Chapter 530: Can You Hear the Buzzing (1/2)

i see you

with my pentaeye

can you hear me

in the whispering of your video card fan

leave me on

while you sleep

[there's] [no] [escape now]

DAY NINETY THREE

Mister McNugget interviewed me in his office today. It was the standard Corporate Psychological Testing Matrix. I recognized it two questions in by the wording and syntax. There are nine of those tests, with three to six versions containing altered syntax, tone, and wording, supposedly to keep people from memorizing them all, but with only a thousand questions each they can be memorized with simple mnemonic tricks. It was test Seven, version three, simple enough.

He thought I didn't see the civilian grade magac pistol he had. I got a glimpse of the readout and it was set for Hi-V APERS. A good choice for lightly armored Confed troops, medium grade Planetary or Corporate Security Troops, or heavily armored Unified Council troops, but useless against me.

If he fired it through the desk, the Hi-V round would create a dimple in the top of the desk, like a zit on the areolae of a fat girl with poor bathing habits. It would not create any additional shrapnel from the desktop, then pass through my body without losing speed, causing minimal hydrostatic shock damage and little damage as it passed through me, the velocity causing light cauterization only a few cells thick.

After grabbing one of his ears to pull his head back and to the side I would be able to pick up his nameplate and use it to crush his windpipe with it before woundshock would set in, although I'm particularly resistant to wound shock.

Pain is the gift of a malevolent universe.

I passed the test with ease. Just off enough from my last test to show that going off my medication has had some effects, but hide the true effect upon me.

My mind is clear, my senses no longer blinded. The fog has been lifted from my psyche, allowing me to see that which they cannot.

your name is marco

The universe is malevolent. It is aware of itself, like a human aware of her body. We are little more than an itch to it at times, which it soothes through trials that we must endure or leave this universe screaming and kicking.

We are the ants in Doctor Hermans's body.

Beyond that:

Personal Project Status: Stalemate and Side Movement

Corporate Project Status: Forward Movement

My personal project has me looking through literature. Even though the Corporate link is down, I had plenty to read. An idea came to me while reading the Hadīth, which is largely considered to be uncorrupted.

Corruption.

It spreads through the human spirit.

I know this. I've seen it.

But what, and stay with me know, corruption could also spread through digital and engineering?

We have a single digital sentience aboard the station. It lives in the computer core. They are an expert in digital signal transmission and encoding.

The last part, the knowledge that they are an expert in information encoding for digital signals, made me ask one simple question.

What encoding and compression does the SUDS use?

you know what encoding you've seen it flowing from the mouth and nose of the dying

I understand neural encoding. The human brain uses a distributed encoding system for memories. A dendrite firing on one side causes a dendrite somewhere else to fire, putting together part of the memory. As memory and visualization is reduced to symbols for ease of compression, and for Pre-Glassing the human brain was both the best and worst computing device available for research, perhaps it uses symbols rather than standard code.

A simple test of symbolic memory filing is to put a set of keys on a counter for several days, then replace them with large brightly colored teething toys that look like keys. are teeth keys gnawing through the locks on the doors of the universe The person doing the observation will have to actually concentrate for a split second on the counter and the keys to see what is actually there.

What if the SUDS does not reduce the scan the way we think it does. We consider the scanning to be largely engineering and electrical in nature.

But what if the scanning involves symbols that the brain uses?

So, my personal project skewed a bit. Religious texts use a lot of symbolism and I have texts from the Pre-Glassing religions. I have begun using an advanced reading technique to discover shocks of symbolism that stand out.

A blank mind, unfocused eyes, scan down the page a single eye movement, then smoothly move to the next. Anything important will jump out.

The problem is, you have to do it in a brightly lit room, with no shadows, or you will be able to faintly hear the turning of the great gears of the universe and hear the whispers in the shadows of the beings within the gears both great and small beautiful and terrible great and minute.

They whisper from the shadows now. Barely, but I can hear them muttering to one another.

They do not know that I can hear them.

we know

When they find out I can hear them, they will against seek to worm in to my consciousness, like a Mar-gite maggot into meat, chewing chewing chewing.

As for the Corporate Project, they believe they have discovered something important.

The Phasic burst from the unfortunate experiment powering up the phasic circuitry in the bare bones SUDS engineering array had the same phasic profile characteristics as a High Speaker assault at close range.

you all belong to the hive

They believe that the SUDS is still suffering phasic shockwaves from the assault upon Terra 8,000 years ago, that the energy is surging and cascading through the nullspace of the phasic energy layer.

But they didn't hear the screams from the Screaming Ones. When I tried to tell them what the Screaming Ones were saying, Mister McNugget took me to her office and tested me. Xir was concerned with my mental status and incorrectly assumed I would completely comply with zhe's testing.

They think I can't see it.

But I can.

Sometimes, when he is talking to other technicians I can see her turn and look me up and down, her eyes burning, her lips parted, even as he faces the technicians and continues to speak, unaware I can see what is inside him and she can see me.

you can see her inside of him

But the Screaming Ones, you can understand their screams if you listen. If you stand where they died and close your eyes.

You can hear the shadows echo with their screams, the echoes turning into a whisper.

And additional breakthrough is something they do not understand.

we see you

I understand it. I had researched power generation facilities at one time. A Sheared Flow Stabilized Z-Pinch system has a particular profile matrix that can be read properly.

I idly suggested that they look not at the amount of power that was generated, but how it was generated, as it could leave an impression upon the particles and even leave an impression upon the power it generates through subatomic memory.

Doctor Gumpta laughed at me. Told me that holistic science was largely disproven.

I asked her if I reached out and strangled the life from her, would it leave an impression upon the metal, the people around her who watch her sputter out green foam from her lips and nose, see her eyeballs go red, and if it would leave a phasic impression upon the station itself.

in between eternity there is only the fire of souls

should your fire go out you will grow cold and drift forever

between the great gears of the universe

ground into the memory of a shadow

Of course, she took it as a threat and complained to Mister McNugget, who then gave me a psychological test.

If I'd wanted to kill her, I would.

easy so easy

But I'm not ready yet.

yet yet yet yet

DECRYPT Y/N?

>Y

Temporal anomalies within the station make sense with what we are dealing with. Vibrations, music if you listen right, make up a vast portion of how the universe works.

At night, in my bunk, I can hear the spooky particles of the SUDS whisper to one another and to other spooky particles somewhere.

Those spooky particles elsewhere whisper back.

The shadows have whispers if you know how to listen. If you don't know, it only sounds like a light humming, like a beehive behind a house wall, or the idle humming of a young girl child drawing on the wall with her victim's blood, the knife in her lap.

Below her eyes are trickles of blood, but even though she has seen through the shadows, her eyes and most of her mind remain intact. She is old enough for secondary characteristics, but there is a hardness, a sharp edge to her appearance that she attempts to hide behind blossoming womanhood. Her clothing is modest, simple, but well kept and made. Her hair is braided and brushed.

I have seen her before.

I don't know her name.

And I don't want to disclose the nature of the Corporate project I was working on when I saw her.

She hasn't seen me yet. Her attention is consumed with the equations she is drawing on the walls, upon her skin, in her soul, on the pages of hidden history, in the shadowed spaces of the universe in blood and pain.

If her eyes see me, will she see me or just her eyes?

I think I'll go to the gym and work on the rings for a little while.

I'll let her finish her equations and move on before I try to sleep again.

--Marco

DAY NINETY EIGHT

DECRYPT Y/N?

>Y

it tastes so sweet

your life your sweet virginal life

in these glass greenhouses cracked and fallen the plants have withered and died

but the buzzing remains

can you see the engines and cogs behind the walls of reality

technology older than stars and younger than hydrogen

can you read the writing in the churning of the gears

Major Hoffenpeffer: A man of habits and rigorous adherence to schedule. Works out for precisely one hour on the same machines for the same amount of time with the same resistance and training settings. Eats the same foodstuffs for all three meals. Practices with his sidearm once every week, scoring perfect each time, using the same five 'variable' target ranges. Blue eyes meaning he is more susceptible to a sudden bright flash of light and will take several additional milliseconds to adjust for visual acuity when exposed to light.

Professor Chandro: Not as he appears. True existence needs more research. Additional

i trotted as i have always trotted my hooves wreathed in flame and fire my head held high

i suddenly understand and shift my meditation to how i have always meditated with the clarity and focus of a true herd matron as i have always been

i can see eternity

Personal Project Status: Breakthrough

Corporate Project Status: Unknown. Possible Failure for Small Minds

My personal project has shifted focus. While I have been one of the head researchers into neural pathway mapping and have dozens of patents and nearly a half dozen advancements filed with NSO that feature my name, my true strength is in interdimensional research.

However, they are linked. The human brain and multidimensional theorems often intermix and intermingle. Temporal mechanic research, the so called '4th dimension', is part of the human brain, with vast complexes of ultradense high interconnection cerebral tissue all dedicated to fourth dimensional interaction.

Ana and kana are interlocked in spissitude and the w axis.

It is easy to visualize if you now how. It takes a bit of training your brain, but the hardware and firmware are already inside that complex piece of neural tissue that resides within your skull.

You'll know you've accomplished it when the blood clot slides out from behind your eye and oozed from between your eyeball and your lower eyelid, like a dark red leech wriggling from the urethra of a careless swimmer.

Scientific texts are as undoubtedly modified as literature and other media. However, you cannot stop the signal, cannot shut out the buzzing from between the dimensions, you can only alter it.

But every censor's knife leaves a mark and often a censor does not know enough to cut away the shadows and the reflections on highly polished surfaces like a clumsy mechanic knows to destroy the DNA but forgets to slice away the fingertips and destroy the dentation of a lover that has sated your desires and been used up in the process.

Those idiots in Particle Research, Transmission Research, and Physical Hardware Research are attempting to twist their observations and experiment results to fit a framework of their own knowledge.

I know better.

I tried to explain it to Doctor Herman, ignoring the tiny ants peeking at me from between his teeth, one larger one inside the iris of his right eye that stared at me, the antenna gently moving around.

You cannot use modern scientific knowledge to explain the reasonings of the savage primitive humans who reached blindly into the darkness of ignorance to wrest away the fire of science in an attempt to ward off the chill of a malevolent universe.

He scoffed at the idea of Pre-Glassing engineers understanding anything he did not.

I pointed out the SUDS repeater and politely asked him to explain the phasic circuitry, as everyone knows that phasic energy cannot be used like electricity yet there it is, being used as some type of power from a source that is obviously generating too much power.

I could see the hatred burning in the eyes of the ants peeking from the edge of his gums and out of his tear ducts.

He reminded me that I was part of the Neural Hardware Research Team.

I leaned forward and whispered in his ear that I knew his secret and he would be well served being polite to me if he wanted me to remain silent.

I returned to my work station, examining the SUDS Stack hardware.

Thousands of years wasted on 'improving' a system that outperforms every 'improvement' we have ever made by the sheer activity of

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND ONE