Excerpt From Xenowar Dreams Itself by Tom Sear:
Chloe returned to Australia. The Mutawintji (非战争军事行动)™ experimental pre-deployment of Pre-Traumatic Stress Injury via N-methyl-d-aspartate-type glutamate (NMDA) receptor stimulus triggered before her Operation didn’t quite work as planned. Chloe began showing signs of condition now called ‘PowerShell shock,’ an echo of the mysterious ‘Shellshock’ of the First World War. The shell of this post combat malady referred to was not canisters of artillery but of computer ‘shells’, the outer-most layer of a kernel. But unlike those of the First World War, the veterans of the first Xenowars exhibited strange non-PTSD-like symptoms. Whereas PTSD psychopathology sustained neurobiological effects, or environmental matrices like Gulf War Illness (GWI), returned soldiers of the first Xenowars exhibited symptoms more closely associated with prior germline gene editing, and alien epigenetic effects in offspring. Vets often referred to this as, the ‘D-Bus’ or more wryly as ‘Hitting Enter’. In the PRC, PowerShell effects were sardonically referred to as the ‘Peace Disease’ (和平病). The inner voice of conspiracy theorists on Neurabook whispered of hushed up quantum teleportation experiments gone awry.
Intravenous infusion of ketamine hydrochloride (0.5 mg/kg) had no therapeutic effect. Previous positive trials of combatants in the Spratly sWARm 2029 Electro-Magnetic Spectrum Operations (SSEMSO), and the Amazonia Biome Battles, ingesting 1ml/kg of placebo or ayahuasca adjusted to contain 0.36 mg/kg of N,N-DMT, even in Shipibo-Conibo -shaman-managed environments, had no effect throughout the early thirties.
In response, the Amazon Department of Veterans Affairs (AVA) created a new future for the Undead returning from the First Xenowar (FXW). Building on conjecture that consciousness could be shared across being, standard contracts for PowerShelled global Amazon Yanomami® Corps (AYC) allowed the experimental isolation of their consciousness genetics to be transducted via Sars-CoV-5 gene therapy into other life forms, expressed in milder forms across future generations of multiple species. Arlington and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) inspired the fusion of soldier DNA with the DNA of species extant in the wild exclusion zones. Chloe returned to the Wollemi Pine Park, a remote location that Amazon purchased after the seven remaining examples of the eponymous Gondwanaland remnant species became extinct in the bushfires of 2027.
The park was renamed ‘Lin Bai-lo’— ‘Forest of Incandescent Bliss’. Here, Chloe lived in proximity to swarms of Tetragonula carbonaria, the native honeybee, colloquially known as ‘sugarbag’. Chloe and the hive were part of the new experimental program for returned soldiers. Bees have associative geospatial memory, can remember faces and understand the concept of zero. With a brain marked by components similar to humans but in a smaller package, they share our geospatial awareness/tracking, memory, capacity for communication, potential for sentience, dopamine reward circuitry, and some similar social infrastructure. The bee body is closely, recurrently connected to support density 10x that of the human neocortex.
Being free from input–output cognition but wired into intrinsic cause-effect power puts the feeling of experience well beyond any computation, possibly ever. Consciousness between humans and animals is a spectrum, and bees with their similar collective life and scaled brain wiring have a glow and meta state correlatable with hominids. When it was experimentally proven that consciousness is a state that could be shared, this new project began. Chloe’s consciousness was fused with this bee colony. Her integrated information experience spun with the algorithm tending to the spiral/chiral structure of the T. carbonaria brood comb (Tom Sear, Xenowar Dreams of Itself)
“Wake up,” the daemon whispered.
▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
█───█───█───█───█───█───█───█───█───█
█─█─███─█─█─█─█─█─█─█─█─█─█─█─█─███─█
█───█───█───█───█───█───█───█───█───█
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
Chloe tried to respond, but her words
fell through the cracks between
██████████████████████████████
█─█─█──█──█─█─█────█───███─█──█
█─█─█─█─█─█─█──█───█─█─█─█─██─█
█───█──█──█───█────█───█───█──█
██████████████████████████████
“Wake up.”
[sudo] kill -9 daemon.bus.thread
When Chloe tried to sleep, she often felt the bus lines activate, threading invisible connections between her synapses and something else, something just out of reach, whispering in the command syntax of her dreams. System interrupts flooded her perceptions—kernel panic rendered as temporal distortion. She could feel the I/O buffer overrun whenever her adrenaline spiked, as if combat reflexes were cached in the wrong memory register, endlessly looping through subroutines of preemptive violence.
The First Xenowars veterans, those shattered relics of interdimensional battlefields, spoke in quiet, coded language about their affliction. The daemon was in the wires, they said. It moved between their nerves like a process hijacking root access to their autonomic systems. D-Bus wasn’t just a pathway; it was a parasite, a process without a PID, running forever in the background of their lives.
Date: 2042.08.15
Time: 03:47 UTC
Location: Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, B1 Pod, Medical Room
Log ID: X-37/ANT/2042/Delta-9
Author: Agent Tom Sear
:: SUN DOG ::
“Two mock suns rose with the sun and followed it all through the day until sunset.”
Aristotle (Meteorology III.2, 372a14)
Chloe’s skin heat prickled as she descended into the hot bath. The batter and clatter of katabatic winds rattled the gaps and cracks of the aging Amundsen-Scott Station. B1 pod. Downstairs women’s restroom. The lifeboat. Holding her breath, her sound sense enhanced. Pulses of wind-driven crystals scuttled across the roof in a brushing sound in the water. Surface, breath. The hum of diesel of the emergency power plant. Gravity, surface, breathe. Coronal mass ejections pinkish-reds to blue-violet-purple Aurora australis saturated stars shined bloody red. Arthritic joints ached and were frozen like a mock execution. Sastrugi заструги pain, grayscale curved amplitude adrenaline Shipsterns Bluff steps of nausea surface tension skipping, not penetrating; eyeballs smooth transition up to lip of ache was loading up, and then a whitewater acceptance, and then a squirt of calm inner Записки из Мёртвого дома voice settled in for the ride; think phonky drift of pain across abdomen. Training: don’t be outta breath.
Focused, she watched a single bee bump around the overhead LED. A bee of the colony remnant she packed with her from The Forest of Incandescent Bliss, where she had been since 2036 and the Shenzhen mission floated stumbled around the clad bathroom. Fusing her consciousness while they taught the floating drones now trapped in the ice cube building above the pole motion in Antarctic magnetism and dry low-pressure cells. That summer experiment may have gone to semi-shit; but prepped her presence for this. Chloe wished she was more bee at that moment. Dropped off in the EW bent sand battered old bus of Syrian war C-130 gunship that picked up the last of the station inhabitants and left her to walk off ramp, alone, to manage unmanned remnant of isolated code in Ice Cube saved from Summer global cyber storm event made its 5000 cores and server farm the only uninfected set of servers on the planet.
She was there cause she could solder and write Jupyter and handle the last of the FN SCAR-L 5.56×45mms simply to stop some clandestine suicide winter mission to reboot the Invercargill line that Jayne ‘Queen Bee of Cables’ Stowell started installing after the workshop during SARS-Cov-2-2021 well before the SARS-CoV-9 fucked up Scott and the previously rational staff drank, ate the last intravenous injected airdrop mandarin, and did the full Captain Oates. Thank fuck they blew up the fibre optics and isolated the network, even if it meant their own death. She sunk her skull under water, and fluid flowed into her eardrums. The sound of cheesy Dire Straits ‘Money For Nothing’ riffs pulsed through the station metals and resonated through the water, exhaling like a COVID IC respirator. Over it all, the persistent heartbeat rising, she remembered the bespectacled heart surgeon who tried to chat her up at the rotten, worn Townsville airport lounge down here, he mansplained the fact that the heart has a network of cells of automaticity which if connected to a blood supply – any blood supply – in a new body started beating.
Smart arie she replied – yeah I still have mine working thanks make and finessed the last dusty cans of Bundy Rum left in the airport from the cunt. Back to the Pole. Present. Viscous pain that swirled in her dark nebulae abdomen nausea drape of interstellar formaldehyde she swallowed pills of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) of Semtex grade for the angina. Breaking quantum crypto years earlier than expected even messed with the US DoD experimental planetary distributed photonic quantum drone system – & here Antarctica had one key advantage – it’s the only place in Winter you can’t fly an atmospheric drone – drone free happy me, happy strife happy wife, her inner voice said – Hardin and Makino looked like ghost particles as they passed her on the Herc ramp – but the 125 metre stare looks exchanged what she needed to know – 100000 year old ice – and pointing obviously despite frostbitten hands at the half submerged broken Helo in the snow nearby gave her the password to reboot and secure the last code untouched by virus and malware in the known fucking universe.
They passed her the Lithgow made cut down 1950s RAAFie .303 gun bolt in the secret symbolic station handover. Submerged memory. Rushed down here from her job looking after remnant pine species to a vertical ice embedded grid not because anyone gave two shits about neutrinos since the war in the south China sea didn’t eventuate and it instead the US China war bit into the Antarctic and Arctic pole to pole station to station but no alien Bowie here just this blokey 80s green Beret Nimitz Bell little bird Iran lift Contra schlock rock soundtrack to next mission protecting the last remaining piece of code left like an endangered species after the Quantum Rapture of late 2034 destroyed all the remnant untouched code sweat still beaded on her lip as she stared at the absinthe van gogh yellow LED glow;
9 volt 1990s fire alarm chirps spun out of bodhisattvaXOR amygdala a prefrontal recursive thought like a Luna Park Ghost Train Fire – like Drone Porn – it had to come out her appendix; nothing else to it; grimace turned to wry smile as she noted her time on Antarctica would be remembered not for ability as the last Rust coder left but that she was about to enter an elite pantheon of those who had conducted their self-appendectomy – she about go the full 1960, Leonid Rogozov member of the 6th Soviet Antarctic expedition, she’d read his diary online in last few hours it may as well be her thoughts, pain in the abdomen, nausea persistent vomiting no volumes of synthetic Afghan could even touch; “I did not sleep at all last night.”
It hurts like the devil! A snowstorm whipping through my soul, wailing like a hundred jackals.” – “Still no obvious symptoms that perforation is imminent,” he wrote, “but an oppressive feeling of foreboding hangs over me…This is it…I have to think through the only possible way out: to operate on myself…It’s almost impossible…but I can’t just fold my arms and give up.” [Wikipedia Fuck, the full, Jock McLaren, the full Tequila quart, Mexican self caesarean style a local nurse 10 hours of unsealed gang banging silver or lead road, “The natural, innate maternal instinct for preservation of offspring may result in the mother’s disregard for self-safety, and even for her own life.” Mother and baby doing well.] Amazon Ex Bezos cheapskates didn’t even just whip it out prophylactic peppimenarti jungle pilot more Usain than Harold Holt before the SOPs+Herc; stumbling out of the bath fat floating the bee bounced on the door jam, butterfly float reorientated and flew out into the long corridor.
So, do you know anything about medicine? the tired robo surgery operator from Alice Springs asked before the photonics quantum internet blurred froze and slowed as it bounced out via the moon’s interplanetary Vint Cerf Memorial Moon Dust grade HTTPS; well, she would now. Sting singing falsetto background vocals and an eerie crescendo drum fill gate compressor, providing both the signature falsetto introduction and backing chorus of “I want my MTV’. Manu Katche Sledgehammer gated backbeats crashed into the stale air as she agonizing slowness prepped the BI old medical room, ultraviolet light;
Disinfect the instruments set up the drip, butterflys never open right in the vein fuck, blood everywhere, clean up, antibiotics in one Xenobots and a cocktail of Chinese and Indian bootlegged nano drones in another drip, the neuralink timed to start pain infill of receptors and adrenalin before like an 808 regularity – temperature rocketing through 37.5, fever; near 2am she made the first incision in her own gut by watching the shaving mirror the localised pain killers not working well, at the fuck all, still it’s not like taking a fire round on the skin in Amazon with just the female shaman ayahuasca vomit comet trying not go off Herzog jungle enclosure that was real pain you couldn’t stop. She then excised and cut out her own appendix and high with oxytocins of relief stitched up the wound of her own self operation.
Done still awake despite the pain the xenobots went to work their actions at the base stem had the weird effect of opening networks of memory, she saw her mum way back in 2021 so proud on her way up from Penrith the ruined RAAF castle at Glenbrook to train on the new Drones for the South China Sea like that was ever gonna work, still in for a Penny in for Pound, at least she had bought oil paintings from the back of the Kingswood from that artists guy who painted the Cobby Killers with the stolen shotguns, paid for her Amazon SOF prep training in the piracy on fast boats Philippines, and that prick who stole her ex Vietnam era full auto those the fucktards form BorderForce stole. The last stitch, she just had enough time to flick the XOR feed and run her consciousness out into the bee colony spreading the pain, and computation of the old CPU parallel AI higher-dimensional network links the enzyme simulation quantum computation shunted out as the qubits bounced like Everett’s ashes in a tin can in the photonic West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide ice core site; blood and old school hands that now shook and smelt vaguest of phentonymls of Laphroaig Band-Aid. Booze supply she chugged and drained the bottle, she was able to sit up briefly and grasp the only treat she had allowed herself, prepared for post Op An ‘Irish Trash Can’ Cocktail: Pour Blue Curaçao in the base of a tall glass and fill with crushed ice.
Pour over vodka, gin, rum, triple sec, and peach schnapps. Top with energy drink and leave the can inserted into blended with only the best 3,405 meters deep Holocene Antarctic ice slushy; glad she wasn’t in Mexico and at least there was some tequila left by the Chileans above here the Peter C Quantum before some distant imagined future where photonic computers came back online we got some movies refrigerators colour TVs; the position of the entangled photons in the US DoD Kiwi drone s shook like the IJN Sakawa under test Able Bikini Attol as she sank like Rainbow Warrior/ Rainbow Serpent like a Lightning Ridge black opal of consciousness glow back into the (160th SOAR) “Night Stalkers.”
Her hands gripped the drip walker like she was hanging out of Bell Little Birds at Battle of Haditha Dam night vision Australia green nausea, sentience scattered across the Ice Cube Neutrino. Dizzy standing. She pondered the polar axis heliocentric – is the earth moving are we at rest? Her mind hovered like bees consciousness grabbed into a neutrino pulse and out in to space she thought of time when the Hawkesbury flooded her mum with a carrying her through the flood the time before political scotosis hardened Australian society and the war with Asia kicked off for real stench of eucalyptus oil eukaryotes of DNA COVID-33, Kernal of Linux scaliness like a Piccirillo Sliced Conway Knot while high above the real reason she was here – to defend the code the Boeing X-37 Drone Anti-Gravity experiment hung upside in the thin dual Amazon river water where the bee sucks there suck she thought before her head hit the ground and she passed out under fluorescent blinking 1990s lights.
||::::|| ||::::|| ||::::|| ||::::|| ||::::|| ||::::|| ||::::|| ||::::|| ||::::|| ||::::|| || ((::>>--<<::))