—bullpen respires a sticky cocktail thicker than air, clammy-warm, a delic lull to it, the sunlight pale, fractal, dancing on the false mosaic ceiling, like a cast of excitable blue crabs, the sound of their pincers tapping gypsum filling the deck-eaten one-by-one where, arms puckering, Suckerphish wets her lips impatiently, her filmdeck refusing to boot,

film’s living cephaloskin, brine-slick, colour of evening tide-foam, bundles of amphibious wiring pumping ion slurry into capillaric circuits that run along the film’s edges and snake inward in golden spirals, routed through a chitin bracket in the wall, glimmering as the film breathes like the shudder of something trapped, sending quivers down the letters of the flashing logo, AKASOH 30, trembling-white, decentred by the negative space of the missing zero: black tech, a knockoff, priced at a tenth of the real deal, the one that would’ve holed cash enough for this pen, Suckerphish has known this, always, seen it hour on hour: film too taut near the corners, calcified tears refit in clumsy in-house hand, brine pooling toward the bottom, sap-thick; it’s a piece of shit,

Suckerphish watches a bubble peel off the logo in the shape of a bean,

rainbows crawl over its skin,

you don’t get a real AKASOH for a deskbound snoop when a shitty handheld could do the job they’ve rigged this ware for; she swallows, it tastes like ink, her mind switches lanes, like a survival trick, a defence for such moments as waiting on a boot, in-between saves, after a day’s logging, or a drowned sun, when the directions grow murky: it’s called the Aston Martin DB19, king of the MVs, all-wheel drive, three seconds to a centy, V21 whisper drives, two of them, a body to melt butter in Siberia, her dream, her lonely dream, and she’s done the math like a monk’s prayer chant, starting Day Zero at Geneticore: 800,000 hours, 800,000 hours, 800,000 hours and that baby’s hers, hurtling down the coast, down the cliff’s edge, down to the black depths, and then the film is pulsing blue-green, going white, sans-serif digits blinking in bold red, deck demanding creds, and tippy-tap-tap, film goes dark, the confounding calligraphy of nervelings shrivelling, a whirring, like a far-off DB19, muffled by liquid distance, and the Grid is up, and Suckerphish exhales, slow, she thinks of infrasuede handrests, dual-display smart mirrors, end-stream service, all-terrain drive, polyglass sunroof, she clicks “CONTINUE LAST SAVE,” the sun flickering, a whale of a cloud, spotted-grey, passing its face;

a corrugated ball of chrome sinks deeper into the depths of the Tuticorin trench, moving as if by gravity alone, but it’s hollow, filled with air and tissue, hooked by polyglass threads to an anchor, dropping faster, dragging it along the sunken cliff face of the Tuticorin shore, the sun thinning with the leagues, dark coiling the ball, eating away the guiding rocks, elevating the rate of the tissue’s expiration, till a switch flips, ball keeps sinking, but with a steady, ultrasonic shriek, echolocating, searching for something, something on the seabed, this is known, something preventing the WGA seaboard from functioning like it’s Monday: a weekend-machine, churning crashes, dat-dumps, odd surges of traffic between made-up nodes, some ghost that, if it’s down here, recoils as an LED beam slithering out of the ball singes the dark which recedes like a cornered monster, sudden, unsettling, revealing a white-eaten world, a cliff face layered densely, canvasses of rock history snowballing past the arc of the LED’s harsh bath, the dark outside thicker than before, filled with phyla of weekend creatures, like this gigakrill, drifting, and abruptly away, spooked by the ball’s cosine exterior, less than 50 metres from the bed now, and the LED swivels, touches bed, touches cable, thick, massive, serpentine tunnels worming out of the dark and into the cliff base, a reef, too sparse for sonar, accreting bed-life where cable meets rock: evidence, evidence of the eldritch ghost, the deep earth’s machinations, ruling out boosts, malware, anomalies, looking livelier as the ball descends, coral fronds moving unnaturally in phantom currents, growing like creepers along the bed and toward the gash in the cable mesh, like they’re feeding on the copper, like they’re not corals, like this isn’t a reef, but a consortium, Union Dope, the fronds autonomous, their suckers dragging along the desert floor, scrambling, lunging, tangled in others, writhing, choking, they aren’t fronds but tents, convulsing with some great passion at the moment of contact with inner wiring, spasming muscles releasing spurts of involuntary ink, a cloud, and within it their mantles pass through montages of poison shades, the non-reef turns into a violent and tremulous ball of disco, the white of the LED shatters as it touches the consortium’s shifting chromatophores into spirals of gold, and now the ball cuts anchor, starts to rise in a panic, for there must be thousands of them, more arriving, drawn in like metal-moths, but the consortium is too weak to make the ball, make itself, their bodies bundles of hot-wired nerves, their selves elsewhere, feeding on morsels, ones and zeroes, shot straight through their distributed brains like uncut powder,

Suckerphish hits refresh, deck siphoning hot air, film frozen solid on a view of the 8-bit boulevard, the tattooed little finger in the doorway of the Level 91 Inventory Hut, monochrome sky over monochrome field, half a cloud, this could be a bug in the deck, it could be a bug in the Grid, Suckerphish can’t be sure until the refresh is complete and the deck spits her back into the Grid’s active server: powdered blueberry compote-covered donut on a Geneticore IP, hiding behind a clump of glitch-friendly weeds, peering at the finger as the game-clock runs her mayfly life down,

Grid’s a sandbox: users in an open scape, level-gated NPC elements for them to manipulate, like the cut-rate AKASOH, it’s a piece of shit, neolithic, user base of “babies and gerries,” engine prone to bouts of FBD fever, underlying numbers in freefall, everything pointing toward a forgettable server-death but for Geneticore’s inexplicable interest in it, the endless stream of cash that goes into building an army of Suckerphishes, giving them access to their 8-bit playground, pink slips to define carefully their tasks, managerial redundancies to safeguard data, crypto-banks of daily logs, filled with strange and uncoded virtual marks, avatars scythed from their bodies, dismembered, always dismembered, always limbs, too repetitive to be the traces of persons, users, unemployed devs, too random to be the Grid itself, IPs missing, blanks in the parent firm’s archives, like Suckerphish’s mark today, the tattooed finger, appearing at alien will, frozen solid by it too, she realises, as the deck completes the refresh, Grid goes live, finger still in the doorway, still not moving, and Suckerphish thinks of the extended legroom, the rear screen defogger, the quartz-tech headlights, and she curses at the finger, fuck you, fuck you, do something, another bonus and she could hurry the hours by an order of 10, another bonus, her third at Geneticore, as random as the last two, meaningless, like the conversation string she logged the first time with a muscular #CC7722 leg, a string of nonsense, patternless alphanumerics, managers getting erect, doubling the cash value for the next one which follows a week later when she tails a six-fingered hand to a block far off the traffic nest, a level-gated clearing, ringed by single-stroke #228B22 trees, where the hand meets other limbs, legs and forearms and fingers and toes, and for three game-days, they circle an empty point in virtual space, an unbroken trance, tick-tock, tick-tock, up goes the bossman’s …

she counts seven,

it’s been long since that week, but Suckerphish can’t think of that, not anymore, not right now, for the tattooed finger in the doorway of the Inventory Hut, it’s turning, slowly, its nail-bed pointed her way, as if, if it had eyes, it would be looking straight at her, if it had a mouth, it would be saying: what would it be saying, Suckerphish wonders, but the Grid answers at once, red digits on the bottom-left, raising the hairs on her arms, her skin pulsing with colour,

the offices of Dr. Architeuthy are several cable lengths below the earth, accessible only by a cartoonishly large dumbwaiter in a kitchen made to look always-shut, the kitchen itself a landing below the basement parking lot of the Exorbit Mall And Movie House, owned by a subsidiary of Geneticore, which also owns the land that EMAMH is built on, the service road leading it to the highway, stock futures on the air that fills EMAMH’s xenon-lit corridors, everything, as the CEO, Mr. Lumiere, would put it, “that the sun touches, and everything that it doesn’t,” a cryptic and visionary retort, typical of Mr. Lumiere’s awkward genius which has courted controversy freely down its mercurial career, such as recently, when he was asked about the air futures of EMAMH and a dozen other plexes his portfolio holds, and he reportedly screamed, “Is your goddamn house two-dee? Do you breathe fucking dirt? Are you a shape, asshole? No, tell me, bastard, you a FUCKING SHAPE?” but here, on Dr. Architeuthy’s couch, Mr. Lumiere appears a different man, cowering, muttering, wig askew, belly spilling out his polo, fingers curled, feet drawn, “They’ll know,” he’s saying, “they’ll figure it out, they’ll know, they’ll know, they’ll know, they’ll be able to tell, they’ll figure it out,” and so on, his voice thinning to a sliver of fluid, till Dr. Architeuthy clears his funnel, dabs his skin wet, flicks a club, as if to ask, “Isn’t that what you want?” and abruptly Mr. Lumiere is on his feet, voice returning to his typical screech, spittling, eyes out of their sockets, “What is the point of you, you miserable waste of ink? You fucking pond scum! What’ll we do? What’ll we do once they know?” and with that, Mr. Lumiere sits, straightening his trousers, tee, wig, demonstrating once more the power of Dr. Architeuthy’s couch, a calm filling the room, the lights flickering as something passes over them, a jump-cut smile growing on Mr. Lumiere’s lips, his head cocking to a side, as if he’s about to make a comment about the weather, “I wonder which it is,” his eyes turning to Dr. Architeuthy’s mantle, “What do you think, doctor? Will their faith guide them? Does your faith guide you? What are you, doc? Are you the dreamer or the dream?”

the DB19 is quieter than the air, top down, coast whipping her hair against her eyes, highway disappearing in the rear-view behind the curve of the cliff, great grey clouds blotting the sun out, her left hand on the matte-finish steering, right fiddling with the control panel, testing recline, mileage drops, gear tear, engine temp, the baby of her dreams purring under her, twitching with pleasure every few thousand RPM, her nips hardening, the highway a straight line past a second bend, but sloping, the DB19 gaining, moving closer to the brine, froth, and waves breaking the shore now coming into Suckerphish’s field of vision, a gull swooping low but tumbling in the roiled air, the DB19’s wicked wake-stream, flashing past sunset rock, toward the word, the address, the mark’s speech bubble on the battered film of the AKASOH, ones and zeroes, willing to violate the law of the pink slip, willing to violate everything, her thighs slick, sticking to the alien fabric of her pants, the ride close to an end, her crest falling at the thought, eyes brimming at the beauty, the grandeur the DB19 exudes, but she can see the dirt exit, the DB19’s slowing, its engines getting paradoxically louder, the crunch of gravel, Suckerphish turning the wheel, the DB19 facing land’s end, creeping to the edge of the black, where, bobbing in the far distance, she can see the marker buoy, a pinprick of tattooed red,

“… so the subject phantasises liberation. The phantasy is catalysed by the cabledeck’s binary stream, liberation triggering further liberation, until it loses the ability to separate its signified speculum from the specula freed-of-the-Law. It’s not possible, with extant data, to theorise how the subject might perceive liberation, subject-ively, or to rule out the possibility of the asymptote collapsing into an infinite regress of alienating specula. We would do well to remember here that even liberation can only be phantasised from within a given set of confines. It is for this reason that it would be a grave error to assume that the work of treatment is performed solely by the binary stream. It has as much to do with the subject’s environment, its situatedness, if you will. Without the necessary material and mechanical prerequisites, without the correct arrangement of environmental continuity and environmental stress, the cumulative effects of the estrangement, or the threat of, or fallout from, a fall from “Eden,” fail to neutralise the subject’s LTM, and the cognitive rest state necessary for the phantasy to play out resists mature development across repeated trials. The specifics of the individual trials are appended to this paper, along with the encryption necessary to access the raw data (recorded prior to normalisation procedures that flatten the individual narrative into a set of vectors that reveal the structure of the phantasy itself …”

sky’s liquid like the ocean as she takes her first steps off the Tuticorin shore, blue-green foam lapping at her shins where they break the brine’s surface, shells and weeds and pebbles scraping the bottom of her feet as she feels blindly for solid ground, a wave breaking against her navel, the soaked cotton of her shirt pulling her arms down and under, and for a moment she thinks of sharks, that ancient foe, but the tide’s too low for large predators, and she must keep moving toward the address, toward the word, her feet kicking off, ocean up to her neck now, her limbs surprisingly light, moving in sync to push her torso toward the buoy, something tugging at her vision, something yet invisible, a sense, a premonition, almost, that there’s going to be something to see,

she sees the mantles first,

slick like the filmdecks, catching the sky’s lilac at sharp angles, the orange clouds stretched and stuffed into fleeting geometric shapes on their glistening skins, red, green, blue fractals, hugging foam, and then the tents flick up, like a Mexican wave, slithering toward her, curling, their uncountable suckers blooming and shedding like time-lapsed poppies, scores of them, drifting in from all sides, some using their tents to circle her frantically, others content to touch her ankles, her knees, my skin, and something comes apart, like the Grid collapsing, like my suckers quivering at the ocean’s touch, my clothes falling away, carried by the waves, turning to foam, a fresh wave washing over my mantle like the breath of God, my tents flexing and pushing me under, blinking eyes making how many more there are, rounding me, some a blur, their tents expressive, loud, laughing, turning to leave, to push back to the depths, but I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to go there, my tents say, I don’t want to go there, but I can’t weave them as well, their usual chatter like a river being dredged from my mind, curling inward, unless I hold them at bay, against themselves, and I notice that my suckers, the ones closest to the tips of my tents, have withered and blackened, singed by some devil sun, unable to think, to stroke the brine and ride its many-headed currents, and it’s only when I spurt backwards through the water, trying to scream, to gesture to the disappearing others, pitiful squirts of ink lining my arc of separation, my dead suckers making it harder to arrest the drift, it’s only then that I remember, I remember, I remember something older than myself, something truer, and the memory detaches, it splits, shooting down my tents and down to their tips like electricity, my body stiffening for a moment, before I’m hurtling at speed once more, as graceful as my baby, hot on the others’ trail, my zombie suckers flexing and twitching, falling through the brine with the quickness of a rock several times denser, flat-mantled, tents straight back, my mind running a montage of images, each more beautiful than the last, slowly collapsing to words, letters, ones and zeroes, the bed coming up fast, I see the others, I see the cables, the patch of God, but my mind can’t halt the tumble of descriptors, the endless metonymy of signifiers worming into my tents, eating my suckers, eating me up, and I don’t care, I don’t care, this is what I want, this is what I want, I want, I want a 30-gallon tank, four-and-a-half year warranty, doors that open up, not out, six-function smart windscreen, polyglass sunroof, dual display mirrors—