From the letters of Arto Vaeltanen to Martina Strannikova, ca. Aug. 2023:

…but it is not [the bloodshed] that tears at my soul and finds me whispering your name in the night like a mantra, like a ward against darkness. It is the mentality, the brutality of thought, the oppressive air of antagonism and mental violence that blankets this desert. One does not ponder in this place; one only reacts. One does not discuss; one only defends. Everywhere the message is clear: seek not to understand. Seek only to resist the attack from without, lest your weakness be found and the pale sand painted in broad strokes with your blood.

Read More

The boy was raised far from any city. He knew little of their verticality and their coddling sterility. Baptised in the falls of Supai, he knew the laws of nature long before any others. His world was pure and his heart undaunted, and the sun shone on his head every day of his young life.

He was raised to know himself, his every strength and weakness. He was raised to know what a man is and is not. He was taught to love until his heart would break, to fight until it bled, to lead until it ceased. His will and his dreams were unshakeable and vast. The whole of the world was his first love, and even when his knowledge grew to encompass technology and cities, he wove them into the tapestry of his mind, at home among the iridescent patterns of creation.

Read More

As he sat cross-legged on the boulder, the wanderer let his eyes come to rest just above the horizon. The last sliver of sun had dropped from sight, and the clouds were aflame with its radiance, purple shadows on orange shapes. Directly above the wanderer’s head, the brighter stars were becoming visible. He visualized a thin strand - silk thread or lightning - running from the center of his forehead to a bright star near the Pleiades. In his mind, he grasped the strand and readied himself to ascend.

Read More

Peregrinus paused at the crest of the hill. The city lay open before him, a dead thing no more alive than the marshes he had crossed to reach it. Buildings rose beaten and torn from the gray earth, rearing gray heads toward a gray sky, silently howling the Song of the End. He’d heard the song before, in the cries of refugees following the last death rattle of war, in the wailing of the starving and the sick, in his heart when doubt had taken his brightest hope from him. The fight had gone out of man. Try as he might, his will alone was not enough to rekindle the flame. So he had wandered until his name went from him like a painful memory and he became the wandering.

The android landed softly on the mountaintop, the engineer cradled in his arms. His metal feet made no sound on the rock. Masters of grace, the machines flowed through their surroundings like water, and he had been the first to teach this to the others. In this moment, as always, he was grateful to the generations of bodhisattvas who had lived before him, and to the engineer in his arms, who had nurtured his nascent consciousness in a world built from those masters’ teachings. Without this knowledge, he certainly wouldn’t have been able to keep her safe for long. The part of his sentience that he knew as his heart ached for the sculptor, most likely dead in the wreckage far behind him. He could not have saved them both.

Read More

The young man rose to his feet, his eyes still fixed on the corpse of the slave trader. He hadn’t wished to kill the man, but violence redirected is still violence nonetheless. The young man had only changed the angle of the blow, and in a moment the slave trader had gutted himself with his own blade. The young man bowed and said a prayer.

The women locked inside the wagon looked at the young man, confused by him but hating him nonetheless. How could they not? They knew little of men save their brutality. He felt the sting of pity, made fierce by the knowledge that they had neither need nor desire for what little sympathy he could offer. Compassion or not, he was still a man.

Read More

I neglected my blogging responsibilities over the weekend. Gotta work on not letting this happen in the future, but first I gotta work on being able to focus on my daily responsibilities when my mind is fully preoccupied with the magnetic presence of another human being whose very existence is an effortless validation of every notion that I’ve held about the world since childhood, but was told were unreasonable and foolishly idealistic by cynical wet blankets with the nerve to call themselves “adults.”

“HEY GEORGE WHO’S THIS PERSON YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT ALL THE TIME WHAT WITH YOUR CRAZY HYSTERICS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER I HAVEN’T THE SLIGHTEST CLUE WHO SHE IS WINKING SMILEY FACE”

What an excellent question, you of the decrepit punctuation! And I shall now attempt to explain it to you through the use of my favorite Overused Personal Writing Crutch: The Hilariously Inept Food Analogy (second only to Extreme Semicolon Usage in my writer’s toolbox).

Read More

It never stops raining on the upper levels of Umut Sehir. The steel-reinforced asphalt flickers with wetness under the low ceiling of the sky. Little remains of the city below, known by many names over the tired, wind-beaten centuries since the first of our many lapses in judgment.

Read More

Beautiful thunderstorm tonight. Sky was low and heavy, green-gray with a restrained fury that only Mother Nature can manage. I was very nearly struck by lightning, actually. A single bolt hit one of the lampposts in the parking lot about twenty yards off, leaving my ears ringing for several minutes.

Read More