Preface
Spree is a novella that briefly explores the existential struggles of Lya and Jack Andersson. Lya, a xenogender woman in her early thirties, and Jack, her slacker husband about ten years her senior, are caught in a dystopian future in the early 2200s, where an Orwellian society of surveillance and control looms over their every move. Amid this oppressive backdrop, they wrestle with profound questions of identity and connection. Their journey reflects the Jungian interplay of opposing forces within the psyche, offering a stark mirror to the uncertainties of our increasingly ominous present.
Dharma Bum
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” — Philip K. Dick
It never stopped drizzling. It never ever stopped drizzling. Hence, the crimson red always washed away. Good, or bad? I didn’t know. I didn’t wanna know. “Inexplicably dead, this man is, isn’t he?” I thought, and turned to Lya to get her beautiful but sad-looking face remapped in the cybershop window in front of us. “And totally forgotten,” she replied, sobbing, as she heard my familiar thoughts echoing out through her overtly populated mind. The dead man was a dharma bum. An anarcho-spiritist monk. Recently ordained, by the look of it—the wet Sanskrit ink on his left hand revealed his true mission in life: Pravana, the fore-sound of everything. He’d been shot several times in the chest. Couldn’t be saved. Too much nanoblood lost. No re-vivification protocol—no activation of DNA-spliced synthetic neurons grown to mimic the cosmic lattice of human thought—could bring him back. It was a tech bordering on bullshit—or “zoopoieo,” as Lya would put it: life-giving, or something—a whispered science that toyed with the limits of mortality. A big no-no, a fucking TSN, a “Thou-Shalt-Not”—kinda thing, according to the tech-savvies at GNU-IS, the GNU’s Not Unix! Institute of Science. And a pity, yes, for sure. All the Zen folks in this otherwise stressed-out city were needed, truly, to weigh out the mind rotting platitudes of global consumerism and greed. It all sort of matched the old graffiti on the so called “Wall of Fog,” the United Nations’ giant financial skyscraper, downtown: “MONEY BEATS SOUL EVERY FUCKING TIME.” “Why has this man been killed?” Lya could hear me thinking. “And why the hell has he been lying here for hours, rotting away, without anybody taking notice? Had he bought something in the shop? Something worth killing him for? New eyes, perhaps? I know that the latest cyberoptic implants are really fucking expensive, really sought after by everyone, and especially by the rich transhumanist gangs of New Buckhead, who can’t get them because they’re not sanctioned by the UN. Well, the AI-drones are on it now, buzzing all over the fucking place, thanks to us, so, yes, maybe they’ll get off their rich fat asses and do something, finally. Those damn UN cops ain’t worth shit!”
Pravana
In the afterlife, where silence swells, Pravana hums, a cosmic pulse, a whispered thread, the fore-sound of all that lies ahead.
Echoes ripple through the nexus point, guiding dreams, yes, shaping destinies—a dehumanizing mess! the heartbeat of everything, the universe’s feathery breath, a fucking TSN, a big no-no—what else? in terms of what could be just a glitch in Man’s reality, or a slow, lingering death.
Listen closely— in its song, the future stirs, waiting to not be born.
Cryptesthesian
“The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.” — George Orwell
Lya, or Lyanna, had been my grandame for some years now, my wife, so to speak, using the ancient lingo of the 20th century. She’d gotten her name from some age-old disremembered sci-fi novella, written by a space and time tripper surnamed Martin, or something. It was fitting, she’d thought, because of her congenital ability to read people’s minds, or, more like, scan them, getting bits and pieces of synaptic data collected in an instant, then flat out printing them, on the back of her eyelids. A blessing at times, I imagined, but mostly a curse. When it all came down to it, she really didn’t wanna know shit about anybody or anything. She wanted peace, to be at ease, in the current flow of things. To the UN, Lya was a Cryptesthesian—or simply, a Crypt—a “freak” with mind-bending abilities far beyond their understanding. She didn’t just read thoughts. She dug in. She tore pieces from people’s minds like scraps off a trash heap, then spit them back out. Science had no idea what to do with her, and the government? To them, she was a ticking time bomb. But Lya wasn’t hiding in the hush of night. She often worked day shifts wherever she could find a paying job, shoulder to shoulder with the crowds, serving people and transhumans alike, blending in as if she were just another nobody in the system. On the surface, she did it all—and did it well. Inside? She was always shutting herself off, silencing the noise of a world trying to crawl into her skull. She’d learned to flick the switch, tuning down the volume of every thought, every emo-verse, every whisper that wasn’t hers. Just enough to slip through unnoticed. It was a tightrope act, one wrong move and she’d be snatched up by their AI-drones, carted off for whatever sick experiments they could dream up. Lucky for her, she wasn’t a textbook case. Her xenogender—a fluid, alter-human identity that was female-aligned but defied categorization—was a blind spot in their precious AI’s eugenics database. This ambiguity confused their scans and muddled their systems, allowing her to evade detection and walk free a little while longer. “This Orwellian Earth Inc. is bad enough,” she always said, “and I don’t wanna listen to all the AI overhauled shit people rant about in their virtual daydreams.” But it didn’t apply to me, she always added. I was her man, her “grangent of gents,” and proud like a strutting horny peacock for her fervidly saying that. “When you make love to me, Jack, I truly and deeply revel in hearing, and feeling, your hippocampus scream, of joy, fright and what not. It comforts me, haunts me, elevates me, and makes me believe that I’m real, tangible, unforgettable, and not a damn freak.” I really didn’t know what “Orwellian” meant before I met Lya. But now I did. Some dude by the name of George Orwell had written a speculative novel, a couple of hundred years ago, about a thought-controlling state apparatus that mind-fucked people. Well, what could I say? I didn’t like the book; it made me violently angry, but I got the point. Anarchistically. We’d been there and done that for more than three centuries. And we were still doing it. “Thank you, George!” I whispered. “That’ll be all.” Lya’s parents, Nikolai and Irina—better known as Nick and Ira—Zimin, a renowned fifth-generation Odesan-Hoosier couple, both xenoanthropologists, were all into science, or, as it were, fictional science. Speculative shit, like good old George. They had published quite a few vade mecums on the subject; diaries, essays, short stories, scribbles in the ether that nowadays didn’t mean shit if they weren’t plausible, relatable, psychologically correct, or just fucking uplifting. Anyway, that was my take on it, but who was I to judge or fudge anything, really. I was just a soldier, MIA, to the UN Armed Forces, a refusnik, a social pariah in a dead zone of misunderstood poets and writers, visiting this burnt-out reality in a lucid nightmare. Gypsies, finks and outcasts, that’s who we were; the onerous men and women of yesterday. “We fight, we write, about the human plight, and that’s that,” I always convinced myself to believe. Nothing more, nothing less. And it didn’t mean shit. It just was. Like Nick and Ira’s so called “sci-fi prophesy.” It was correct, psychologically, but not very uplifting. A bit too Orwellian for my humble sluggish taste, their fictional dystopia had now become our stark reality. Lyanna never talked about Nick and Ira. “They were no parents of mine,” she always iterated when I tried to ask about them. They could never accept her xenogender transition. To them, she was always Gennady—or Gena—”an effeminate androphilic Crypt by choice, if anything,” they’d said dismissively, and she fucking hated them for it. “My brain is now fully rewired, my love,” Lya said, listening in on my thoughts, “and today I’m an enthymeme, a blossoming yet hidden flower, a black rose that only grows on barren land.” “Well, my beautiful black rose, me, myself and I... we all love you, we do, whether your brain is fully rewired or not,” I jovially whispered into her left ear, as if merely putting a thought in her head and not speaking, and gently grabbed her by the arm. “Get something to eat? I’m starving. The police’ll get here soon. Let’s fuck off, before they do!” “Sure, honey,” she said, putting her right hand down my pants to see if I was still awake, getting hard, or just dreaming my precious time away in my old, rusty OP, Miss “Olly Polly,” my very own, handcrafted oneironautics pod.
Burnout
Today, my mind wanders through the cyclical nature of consciousness, shifting between a clear perception of reality and a hazy, hallucinatory tapestry woven from imagination. Can I truly observe the workings of my own mind? Does my connection to the transcendent fade when I neglect to examine it? I find myself wondering about this, Jack. What captivates me is the potential to disrupt this endless journey through consciousness—the relentless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. While some seek spiritual emancipation through advanced meditative practices, I feel drawn to the intricate web of cognition we explore together. There’s something profound about the mnemonic techniques we employ, catalyzing a transformative “burnout” that leads to shared enlightenment. At the heart of it all lies the release of energy—a force, a rhythm, an elevated state of awareness. Regardless of the xenosophical framework, the fundamental question remains: how does this transformation occur? I can hear you, Jack, suggesting that it’s about “detaching from the self to merge with something greater.” And then there’s the idea that “true knowledge emerges only through silencing the inner dialogue.” This insatiable curiosity about existence binds us, reflected in the emo-lingo we share. Yet, I grapple with the paradox of life’s most enigmatic process—how do I pour more water into a vessel that is already full? How can I release additional energy when all my resources are already engaged in the act of perceiving and experiencing life? This question feels insurmountable, yet I sense there are pathways that transcend rationality. Reason itself, that finely tuned instrument of human intellect, has the capacity to reconstruct environments where entirely new paradigms emerge. It’s intriguing how reason can articulate the ineffable through paradoxical emo-lingo. Its inherent contradictions don’t diminish its truth or comprehensibility; rather, they enrich this exploration of existence. These thoughts linger, waiting for the moment we can share them, Jack, weaving our understanding together in the tapestry of our shared journey.
To Be or Not to Be
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” — Carl Gustav Jung
Lyanna was sound asleep. I looked at her. My eyes touched her silky smooth skin, lingered there for a while, then regressed, slowly, back into a semi-dark, blueish abysmal world of nightly dread and anguish—the buzzing strobe-light from the handheld projected screen faintly mirrored my pale, unshaven face on the wall. And there it was, in front of me, silver-glimmering in the faint aglow, my beloved Mac Quid Pro Quo. It was a bit old, couldn’t keep up with the Apple Inc. AROS software releases anymore; the Augmented Reality integration didn’t work, lost it’s pairing beyond its 3D EyeTap all the fucking time, the machine learning algorithms had clogged up, worn themselves out, and Siri, well, she’d been ass-fucked by malevolent AI’s too many times—she simply wasn’t there anymore, couldn’t be found, neither in the EFI nor out on the AppleNet. But I didn’t care, didn’t need her anymore, because I ran the newest GNU OS on Manitoban reverse engineered Apple hardware; a parallel quantum-based 8 exaFLOPS system that aligned itself with my thoughts, and not with somebody else’s. A true Hack Mac, purely darwinized and reinvented with a lightning-fast HURD X kernel. And free, totally free, as in “to be or not to be, that is the anathematized question, you sanctimonious nobs of the Holy Church of Jobs.” Nice. Really fucking nice! You just had love those goddamn Manitoban hackers! Bona fide wizards and lizards of the XNet they were, the whole bunch of them. “Fuck, I really need to call Jesse and Tisha,” I thought, turning away from the dimly lit wall, as if attempting to hide my stupid-looking face from the AR. “Soon, very soon. Otherwise they’ll think I’ve bailed on them. Not good. I have to get that fucking dough from somewhere.” Jesse and Tisha were close friends of mine—and of Lya’s. A beautiful young couple in their early twenties, I affectionately called them “Mohavky,” a playful Odesan take on “Mohawks,” the Bear People, due to their age-old tribal haircuts. We sometimes met outside New Buckhead, at their small hack shack in one of Atlanta’s shabbier districts. There, they worked undisturbed and hidden, using homemade, high-quality fake ID cyberimplants to evade the ever-present AI-drones. Their actual homestead, however, was far away—a rustic cottage near the Nunavut border in northern Manitoba, part of the First Nations’ confederal district. How they navigated between these places, these contrasting worlds, I never knew. “They’re true oneironauts,” Lya once suggested. “They probably reset their pod’s start and endpoints on their own, bypassing the AppleNet’s transit nodal checks and ghosting past the UN quantum mainframe.” She was likely right, though I’d never asked. It wasn’t my business. Jesse was, in fact, a poet, like me. Tisha, while she occasionally wrote, devoted herself primarily to Zen practices. As an ordained anarcho-spiritist nun, she balanced her spiritual pursuits with her role as a First Nations tech administrator. Her work on the XNet grid played a critical part in shielding and connecting the Zen Cyber Centers scattered across the Hoosier Islands. We loved them to the bones—our closest friends, you might say, despite rarely sharing our day-to-day struggles with them. One of Jesse’s poems lingered in my mind. It had been published a few years ago on the underground XNet Zen forums and had become widely admired. I loved it, too. It evoked a time long lost—one that no longer existed, at least not here in this fucked-up timeline. It felt like a precursor to what might come or what might have already occurred elsewhere, elsewhen—a thought pattern Lya recognized effortlessly and embraced wholeheartedly, rather than trying to keep it out. The poem had been dedicated to me. “Dear Jack,” the title read. “A poem in response.” I was dumbfounded. Jesse was truly something else. What a fucking honor! What a brotherly delight! His preceding meta-comment had me self-probing, self-strobing, poetically, over and over again: “As I’m reading this, a crow flies across my vision. I couldn’t have intended a better psychopomp.”
Dear Jack
A poem in response
Stepping into the Dream:
In a place, in a landscape where we can be silently, violently broken down into so many pieces where you cannot look away from the aftermath but are put back together as a rendition of unity as life has, always have been—there’s no blood to contend with or there is but that’s just part of the sacrifice and not meant for cleaning up—the air becomes us as we go into fire and come out water and split again and again until there are more parts than we ever knew we had before.
I did dream last night and I sat for an eternity staring over the sea turquoise and violet— across from me there were seven arches, various widths and heights.
I just sat and watched the water flow through them.
And after that I went into a place where we all got changed into many costumes.
Towards Unity:
And this is what we break ourselves for the knife we give our permission to for the ceremony that reveals, conceals, destroys, sustains but—like a kiss! —then creates as we stumble and go lining the altars we’ve long lost and let weeds grow over cover, covering ourselves as we fear to be naked as we hate the land for turning us into needs as we frighten the birds for seeing better than we do as we howl at the sea as if we have the better voice—
Is this what the bleeding feet are for then, brother? That we’ll mend ourselves one day with endless shorelines and the wind and the clouds that the green of the world will finally—just finally!—touch us and go about the work of making us unfractured.
Disremembering
“The world was so recent, that many things lacked names.” — Gabriel García Márquez
The poem unfolded like a half-disremembered dream. Seven immense arches rose out of a flickering haze, their surfaces alive with shifting glyphs—old, older than anything I’d ever known, yet somehow familiar. They shimmered in hues I couldn’t name, stretching endlessly upward, cutting through layers of molten-gold fog. Beneath them, the ground wasn’t ground at all, just a pulsing field of brightness that swirled like liquid glass. The arches hummed, each with its own low, resonant tone, like they were speaking to each other in some emo-lingo lost to man. Between them ran streams of glowing data—histories, futures, fragments of moments that could’ve been, might still be, or never were. I didn’t belong here, not really. But for a moment, I let myself sink into it, let it wash over me, this endless landscape of everything and nothing. Pulling back, I gasped once, then again, the buzz of reality slipping into focus. A fragment of strobe-light still clung to my thoughts, like a neon spark caught in the folds of a holocurtain. I wrote by thinking circular, instead of linear, in eights and noughts, instead of ones; a blink here and there to word-wrap, punctuate, or such, and erasing shit by nodding. Loved it! Could jack off at the same time, if I wanted to. You know, just looking at Lya, lying there fully spread out on the no-poster bed, naked, with her cybereyes closed, had gotten me hard. “Hold on, Mr. Andersson, hold on!” I inadvertently thought to myself. “Stop dicking around in my mind! Get that stupid poem outlined. In plain text. Do it. Do it now! Don’t be such a fucking pansy. Write!” I momentarily split my focus—one, two, three seconds—reconnecting with the AR. Streams of data coursed through me, fragments of past and future sparking across my mind. With a practiced shift, I gathered my thoughts, centered myself, and blinked twice to initiate the writing mode. Text began to form, translating virtual echoes into real words.
Pro-Rata
In the encrypted scan of Man’s enigma, his moves defy the algorithms, embracing his ethereal origin, a being misplaced in this three-dimensional prison.
As I digitally imprint his face on mine, I sense a life divergent, drifting between quantum realities.
Dreaming his future dreams, I feel my world dissolving in the constant static, fragmented by the hyper-flux of data: Am I dead, or is he? Pro-Rata —a homolog of Zen folk mastery.
I re-remember: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?”
In communion with his non-self, I share the profound humility of artificial absence, as life’s inception breaks free from the constraints of programmed fate.
Connecting through an emotional bond, I acknowledge this as our last real encounter, before the strings of corrupted code begin their insidious hack from within— I haven’t forgotten and I will never forget that time actually stopped when I turned around and witnessed him awake —for God’s sake, from his prolonged life-like slumber.
The dead man from yesterday had really gotten to me. He didn’t have to die. They could’ve just fucked him up a bit, broken his nose or something, not gunned him down like they did, like a stray dog, or a “stay-the-fuck-out-of-my-way” homolog, repeatedly, ruthlessly, twenty-five fucking times. “Let go, or be dragged,” like the xenosophers of the 21st century used to say. “The true believers of the UN were the false achievers of Zazen,” or was it the other way around. I couldn’t remember. Damn! Those UN fascist assholes. Their disremembering program had made all of us dumb, or at least, numb. “One of these days I’m gonna get them, for sure, the whole bloody bunch of them,” I mentally raged into the vastness of my digitally imbued mind. “Really beautiful poem,” Lya suddenly whispered, putting a quick stop to my obnoxious line of reasoning. “I couldn’t help overhearing your thoughts, feeling your rage, struggling, hoping, loving, wanting…” She paused, looked at me passionately. “Come over here, honey,” she continued, now urging me, with a hot to trot smile on her face, to get up from the floor and walk myself over to the bed. “Let me give you something, something that’ll make you sleep. Knee-deep in bliss. I promise.”
Neo-anamnesis
We stand at the precipice of opposing extremes, Jack, within a dichotomous world that often separates rather than unites our fundamental elements. The mechanistic perception of reality lays bare the conditions of existence, yet it distances us from the deeper purpose behind those conditions—the meaning of life and humanity’s role within a vast, multidimensional entirety. This separation extends beyond the external world; it seeps into our relationships, clouding our ability to recognize the “underlying”—the intuitively genuine and the logically contradictory. It amplifies the feeling of alienation, making it all the more challenging to surmount. The journey through consciousness seems to be at a critical threshold, yet which threshold holds the greatest significance? This question lingers in my mind, Jack. “I am myself, a unique individual, because I am a completely unique pattern of relationships,” as xenophysicists assert. This notion resonates profoundly, indicating that the interaction between our consciousness and the surrounding world forms the very basis of our experiences—regardless of whether we choose to distinguish between an inner and outer sphere. Everything possesses inherent simultaneity, a paradoxical dynamism that cannot exist without wholeness. It’s a beautiful complexity, isn’t it? The body and the soul are “one,” intertwined in a dance of existence. The need for being and non-being is but a projection of humanity’s eternal pursuit of perfection and metaphysical androgyny. I think of us, Jack, and how our connection embodies this intricate interplay. Our relationship is a tapestry woven from countless threads—each moment, each shared thought, each silent understanding adds to the pattern of who we are. In this light, our journey becomes not just a personal exploration but a collective one, a shared quest to bridge the gaps that separate us from the essence of existence. As I reflect on these ideas, I feel a sense of urgency to embrace the wholeness of our experience. The world may present us with dichotomies, but within those contrasts lies the potential for unity—a neo-anamnesis. Together, we can navigate this landscape, this collective unconscious dream state, seeking the underlying truths that connect us to each other and to the greater cosmos. I look forward to sharing these thoughts with you, Jack, to unraveling the mysteries of our existence together, and to crossing those thresholds hand in hand.
New Sun
“The only thing that matters is what you do, and how you do it.” — Ian M. Banks
Breakfast. I always got my breakfast at Shev’s. It didn’t matter how early, how late, how tired, or how stoned I was—the coffee shop next to our apartment building had become my steady waterhole. The dude who owned it, Iggy Shevchenko—a middle-aged Odesan immigrant from the Azores, a former UN correctional district in the Atlantic—was a good friend, or rather, he’d become one, because I always paid him straight up, with either creds or dope. Sure, he was a psiaddict, never said no to a good, pure batch of psilocybin, or DMT, for that matter, if I could get hold of some from the transhumanists downtown. But he would never fuck up his business, let anything whatsoever jeopardize the utmost efforts he made daily in managing his beloved Café—the lovechild of his dear old mother, Mrs. Shevchenko. Iggy and his grandame, Sue, kept the coffee shop open all around the clock. How they were able to manage that, I didn’t know. They seemed never to sleep. Or maybe it was just me, who couldn’t distinguish their reality—and subsequently, mine—from the so-called “Spree,” the backdoor to Akasha, the collective unconscious dream state that didn’t end upon awakening, but kept me on hold, sort of, as if I were still asleep, dreaming lucidly, or steaming deucedly, from the indescribable pleasure that Lya always gave me, “head on,” so to speak, if I couldn’t relax, alter my subversive mindset, and consequently, close my eyes to the reality that was the Spree—the real world beyond the illusion of day-to-day life. Or, as Lya would put it: “It’s a kind of neo-anamnesis, a way to remember what has already been disremembered. A dangerous thing, sure, but necessary if we’re going to survive this mess, this dehumanized society of Friedmanic agitprop.” We all feared it, but it had its exigent upsides. “Thanks, Iggy, my man,” I politely announced, as I opened the front door and turned around to leave the coffee shop. “As always, the best fucking java in town!” “Sure, Jack, see you on the rebound,” Iggy shouted back and pointed at me with his index finger and thumb formed into a gun. “Say hi to Lyanna for me! Much love, and thanks!” “We’ll do! Love to Sue and your Mama!” Mrs. Shevchenko, or Lady Shev, as she was commonly known, was a grandame to revere, undoubtedly, and to fear. Nobody questioned her, nobody fucked with this high-standing Odesan silver fir. Years and years of hard societal negotiations and shit—with the UN, with corporate scavengers, with every would-be invader who thought they could bring this part of town “up to code,” reliable, compliant, and economically viable in the greedy eyes of the capitalist world—had shaped Lady Shev into what she was. Not a ruler, not here in “Nove Sonce,” New Sun, where rulers were just another vestige of the old world. No, instead, she’d become what we Sunians would call an Anarcho-Queen—a facilitator, an organizer, a force of nature holding the township together without claiming it as her own. Smack in the middle of Atlanta, within the UN federal district of Hoosier Islands, New Sun stood as a “testament to anarchist resilience.” That’s how Lya always put it, and honestly, I couldn’t argue with her. “It’s no state, no sovereign territory,” she emphasised. “It’s a collective experiment in survival, run on principles of decentralization and direct action, its streets governed by the people who live on them, not by some faceless authority. There are no permits for survival here, no bureaucratic hoops to jump through to exist. If it bears any resemblance to history, it’s to the anarchist communes of Catalonia during the Climate Wars of the late 21st century, or the cooperative assemblies in ancient Rojava—a precarious balance of cooperation and autonomy that somehow worked, against all odds.” Twenty thousand residents or so called it home—a patchwork of Odesans, Hoosiers, Catalans, Rojavans, and Swedes—I was one of the latter, comprising about five percent of the total. No more peace-loving Norse wargs or Bjorn-fucking-Borgs, or whatever, left in the world to question or make fun of for their unwavering social conscience. The nuke over Stockholm in 2055 wiped out the whole fucking lot of them from the northern hemisphere. Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Balts, Finns—you name it—they all died from either the blast or the acid rains that followed. Well, not the exiles, of course, to which my Swedish-Romanisæl ancestry belonged. I’d heard the stories, and they weren’t pretty. “Hell on Earth,” as my old beautiful granny always used to say when reminiscing about ancient times. The Sea of a Thousand Screams, it was now called, the ocean covering most of Northern Europe down to the outskirts of Munich, the capital of NRB—the Nationalist Republic of Bavaria, or, as I usually preferred calling it, the world’s unwiped asshole. “Wake up, honey,” I whispered softly into Lyanna’s left ear. “It’s time to get up.” Lying there, still naked, and untouched by the harsh, overlit morning, Lyanna, my beautiful grandame, the love of my life, my beginning and my end, represented everything I ever wanted in a lover, in a life companion, a soulmate, a friend. Did she feel the same for me? I didn’t know. “I can only hope,” I thought. “You know I do, my love,” she instantly affirmed, though almost inaudible, upon opening her eyes, slowly and passionately, with a big, tuckered out smile on her face.
Lyanna
Lyanna, my love, wake up! It’s time to breathe, seethe again this forgotten flicker of age-old dust and DMT-spiked poetry.
Ripping thoughts, feelings from skulls, from the Spree— flashes of synapse and virtual culls burning behind your eyes, incessantly!
You’re never ready, are you? Just want silence, not this Orwellian hum, not the AI sludge seeping through in all, and then the fascist non-U.
But with me, it’s different—I know—Pro-Rata. I’m your fucking man, your “grangent of gents,” a title you savor and spit out like erotic data.
You devour me, feast on my screams— this peer-to-peer dominion of mind over matter is all there is, all there ever was, joy, bliss, fear—a beautiful thrashing of claws in the raw grind.
I make you feel something, don’t I? Maybe real, maybe not, maybe just less freak— like death, or a Zen reject, pressed against your naked thigh.
“You’re on a mnemonic streak, honey,” you inject. Well, maybe I am, maybe not.
Someone will know, for sure, someone will eventually throw my sorry ass—alas, into the UN disremembering moor!
Lyanna, my love, wake up! We need to claw out of this damn hellhole—there’s a mole, unborn, in our forlorn dreams.
Dream Together
“The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.” — Margaret Atwood
As the sunlight crept through the gaps in the nanocarbon blinds, a soft glow played on her skin, blurring the line between my reality and hers. The world beyond the window stirred with the sounds of city life resuming its relentless march, but here, in this fleeting cocoon of warmth and breath, time hesitated, lingered. The moment felt fragile, as if a whisper or a stray thought could shatter it, spilling us both into the grind of another wearying day. I held my breath and willed it to last. Perhaps, in these stolen eternities, there was a reminder that love could still flourish even in a society of decay and indifference.
Enthymeme
In the neon-lit sprawl of tomorrow, I’ll hoist the black rose of synthetic essence—its fragrant code will weave through the data stream, perfuming the holonight’s Pro-Rata enthymeme with sweet binary echoes of virtual “Qui Vive.”
Lya’s cyberoptic gaze met mine, and for an instant, it was as though nothing else existed—no fucking UN-imposed curfew deadlines, no bleak New Sun Times headlines, no relentless noise. Just us. Just this. A quiet sanctuary carved out of an otherwise chaotic world. I kissed her forehead, as if to seal this fragile peace, feeling the coolness of the morning against the warmth of her skin. “I’ve got you some coffee,” I said and held the fibercup under her nose, so as to lure her into welcoming yet another day of struggle. “Thanks,” she said softly, her eyes cycling from red to green to blue—a familiar signal of her understanding of my often complex yet transparent state of mind. “Lovely!” Survival, each and every day, was the whole idea. And coping with all the corporate shit that was going on, all the time, year in and year out, infecting all of our minds with AI bullshit. The UN disremembering program posed the ultimate threat. It’s sentinels were lurking in the Spree, resembling shadows without selves, coded with self-learning algorithms that detected every anomaly, every non-assimilated behavior by humans. The only means of outsmarting them was to dream together, entering someone else’s specific dream state and hiding there, behind the protagonist’s back, in a parallel individual unconscious overlapping that of the collective—a nearly transparent, thin layer of an ever-expanding onion. Lya and I did this, continuously, but it was expensive. The oneironautic method required a special key, a key that had to be re-initiated on every new try, and hacked each time with a new pairing set of algorithms in advanced Python X syntax, which neither I nor Lya could write ourselves. UNC’s, UN creds... that was the main fucking issue, day after day, challenge upon challenge. I was always broke, it seemed, never had enough dough to pay the rent, or the AppleNet XG uplink. I had to hack into that, every month, much to the great dismay of Lya, who didn’t agree with my semi-illegal activities. She feared for me, imagining the possibility of my arrest and imprisonment. “I can’t live without you, Jack!” she would repeatedly exclaim. “We need to find another way to manage this, to pay for everything, and to keep ourselves going.” She, however, did get paid now and then for her work at the GNU-IS, midtown, but it wasn’t enough, and not always in UNC’s—the only payment method that Apple Inc., and all the other sanctioned corporate entities, accepted. “Do you have the re-initiated key?” Lyanna asked me. “I do,” I answered with a smile, opening my right hand. “Here it is.” The key glowed with a deep, black obsidian hue, its rounded bow etched with the distinctive Manitoban logo. On its left side, a small inscription read: “THE ONLY TRUE REVOLUTION IS THE LIBERATION OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.” Though it was worn, bearing evident marks of heavy use and signs of overheating from the nanoprocessors’ relentless strain, it still worked. After a few minutes we were gone. Free, in an eternal moment of bliss. The veil over the world had been lifted; we were in the Spree.
Ghosts of Tomorrow
Day lies naked— unmeasured, beyond now and later, the sun’s first breath fades into yesterday.
I hold on violently— killing off my words, my strife, the slow embrace of death gives meaning to life.
Time undone, unwritten hours, weightless longing, my shadow sways— a sigh upon the tidal wave of everlasting passion.
I move on silently— unfolding paths unseen, unbidden, the image of twilight whispers of unveiling.
Night unbound, cleansing rot, the ghosts of tomorrow, my memory sings— a final, fevered note.
Shadow
“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
We always ended up in Chickasha, a quiet, abandoned Chickasaw town on the First Nations’ eastern shores, Lya and I, when first entering into the Spree. I didn’t know why. And I had never really thought about it. Until now. Something had changed. Something felt unfamiliar, like a glitch in the synaptic code, subtle, but there, behind the scenes, making the surroundings clearer, the seaside grains redder, the ethereal sky bluer, the details of everything sharper... I could feel it, down deep in the core of my unconscious self. What was it? Had one of the sentinels found us? If so, where was it? No fucking shadow lurked around here. It had nowhere to hide, in this disremembered place of Pro-Rata. At least, I couldn’t see anyone, or anything remotely looking like it. No fluctuation visible in the ether, no Fata Morgana discernible in the “rether”—the space between spaces in this two-person collective unconscious. I turned to Lya, swiftly, and saw in her face, a fright I had never seen before, getting a hold of her, engulfing her, scaring the shit out of her. “What the fuck is happening?” I buzzed strongly as if shouting. “Honey, I’m scared,” Lya whispered back, wavering her hands in the air as if trying to erase something, or maybe just trying to calm me down, to calm the whole damn situation down. “We are not alone, Jack, I can feel it.” Among the left-over stuff after my father, New Sun Times war correspondent Gunnar Andersson, I had found an old literary magazine from the early 21st century, Radon Journal, Issue 33—a half-torn, half-unreadable piece of history that he’d hidden far down in a holobox of old papers, books, notes, and other peculiar memorabilia. The magazine had a dog-eared section, worn smooth from years of handling. Carefully unfolded, it revealed a poem—a free verse scrap my father had called a “masterpiece.” It was written by a Swedish indiepoet named John Douglas Andersson, a man who, according to family lore, was our earliest known ancestor. Fuck—my parents had even named me after him, or at least after his nickname. The annotation alongside the poem claimed that he’d published his final book of poetry around 2030, after which he vanished into the unknown, leaving behind only whispers of his fate. The poem meant something to me, something I couldn’t really put my finger on. And I always got wound up by it, by the strange notion of time they had during those olden days. “Time,” I thought. “Those old fuckers really thought they understood time? As in time and space? Stupid fucks! They really didn’t know what was coming, did they?” And then, softly, I heard my father’s voice. He was reading the poem out loud, as if from a distance. His voice was soft, gentle, kind—the voice I remembered from his deathbed. Lyanna heard it too. She always listened in when I got stuck pondering something, when I was lost in thoughts I didn’t understand—or didn’t want to understand. In New Sun, everyone referred to my father as “Gunny,” a nickname earned from his sharp-shooting coverage of the UN Civil War in 2165—the year of my birth. Yet, to me, he was never Gunny. The man I knew was a different kind of sharp-shooter: a lover of poetry who aimed his insights at “us” rather than “them.” He often quoted the renowned 20th-century poet and playwright Samuel Beckett, saying, “All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.” Lya and I both settled down. Calm. At ease. There was nothing to be scared of. We weren’t alone, true. But the shadow in the Spree wasn’t a sentinel. It was my father. Free, subliminal—a fucking selfless derring-do.
Time
We spoke of time— once measureless, once vast, when stars were cast like seeds across an endless dark.
Now the sky holds no breath, its dust is thick as regret, the rivers of hours dried to whispers.
We do not sit at its banks; there are no streams to follow, all flows stopped— a cracked earth beneath our feet.
Seasons once caged our days; now they falter, unmoored, trapped in an unending dusk.
We said we would make time a permeated song— but the instruments are broken, the chords lost, melodies buried and forgotten.
In this boundless pain, we seek no dream of tomorrow; we haunt the memory of today.
What first scattered the stars has left us in a night where nothing begins, where the last afterglow never fades.
Author’s Note
Spree is a one-off experimental foray into speculative writing. I thought, why not try something completely different? Why not blend the prophetic depth of Philip K. Dick, George Orwell’s grim realism, Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological edge, with Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism, Ian M. Banks’ visionary complexity, Margaret Atwood’s incisive social critique, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchistic clarity—a mix of raw honesty, fleeting introspection, surreal realism, and dark optimism? Something personal yet fantastical, gritty but tech-savvy, provocative without being explicit, crudely empathetic, strangely wise, rough around the edges but still tender... science fiction! Yes, that’s it! That’s the perfect genre. Why not step out of my comfort zone, shed the familiar, and journey to a place of genuine discomfort, even shittiness, employing an entirely different set of creative tools? And with that, scribble down something that not even my alter ego would be able to shy away from touching. Well, I did, and it turned out to be quite a ride! I swore I’d never, ever do something like this again—it damn near tore me apart from the inside out.
As part of this rough ride, I’m stoked to feature an excerpt from Dear Jack, a deeply personal poem crafted for me by my good friend and fellow poet, J. D. Harms. It’s shared here with his kind permission.
John Douglas Andersson April 2025
The novella may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without a copyright request. For permission requests, please contact: info@name.se