broadbrow: Someone with a lot of different interests (as opposed to high or low brow).
Broomstick Marriage: A common-law marriage.
Browsing and Sluicing: Eating and drinking.
Brummagem: Second hand, or fake.
Bum-Freezer: A short jacket.
Burn Bad Powder: To fart.

Maestro – Research or Visit a Place – Whitefriar’s Glass

For an upcoming story, I need to situate it at a glassmaker, one that made a particular type of glass that fell out of favour in more modern times: uranium glass.

Uranium was first identified in the late 1700s but was soon used in glassmaking as it created a unique fluorescent colour. Many glassmakers began using it, and in England, one of the great creators of uranium glass was James Powell and Sons, also known as Whitefriar’s Glass. Interestingly enough, James Powell was from the same family as the founder of the Boy Scouts.

Uranium glass fell out of favour after World War II as sources of uranium (needed for bomb-making) dried up or became prohibitively expensive. The public became afraid of anything relating to radiation, even though uranium glass tableware was perfectly safe.

With my story set in the 1920s, I don’t need to worry about that, though physicists and fiction writers were already pondering the potential power of the atom and how it might be used, which is an association I want to exploit.

Whitefriar’s Glass was an existing company, established around 1680 and situated just off Fleet Street, though they relocated in 1923 to a factory in Wealdstone.

Interestingly, there is a ‘weald stone’ that was used to mark the boundary between parishes. It’s a sarsen stone, the same type used at Stonehenge, and its age, or at least how long it has been there, being unknown. A bit of a mystery in keeping with what I’m going for.

Powell and his sons took over Whitefriar’s Glass in 1834, six years before the elder Powell’s death. Weirdly, nobody involved had any experience with glassmaking. Still, they appeared to take to it quickly, to learn the necessary skills and – perhaps because of their lack of knowledge – to try new glassmaking methods and succeed with many of them.

James’ sons Arthur and Nathaniel made a name for themselves through the company in stained glass. They owned several technical-process patents, giving the company a strong reputation. They were amongst the first companies to offer glowing uranium glass due to their technical and innovative background.

Thanks to technological innovations and insights, they also produced a lot of architectural glass, becoming associated with Jackson, Burnes-Jones, de Morgan and Doyle and the arts and crafts movement around the same time.

The move to a new factory in the interwar period was intended to ramp up production and to allow the company to grow, but a planned village alongside the factor for workers to live in (taken from arts and crafts ideas) fell through as the factory was too expensive to build, in and of itself.

Even with that expense, the company continued to grow until after World War II, when it began a steep decline, finally winding up operations in 1980. Many examples of their work are either still found in situ or held in collections in various museums, though sadly, the factory was demolished and cleared.

Maestro – Solve et Coagula a Story You Hate – Jane Eyre

Like many kids who were forced to read even portions of ‘classic’ novels, especially boys, I loathe Jane Eyre. Silas Marner runs a close second, but Jane Eyre ranks higher as it is wildly over-celebrated, and one media company or another seems constantly engaged in making and remaking it.

My frustration at grappling with such a dull and hideous work was only made worse because much better books, such as Animal Farm or The War of the Worlds, were also on the school reading lists, but we never got to study them.

Horrible.

So if I am to break down and reconstruct a novel that I hate (at the urging of Alan Moore’s BBC Maestro course), I choose this horrible, dull, insipid ‘classic’.

So what’s the plot? What’s actually engaging in Jane Eyre?

The Plot: 

The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of the title character. Its setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III (1760–1820).[a] It has five distinct stages: Jane’s childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she gains friends and role models but suffers privations and oppression; her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester; her time in the Moor House, during which her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St John Rivers, proposes to her; and ultimately her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester. These sections provide perspectives on several important social issues and ideas, many of which are critical of the status quo.

So what’s interesting, more than anything, is the backdrop. This was the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the social shifts and ideas that would eventually lead to things like the Chartists arising.

What’s also interesting are the gothic elements in the book (Rochester as a Byronic hero, aspects of misery tourism and the presence of the supernatural).

Supernatural elements include telepathy, ghosts, prophetic dreaming, a ‘demon’, and religious factors and concepts – often somewhat critically.

Interesting elements:

• Napoleonic and revolutionary backdrop.
• Gothic/Byronic aspects.
• Social criticism.

The Supernatural:

• Jane is described as being like an elf, imp or sprite.
• In her reflection, Jane sees herself in such a light (or as ghostly).
• Rochester is unsettled by her.
• The ghost in The Red Room.
• Jane keeps searching for the supernatural or other oddities.
• Jane and Rochester share a telepathic link.
• Jane talks about fairies and appears to take them seriously (The Men in Green)
• Bertha, the madwoman in the attic, is suspected of being a demon or vampire.
• Presentiment and foreshadowing.
• Ignis fatuus (Will’o’Wisp).
• Implied mediumship.

Rewritten Plot:

Jane is a strange and peculiar girl who is treated poorly throughout her childhood and adolescence. She has gifts that others do not, sees the world differently and encounters the supernatural from a young age. Not so many years before, she’d have been considered a witch and hung, but we are now in the years following The Enlightenment, and nobody quite believes these things any more, at least nobody with any wealth or education. We don’t spend too long on these sections, instead focussing on the last portion, her time at Thornfield Hall.

Rochester has ‘seen some shit’ in his time and is now, secretly, a monster hunter of some sort. His interest in Jane starts out as the practicality of needing a governess to cover for his secretive and disturbing adventures, then professional, seeing her as a potential fellow monster hunter – one with gifts – and finally romantic.

In this version, the ghosts and monsters are not implied, nor devices to suggest an unreliable narrator or psychological state, rather they are true. The ghost in the red room is real, the premonitions are real, Jane may have a touch of the unnatural in her bloodline. Bertha is either possessed or a supernatural creature herself (a zombie, vampire or werewolf perhaps).

By the end of the rewritten work we have Rochester and Jane as equal partners, his strength, passion and martial skill coupled with her supernatural talents making them an effective duo at combating the supernatural, just as the world is about to be plunged into a massive period of revolution and bloodshed.

Maestro – A Short Story Without a Plan – The Archaeoeschatologist

Arequeet’s second skin hissed around xis spiracles as xe stepped out of the hopper on spindly legs. What a horrible world this was. High gravity compared to xis homeworld, a thin, low oxygen atmosphere that meant the skin had to work triple-hard to let xim breathe. Then there was all the radioactivity that lingered, making the skin hungrier than usual for anti-oxidants and cellular protein.

Still, Arequeet was an archaoeschatologist, which meant xe had to spend time in places such as this, puzzling out how and why an allegedly sophont species had wiped itself out so that the various species of the Taxonomic Polity could avoid the same fate.

This world didn’t even present a particularly compelling or exciting case. The species had been balkanised into different tribal and mutually antagonistic groups, allowing singular leaders to hold command authority over apocalyptic doomsday weapons. Xe’d seen it a dozen times, from the orbital bombardment scars of Trappist 1d to the grey goo of Gliese 514b. It was clear to Arequeet that non-eusocial species were at a distinct disadvantage regarding survivability, even with ideologies representing the superior model.

So this was going through the motions, drawing the shitty duty of stalking through the uglier and burnt-out remnants of this species’ ugly architecture, looking for any signs of lingering survivors or preserved caches of cultural artefacts. It was likely fruitless. Even the shelters of the species’ genocidal rulers that had caused the problems had been radioactive craters, their weapons technology was even more advanced than they had given each other credit for. They all knew exactly where each other would hide.

Even so, monitoring before the eschaton event had suggested that the species was so utterly, incredibly primitive and atomised that a secondary ruling class known as ‘billionaires’ (a reference to the quaint idea of currency) might still have survived, hidden in their own shelters that the primary ruling class might not have bothered with. It had been Arequeet’s job to check for those sites.

Thus far, this had been fruitless. One of the billionaires had tried to survive by flying into space in a chemically fuelled rocket (of all things) and had met his end in the whirling debris resulting from satellite warfare. Another had hidden on a private island beneath the notice of the war but not beneath the notice of the resulting climate apocalypse or drifting clouds of radiological and biological death.

This site, which Arequeet was now picking his way carefully across, brittle bones crunching under his tarsi, had been the centre of this species’ high-tech industries, such as it was. They had still been tinkering with computers made out of slivers of rock when everything went wrong and the early stages of a global information network that had only contributed to their tribalistic self-annihilation rather than cementing a planet-wide eusocial hivemind. Disgustingly primitive.

Probes had supposedly found a mostly-intact underground bunker complex here. Arequeet doubted anything could survive in there, given that the bombs had set off the faultlines that ran through this city and broken the ground apart. Still, Feudirk’s pheromones had been quite insistent that this whole expedition be done by the book, so here Arequeet was.

This heap of abject rubble was the site, so Arequeet set to work, dolloping an egg’s-worth of angstrobots onto the wreckage and letting them set to work.

It wasn’t long until much of the rubble had been sorted into its constituent elements, and the entrance to the bunker had been revealed. It was damaged and twisted, but the second skin’s effectors and neural layer were up to the task and soon had the thing open.

Arequeet had to duck down to fit inside. The heavyset primates of this world had rarely exceeded five tibias in height, while Arequeet was a healthy nine tibia high. Xe had to hunker down and walk on four out of six legs, which was quite demeaning.

There were bodies close to the entrance, which Arequeet had to step over. These primates were disgusting creatures, with horrid endoskeletons and flabby flesh, which was even worse when it was rotting. It made Arequeet’s spiracles pucker and clench with disgust, even though the scent of their rot was incongruously enticing.

It was clear rapidly that there were no survivors here and that this was nothing but a colossal waste of Arequeet’s time and expertise. Xe was about to log it and go when xe noticed something interesting. Part of the shelter was covered in tendrils and growths of what seemed like biotechnology, haphazardly spreading across walls, floor and ceiling and seeming to trace back to one of the more private chambers.

Biotechnology? They had been monitoring this crude species for many years, and they had only begun to fumble around with such things relatively recently. Had the Slumellow Concordant archaoeschatological team already visited this site and broken protocol? On closer inspection, it didn’t taste like their biological probes, so curiously, Arequeet followed the tendrils.

Arequeets secondary thorax rattled in disgust as xe beheld the scene. One of the primate’s bodies was sprawled on its sleeping platform, and the growths were coming out of it, fusing to the blankets and spreading across the surfaces. It was hideous and disgusting, but the body didn’t seem alive, even if the growths were, and was barely recognisable beneath them. The bulging and misshapen blobs emerged from the body like lazy grubs from a birthing corpse, giving the scene a disturbing, erotic undertone.

Reluctantly, Arequeet used the second skin’s sensors on the flesh blob.

“Can you hear me?” The skin had picked up neural activity within the flesh and had automatically translated it.

“Clutchrot!” Arequeet swore in disgust before xe could stop to think, and the skin – well-meaning but stupid – translated it across to the flesh blob.

“I take it that means yes,” said the blob.

“Yes,” Arequeet replied reluctantly, fretting, reviewing the data from the skin. The body was no longer alive, but the growths were – after a fashion – sickly mutated cells from the original host, replicating wildly, including neural tissue.

“Wonderful, I thought I’d never talk to anyone again. I can’t seem to move. Can you help me?”

“No,” said Arequeet, still desperately reviewing the data for some idea of what was happening.

“Why not? Why didn’t you help us before? You were here so quickly after the bombs. You must have known what was happening.”

“We are forbidden to interfere in the affairs of more primitive species.” The pat reply came out by rote as data and search terms rolled by Arequeets forebrain consciousness, desperately seeking an explanation.

“So you just let us kill ourselves? That seems cruel, heartless, unenlightened.”

Arequeet didn’t reply, xe’d found something buried deep in the medical database, a cellular problem from ancient times called ‘cancer’, which seemed to explain – somewhat – what had happened. Did this species not have a cure for that? Had this creature mutated so much, its cells grown so wildly out of control? What were the odds?”

“Are you still there?”

“Yes,” snapped Arequeet curtly. “I’m trying to understand what happened to you.”

“Why not just ask me?”

Xe had to admit that was as good an idea as any. “What happened to you?”

“My name is Adain.”

Arequeet hissed air through xis spiracles in irritation. “Adain, what happened to you?”

“We survived the blasts,” Adain said with a proud tone. “The shelter was built very strongly, but the bombs weakened it, and then there were the earthquakes. The walls split, and contamination got in. We couldn’t get out – not that it was safe – and we had no choice but to eat and drink contaminated food and water. The others killed themselves or chose to die. I stayed alive and got sick, and that’s the last thing I remember.”

Arequeet finished reviewing the data. “You died, sort of. What remains are what your species called ‘cancers’. They have outlived your main body and your brain.”

“But I can still think, and you’re reading my thoughts.”

“Yes.”

“So I survived?”

“After a fashion.”

“So you’ll rescue me, one intelligent being to another?”

“No,” Arequeet told him, removing a fresh capsule of angstrobots.

“Why not? Isn’t that why you’re here, to find survivors?”

“No,” Arequeet popped the cap of the capsule, readying it.

“Then why are you here? Why did you come?”

“To understand how and why you did this to yourselves so that we can avoid it. As a survivor, you could perpetuate the memes that killed your species. You’re an information hazard. For what it’s worth, I am sorry.” Arequeet tipped the angstrobots onto the cancerous growth and let them get to work, breaking down the freakish survivor into its constituent atoms.

There, done. On to the next shelter, and then the next dead planet. There were so many to choose from and so much hazardous waste to clean up. Xis work was never done.