Tag: fiction

Ongoing manga: Tengoku Daimakyō, by Masakazu Ishiguro

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Arte, ReseñasLeave a comment

I dislike reviewing manga series when they haven’t finished; more often than not, how all the parts end up tied up together influences my view of the entire story. There are quite a few manga series that I follow and love but that haven’t ended yet, like Dungeon Meshi, Kaiju No. 8, Boy’s Abyss, Chi no Wadachi, etc. However, a week ago I came across the most intriguing manga in a good while, Tengoku Daimakyō (the title apparently translates to Heavenly Delusion), which has “only” reached chapter 55 (such series tend to end at about chapter 100), but that I’ve been looking forward to sit down and continue discovering what it has to offer.

This story is an odd mix of the Fallout series of games and The Last of Us (the first game, not the TV series, and certainly not the second game). We follow two storylines. In the first one, a bunch of kids are living in a controlled environment designed to raise them in a certain way while isolating them them from the outside world. The kids are tended to by AI, as well as by shady adults who seem to be guided by a cult-like drive to create a “heaven on earth,” where people won’t be discriminated in any way. You quickly realize that these kids slash test subjects have been manipulated genetically to whatever extent, and some of the most interesting scenes of that storyline involve children being unable to comprehend how utterly nuts their environment is; they are unfazed when they come across babies that look like alien squids, because that’s how human babies look like as far as they know. One of the children mingling with the rest straight up looks like an alien. We are only given a bit more information than the children, because we follow some of the adults that handle the operation. In general, the whole deal works like a Fallout vault.

The main storyline involves a twenty-year-old redheaded bodyguard who wears a cool jacket, and the fifteen-year-old kid for whom she’s working. They live in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Japan after some cataclysm destroyed a world that had achieved artificial general intelligence. Enough time has passed that the newest generations don’t even care how things ended up this bad. Anyway, for unknown reasons, disturbing monsters with superpowers are roaming the place, which has prevented human beings from establishing lasting settlements.

The aforementioned redhead, who is the main protagonist of this tale, was offered work by a sick young woman who promptly died, but not before bequeathing the redhead a ray gun along with the task of accompanying the fifteen-year-old kid to locate a place called Heaven, where someone who shares a face with the kid will need to receive an injection of a mysterious medicine. Our main couple sets off together to explore a ruined Japan. The redheaded girl also intends to locate the two people she remembers from before a monster attack landed her in a hospital bed for about a year.

The anime adaptation has already been produced. Here’s the trailer:

Troublingly enough, though, it has been picked up in the US by Disney Plus. This is a casually hardcore series that involves regular nudity, murder, The Thing-like grossness, a thirteen-year-old prostitute/hotel tycoon, rape, child rape, and such. There’s thematic stuff that Western fiction wouldn’t touch with a teen foot pole; for example, one of the settlements that the main couple comes across is controlled by a group of female supremacists that cut off women’s breasts if they are deemed too big, that kill any older men they come across, but capture attractive young men (and kids) to keep them as “seed pigs”. I have to assume that the anime, which I’ve barely started watching, must have been toned down significantly, which would be a shame.

All in all, fantastic worldbuilding, very detailed landscapes of a post-apocalyptic Japan, natural-sounding dialogue, cool fight scenes, and a narrative that gets sadder and more tragic the longer it runs. The only downside for me, quite minor in comparison, is that a couple of “evil” characters come across a bit over the top. Anyway, check Tengoku Daimakyō out. Or don’t. Do whatever you want.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 100: AI-generated audiochapter

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

For a measly hundred euros, I will share all my knowledge of the Younger Dryas cataclysm. This audiochapter covers chapter 100 of my ongoing novel.

Cast

  • Leire: a vexing thief that hangs out in the sewers under Riften like a common rat
  • Alberto the blob: Argonian fellows

I have produced audiochapters for this entire sequence so far. A total of two hours, five minutes and two seconds. Check them out.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 100 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

The mound of sentient ooze pulses with a sloshing noise, as if it were gulping down foodstuff to fuel its bloat-bound brain.

“Leire, you need to stop having a meltdown every few minutes.”

I take a deep breath as I wipe away my tears with the pad of my thumb.

“What I need to do,” I start in a slow drawl, “is grab the spare umbrella and head home, and by home I mean mommy’s apartment in the hills. The trip back there is going to feel like a journey to another galaxy, but the hot tongue of my petite amie will purge my memories of slimy, eyeball-studded freaks. After having been so thoroughly humiliated by a gelatinous mass of putrid flesh, I need to be hugged and fucked by mommy to keep the dark thoughts at bay. You can return to your realm of rotting slime, and leave me the fuck alone.”

A gloopy chuckle slurps through the blob’s bulk.

“Oh no, we ain’t done yet.”

“Sure we are.”

“You want a repeat of this evening, more hours of wasted overtime at the office, filled instead with you and I arguing? Why not? After all, you don’t care if you get fired.”

My eyelids twitch.

“By all means, please keep pestering me until I slit my wrists.”

“I’m going to force you into a lucid state by any means necessary,” the blob assures me acidly, “and I swear that we will sort this shit out before you leave tonight, because I have dealt with you as much as I can handle.”

“Why don’t you come over here and shove your ‘any means necessary’ up my ass, you quivering wad of phlegm?”

“I’m not going to punish a masochist like you with a good time. Now, I can’t expect someone who has lived a lifetime as a pile of garbage to change overnight, but I will get you to hear me out and learn the true scope of our problem.”

I groan, then run my fingers through my hair. For a second I fear that my hand will come away sticky with black ooze.

“Fuck me with a spiked dildo,” I grumble. I crack my neck, I loosen my shoulders. “You want to share a part of your universe with me?” I extend both arms, palms up, toward the interdimensional intruder, and make beckoning motions by curling my fingers. “Alright, spit it out!”

The office light fixtures are casting their cold glow on the blob’s putrid sludge and his dozens of eyeballs, that stare blankly as they bob like corks. The drumming of raindrops against the windows, along with the low rumble of thunder, have given way to an oppresive silence interrupted only by sloshing and slurping noises emanating from the bulk.

“Earth to cum monster!” I shout.

Alberto harrumphs, and a glob of slime, airborne debris that resembles a greasy pebble, splats into a puddle.

“Are you truly willing to hear me out, or are you going to pull out a fork and stab yourself in the neck again?”

An electric echo crawls up my spine. I remember that drive to dig my carotid artery, and the agony that sewed my mouth shut. It makes me shudder. I rub whatever remains of the four-holed wound from when I attempted to kill a rotten bitch.

“Of course you witnessed that as well, you unmitigated fuck-weasel. Yes, I’ve had my share of stabbings and forkings and plenty of other shit I prefer to keep to myself. I committed atrocious acts when I had to. Regardless, I will listen, as long as you have something intriguing to tell! Then I’m gone. I intend to finish off what’s left of the evening sucking on mommy’s nipples like a starved infant.”

“Can you care about anything other than yourself and your buxom lover?” the blob asks, his voice tinged with irritation.

I huff.

“I’m telling you, dude, some of the stuff that went down in this sorry excuse for a planet is, in fact, rather enticing! Do you know about the Younger Dryas cataclysm?”

“What? The Younger-what?”

“Picture this scenario: we’re in the Late Pleistocene, a period when much of North America, from the Canadian arctic down to Missouri, was buried under three-kilometers-thick glaciers. Back then, woolly mammoths, dire wolves, sabre-toothed tigers and ground sloths inhabited the frigid wilderness. They didn’t bother to build cities or write stories or any of that shit: they enjoyed the great outdoors, as well as the pleasures of eating, drinking, swimming in freshwater ponds, rolling in a mound of fresh dung to warm up, and fucking each other senseless, for thousands of generations. That megafauna may have taken delight in some of the most liberal sex positions ever practiced by the animal kingdom. They also suffered, mourned, and remembered their friends and family. Imagine these beasts in the frozen wastes of Alaska and the Yukon territory, their skulls buried in so-called ‘muck’ deposits that nowadays you can excavate from tundra and glacial soil. In the skull fragments, scientists discovered impact-related microspherules, tiny beads formed in the heat of a cosmic impact.” I take a deep breath while my heart pounds against my ribcage. “What evil force snatched such magnificent creatures from life, from our realm, leaving behind nothing but the smear of their existence? The answer lies beyond our planet, in the vast reaches of Arachne’s web, that binds the universe together. An alien spacecraft approached Earth, carrying some interstellar creep, a demigod of destruction whose mission was to crash his ship into our planet as revenge. JK, just joking, as humans like to say. A large short-period comet must have fragmented within the inner solar system. Drawn by Earth’s gravitational pull, flaming chunks of rock from another world bombarded ours. The sky flashes. The ground trembles with the shockwaves of titanic impacts, enough energy released to blast your shitpile through a hundred walls. Bursts of rocks and ash plume over hundreds of kilometers. The ice sheets melt, turning the oceans into a bloodbath of brine and slurry. Massive firestorms rage across forests and savannas and grasslands, burning ten percent of the world’s biomass to soot, while a blanket of atmospheric dust blots out the sun. In the chaos that ensued, a lone entity escaped the wreckage of his spaceship: a deity with eyes like liquid flame, with tentacles for hair. The incarnation of despair, a malevolent force from beyond time and space.” I gulp down the knot in my throat. “The region where these fossils were found, known as Beringia, was part of the largest circumarctic landmass to remain unglaciated, a refuge for Plio-Pleistocene tundra-grassland plant species, and the now-extinct megafauna. So we can assume that those noble beasts went extinct both from a cosmic bombardment and from an alien tentacle god with an egotistical cunt’s idea of fun. A fascinating albeit chilling story, don’t you think, dear Blobbert? I’m an authority on the Late Pleistocene, as I visited it briefly.”

A guttural groan reverberates from deep within the putrid bulk of ooze.

“What the hell are you prattling on about?!”

“Did I strike a nerve? I shared my knowledge of the Younger Dryas cataclysm, born from a comet and an intergalactic god-monster, as a gift to you. Imagine all the contemporary species larger than a goat, then kill off sixty-fucking-five percent of them; that’s how many of the mighty Ice Age megafauna disappeared forever. And the global sea level rose by a hundred and twenty meters. Can you comprehend such catastrophe, how much misery it brought? Can I make you, a gooey puddle of sewage, listen to the screams of the victims as they suffocated in a sludge of melted glaciers? The Younger Dryas cataclysm happened, in the grand scheme of things, yesterday. You were spawned in the post-apocalypse! Your genes are scarred with the fear that the sky will fall on your head.”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t give a flying fuck about your pet rocks and your tentacle-haired cunt god!”

I narrow my eyes. I’m getting fed up with this monstrous ignoramus.

“In Arachne’s name, I swear you must have fished your brain out of a lake filled with cat poop.”

“Your morbid obsessions are completely irrelevant to what I’m struggling to convey to you.”

I rub the bridge of my nose and sigh. I picture my right hand clenching around the handle of the office door, about to pull myself out of this hellscape. The sooner the better.

I glower at the blob as I spread my arms wide.

“Then spit it out already, sludge-for-brains! Here I am, ready and willing. Tell your story or perish!”

Author’s note: today’s songs are “The Same Old Rock” by Roy Harper, and “Waitin’ Around to Die” by The Be Good Tanyas.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty-six songs so far. Check them out.

Leire didn’t pull the stuff about the Ice Age (entirely) out of her ass. I recently came across this scientific paper. In addition, my protagonist attempted to kill a rotten bitch back in chapter 14, as the climax of the sequence titled “I’m Killing a Rotten Bitch.”

Do you want to hear this chilling chapter acted out by AI-generated voices? Check it out.

So, a hundred chapters of this shit, huh? I started the story back in October of 2021, attempting to pump out a novella after I abandoned my previous two ones. I’m not sure how it ballooned to such an extent. Anyway, I know that a few souls out there have followed this story from the beginning, probably out of morbid curiosity. Thank you. I won’t say that I couldn’t do this without you, because I was doing this alone until I started posting my crap on the internet a few years ago.

Still fifteen or so chapters to go.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 99: AI-generated audiochapter

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

Yet another entry in the saga that involves a lunatic arguing with an uglier lunatic. This audiochapter covers chapter 99.

Cast

  • Leire: the best blonde infiltrator in Riften
  • Alberto the blob: loads of scaly dudes that you met in Oblivion

I have produced audiochapters for this entire sequence so far. A total of an hour, fifty-six minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Check them out.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 99 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

A bolt of lightning slashes the darkness, throwing the office into harsh relief. Alberto the blob, a viscous and putrid mural of shuddering goo, glistens wetly under the harsh light, and his myriad of eyeballs reflect my own dreadful image back at me.

“I wish I were riding your current high,” I say, “burning with self-righteousness, able to discharge your pent-up anger against someone else. I’d prefer, though, if you had chosen a target who did something worthy of your ire: an actual asshole.”

“You think that people can only get angry at what you do? Is that why you keep busy playing with yourself while ignoring your responsibilities, including your job and your basic needs? Your inaction can ruin lives.”

My stomach knots tighter.

“Don’t try to make me responsible for others,” I plead. “I can’t even take care of myself.”

The blob ripples like a sea of black slime and eyeballs.

“Unfortunately, the responsibility only falls on you, a weirdo who would rather be miserable than improve. You’re the one who can listen to what needs to be done, the sole person suited to stop a cosmic shitstorm. Isn’t it fitting, though? We need an aberration to beat another.”

I hunch over, and as I rub my eyelids, I seek a mental refuge from this deluge of insanity. I see her face, the glowing visage of Jacqueline, my all-encompassing muse, a pearl beyond price. Her ivory-white skin is framed by a raven-black cascade of lustrous hair. Her cobalt-blues are locked into my eyes without disgust. The rosy, wet cavity of her mouth tempts me like a fountain of potable water in a scorching day. Please come and save me from myself.

“Wh-why do I have to be the one?” I complain weakly. “Jacqueline also worked with you, for much longer, and she isn’t as eager to forget human beings as I am. She would try to understand you and help you cope. Hell, she even believes me when I open up about the otherworldly stalkers by whom I’m routinely harassed, although she’s never suffered the misfortune of gazing upon your abominable forms.”

“Sure, your girlfriend slash mommy would have done a bang-up job, if only for reminding me of the most carnal pleasures of my former world.” The blob snickers. “But nope, we are stuck with a self-defeating sack of shit, a pathetic wreck with more anxiety attacks than brain cells, who can barely accomplish the most basic of tasks, who’s never had the guts to start living, who can’t see farther than her own disgusting orifices. The perfect package for a universe on its last leg!”

I gulp down bitter acid, then take a lungful of stinging toxins.

“Again, why me?”

“Because your mind was open and ready for a trip through the cosmic craphole, Leire. What, you want me to make it simpler? You’re a walking heap of psychological garbage. In the old days, you’d have been locked up in an asylum. I had the inkling that you wouldn’t go crazier even when contacted by sentient abominations, but you still surprised me by taking the visits in stride, as if some people just happened to be accosted by teleporting horses.”

I grind my teeth.

“I’ve done nothing but rage against you fuckers.”

The blob’s legion of eyeballs catch the erratic flicker of lightning, shimmering like tiny stars caught in a sea of filth.

“Hey, cheer up, girlie! In these enlightened times, you can become the champion of interdimensional gods, which is what I’ve fancied myself to be since I escaped your realm of rot and decay.”

“If people actually worshipped you,” I grumble, “I would understand if they also persecuted anybody who depicted your image.”

The blob chokes on a chuckle, glugging noisily. My gaze wanders from my former coworker’s grotesque bulk to the black screen of my computer. Leire the Demented Seer, the Chosen Paladin of Interdimensional Gods. Sounds better than being a struggling office worker that has to curb her intrusive thoughts about shoving random penis-shaped objects into her orifices.

“Enough bullshit,” the blob barks out. “You’re going to wake up right now. You’re going to open your eyes and start taking life seriously. Time has been running out for everyone since you disregarded my warning back in your defunct car.”

I cross my arms over my chest.

“You creeps have done an atrocious job of convincing me that these supposed warnings were urgent. Perhaps you left your brains behind in some other dimension, where you should have stayed for all I care. Besides, I can’t shake the feeling that you’re lying about a cosmic threat, that you just want to fuck with me.”

The wall-wide mucus-and-eyeball-ridden monstrosity stirs like an organic tide.

“Look here, you clit-loving lunatic,” the blob snaps back in a wet gurgle. He coughs up a glob of tar onto the carpet. “An impossible message flashing across your Renault Laguna’s dashboard would have disturbed any other human being into lucidity.”

“Didn’t we discuss that already? No, we ended up arguing about my car’s supernatural powers. What did you write across the dashboard, then? ‘A horse with a dick for a head will fuck you before you die’? Such a warning might have sent me running to the psych ward.”

Gooey innards ripple and slosh in the gelatinous bulk.

“‘We’re fucked,’ damn you!”

“What was that?”

“The message I wrote on your dashboard, which you ignored as if it were junk mail, was ‘We’re fucked’!”

I grimace.

“That’s all the fuck you wrote?”

“How much clearer could I be?” he snarls. “It means that you’re fucked, that I’m fucked, that the universe is fucked!”

A knot expands in my throat, and I lower my gaze to the puddles of black goo seeping into the carpet. The slanted rain is drumming on the windows. Thunder crackles. The absurdity of it all bubbles up inside me, shoots up my esophagus, and bursts out into laughter that ricochets off the office walls. Mine is a despairing laughter tinged with madness, the sole human sound amidst the rainstorm and the blob’s otherworldly gurgles.

“Do you recall that message, then?” Alberto asks impatiently.

I raise my gaze to meet the wall-wide mass of putrid slime. His countless eyeballs are scrutinizing me like a cop eyeing a perp.

“Nope,” I say in a strained voice, “you may as well have made it up.”

The blob heaves as if I had punched his gut.

“Again with your self-imposed amnesia?!”

“Doesn’t matter. I get your point: we’re fucked.” I slide my palm down my face as the back of my eyeballs grows hotter. “That’s what you wretched snot-fondler sent as a message of utmost urgency? As eloquent as a dead rat’s turd. Of course we’re fucked, you oversized cum-sack! That much I understood since I crawled out of the womb broken, since my parents failed to behave towards each other like human beings, let alone raise a functional, healthy child. Billions of people born to struggle daily in this cesspool only to be rewarded with decrepitude and death. How many are loved along the way?” Tears well up, hot and stinging, but I press on. “I don’t need some interdimensional pus-clown to remind me of the achingly obvious fact that we’re all fucked. We never stood a fucking chance.”

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Karma Police” by Radiohead, “Game of Pricks” by Guided by Voices, “The Plan” by Built to Spill, and “Miss Misery” by Elliott Smith.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty-four songs so far. Check them out.

Were you looking forward to the audiochapter for this entry? Well, I was. Check it out.

It took me ages to work through this chapter. I’ve been distracted programming, and my mood has been let’s say quite low. Anyway, GPT-4’s API has been broken for days, who knows why, so I’ll likely write more prose than code in the coming days.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 98: AI-generated audiochapter

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

No matter how grimy the material, AI voices will dutifully perform my chapters to completion, in this case chapter 98.

Cast

  • Leire: a greedy thief who offers you jobs at the Ragged Flagon in Riften
  • Alberto the blob: best voiced Argonians, from back in Cyrodiil
  • Jacqueline: the real Triss, redhead goddess

I have produced audiochapters for this entire sequence so far. A total of an hour, forty-nine minutes and nineteen seconds. Check them out.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 98 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Arte, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

I’m drifting back toward lucidity. I avoid meeting my gaze in the rain-slicked windowpane as I blink away the residual stardust. My brain registers again the noxious reek that’s invading my nostrils, that must have coated my clothes and hair and skin: mouldering corpses mixed with sewage festering in a latrine pit. The lump in my throat subsides enough for me to speak, though my voice is shaky and broken.

“Perhaps the nurses that assisted in my birth made a mistake. They didn’t prepare the umbilical cord right before cutting me away from my mother.”

“I can barely hear you,” the blob complains impatiently. “Unless you’re mumbling to yourself, speak towards your audience.”

I grit my teeth. After I wipe a couple of tears with the back of my hand, I swivel around in Jacqueline’s chair.

The wall-wide bulk of jellified, tar-black flesh looms at the opposite end of the office, looking like it crawled out of a swamp. The skewed reflections of the fluorescent light fixtures seem tattooed on the blob’s dozens of polished eyeballs.

I take a deep breath, and feel the stench of decay fill my lungs.

“I was thinking of everything that has gone wrong with me.”

“Don’t you do that often enough?”

“Most of the time; my brain makes sure of that. Close to my birth, still a drooling infant, I devolved into a trash heap of toxic waste, a vessel for desire and obsession, driven by uncontrollable impulses. When I could walk and talk and go to the toilet by myself, I became an unkempt houseplant withering in a corner. Anxiety consumed my insides like bowel cancer, and I wondered from where all my shit-ridden thoughts were emanating. As my tits developed, I had been living for years in a glass prison. A void within me, a gaping abyss that had never known warmth, swallowed everything good about life, leaving in its place a desolate, desecrated ruin. I had no clue how I was going to survive in this society. Should I have joined a war to fight for some obscure tribe or king? That would have been easier than attempting to endure broken-hearted in a world full of savages. I knew that no matter how much time passed, nothing would improve my life, and every night, when I lay down to sleep, I dreaded the incoming sequence of nightmares that would entrap me naked in a maze of tunnels infested with well-hung monsters, who salivated as they pawed at their genitals.”

A wave of nausea sweeps through me as if I were puking up my guts in slo-mo. I hunch over, resting my elbow on my knee. I wipe away the slime seeping from my forehead. I’m boiling with the self-loathing that gurgles in my stomach, and my mouth has become a well of vitriol ready to spill out with each ragged breath.

“The shrinks kept me blabbing to pocket my money,” I continue in a choked voice, “so I started my own therapy through masturbation. If I couldn’t love another human being, at least I would become a machine of self-diddling. I have spent hours upon hours of my spare time, and of any time I could steal from work, rubbing my clit or shoving into my depths rubbery contraptions that I found in alleyways or dumpsters, soaking my bedsheets and the chair cushions in a flood of warm secretions, because those few seconds of bliss numbed my heartache, and gifted me a break from the onslaught of intrusive thoughts and flashbacks with which my brain terrorizes me. I burn with an unquenchable thirst for sexual debauchery and depravity, no matter how perverse. Sex is my religion, masturbation is my ritual, and I’m the high priestess of this cult. My record is fifteen orgasms in one day, although I suspect that some adventurous women out there would ridicule my achievement. Anyway, at times I suspected that alien parasites had hijacked my cerebrum, brainstem and cerebellum to feed off the dopamine secreted during my bouts of auto-arousal. I wished I were strong enough to claw my face open so I could unspool the parasites and liberate my mind. After all, as soon as the itch in my vagina subsided, my depression grew again. I was regularly kidnapped away to flashbacks in which my kid self cowered in a corner, hugging her knees, sobbing, while monsters crept closer. Their hooves clopped on the floorboards. I felt the heat radiating off their hideous flesh. When I blinked back to reality, I found myself as a miserable aging woman detached from anything and anyone, a walking reservoir of self-hate that over the years had bubbled up into a tide of tar eager to consume the world. Most days, instead of facing more anguish, I would have rather entered the cosmic urinal through self-deconstruction, if you get my drift. Hell, I should have spontaneously combusted from self-loathing alone. We’re all going to disappear anyway, right? If not by our own hands, then by a pandemic, a nuclear war, a zombie apocalypse, supervolcanoes erupting, meteors plummeting out of the heavens… So we may as well hurry up and plunge into oblivion, let the abyss squeeze us dry of life’s little droplets until everything turns to dust. Many nights, as I lay face up, I gave my heart permission to shut down in my sleep, to spare me the torment. How could I make plans or care for my hereafter when I resented that I was born? But one day, a woman’s voice called to me from behind the mist on the horizon: ‘It doesn’t matter how old you are, how fucked up your life may be. I will take away your loneliness. I will save you from drowning.’ One organism had dared to reach out and touch my begrimed soul. Jacqueline,” I say, my voice cracking as I speak mommy’s holy name. “She ran through me like a full-bodied orgasm from all the ends of the universe. However, even mommy with her boundless love can’t glue together a broken vase that’s missing half of its pieces, so apart from those times when I find solace in Jacqueline’s ample bosom, I remain a wreck, an insufferable mess with no sense of direction, dignity, or decorum. I crave being ravaged; I yearn for little else than to be devoured, bones and all, by someone I could adore.”

The office falls silent, save for the rhythmic drumming of rain against the windowpanes. Using the back of my shirtsleeve, I wipe away a few tears trailing down my cheeks and a glob of snot clinging to my upper lip. The blob’s psychotropic gas keeps assaulting me. I thought he was allowing my words to sink into his slimy bulk, but when he speaks, his voice oozes with contempt.

“Is that all?”

I open my mouth, eager to deliver the coup de grâce, but I end up sputtering inarticulate mumbles instead.

“I… suppose so. It seems I have run dry of words.” I rub my throat. “I’ve gotten hoarse, too.”

“Get over yourself, you neurotic coward, you irresponsible cretin, you mental cripple who spends company money staring at horse penises!”

“I-I was only curious about how long they get.”

“I need a serious shower after listening to you moan like an aborted foal.”

I cross my arms.

“You do need a shower, although you’ll end up as a pile of eyeballs blocking the drain. Maybe you’re just a revolting monster incapable of understanding human suffering.”

“You’re too much of an asshole for me to feel sorry. My life was also riddled with setbacks and calamities, but look at me now!”

“You should have used ‘and,’ not ‘but.'”

A guttural chuckle reverberates from deep within the blob, sending ripples of tar-black slime across its mass.

“You think I haven’t caught up to your shtick?”

I suppress a shiver.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, bro.”

“You navigate the world by arousing pity in the idiots that fall for your act. That’s what worked with Jacqueline, wasn’t it? That’s what gets you laid and keeps you from killing yourself.”

A flash of rage ignites inside me. I leap from the chair, then I jab my trembling finger at the blob as I offer him the most feral look I can muster.

“Hey, don’t involve mommy in this fight, you globulous gasbag!”

The blob snorts.

“You’re mad because the snot-slicked lump of gunk is right. Until that big-breasted floozy arrived in your life and turned you into her sex puppet, you were wasting away as a resentful sack of depression.”

“It’s none of your business how I wasted my life!”

The myriad of glistening eyeballs glare back at me as I grit my teeth and my eyebrows twitch.

“Alright,” the blob says, his voice laced with scorn, “we’re done with this farce of a therapy session. I won’t let you keep ignoring our problems any longer.”

Author’s note: today’s songs are “The View” by Modest Mouse, “Liar” by Built to Spill, “Birds Encouraged Him” by Jason Lytle, and “Carry the Zero” by Built to Spill.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty songs so far. Check them out.

Wouldn’t you love to listen to Leire whine, thanks to sophisticated AI voices? Check out the audiochapter.

Review: Watashitachi no Shiawase na Jikan, by Mizu Sahara

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

Four and a half stars. The title translates to Our Happy Hours.

The main protagonist of this tale used to be a promising teenage pianist. Now, as a thirty-year-old woman, she has swallowed a bottleful of pills and is waiting to die. She wakes up in the hospital, where she receives the unsympathetic visit of her cold, strict-looking mother. The protagonist shares with the old woman that she’s been trying to die since she was a teenager because she fears that at any point she’s going to murder her mother.

The protagonist’s fate seems out of her hands at this point. Her mother wants to send her to a mental institution at least for a month, but the protagonist’s aunt, a nun, offers her an alternative: the two of them will meet with a death row inmate who hasn’t responded positively to the nun’s attempts at supporting him. The protagonist can’t spare any empathy for anybody, even herself, but such a visit seems like a better option than getting locked up in the loony bin.

On the day of the visit, we learn that the death row inmate, jailed for murdering three people, is an orphan who lived in the streets for most of his life. He also clarifies to the protagonist’s aunt that the clergy sicken him: they look down upon people and offer empty platitudes. In his words, “The group which discriminates the most are the people who decorate themselves in pretty words.”

As the guards take the inmate away, the protagonist follows them to give him a drawing that some child had drawn for him. When the guy suggests that the protagonist apparently hadn’t gotten enough of looking down upon him, she surprises him by saying that she considers him lucky. She adds, “If people understood those things at the start of their lives, they’d be able to decide on their own how they’d like to live. When people are betrayed at the end of their lives, they hold on to hope until then. I think that would be a blessing. The greatest burden is when a person is let down in the middle of their life.”

As the inmate gets taken away, confused by her words, he realizes that he has seen this woman before: back when she was, for him, the distant image of a girl playing the piano.

What follows in this short series is a tight plot where the main characters spend a bit of time every Thursday getting to know each other, learning why they ended up as broken people who lost all hope along the way. Is it possible for those who have already given up to welcome the light of a new day?

A bleak yet beautiful tale that I’m very glad I read. I have to thank ChatGPT for this recommendation; I asked it what mangas similar to Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun it could come up with. I had already read most of ChatGPT’s suggestions, and I had come across this particular series I’m reviewing, but I had ignored it because I didn’t see myself sparing any empathy for a death row inmate who likely killed innocent people. I thought the story did a good job acknowledging that the guy’s actions were partly unforgivable, certainly from a legal perspective.

Anyway, I recommend this story if you want to end up with tears in your eyes as you read it seated on a bench in the wooded area near your apartment.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 97: AI-generated audiochapter

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

As in previous times, my enslaved AI voices have contributed to enliven the current chapter of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, this time chapter 97.

Cast

  • Leire: A sassy infiltrator who hangs out at the Ragged Flagon in Riften
  • Alberto the blob: So many scaly dudes from Cyrodiil
  • Leire’s father: some delusional guy who sells swatters in Diamond City
  • Leire’s mother: a ghoul who sells bits and pieces in a good neighborhood

I have produced audiochapters for this entire sequence so far. A total of an hour, forty minutes and forty-six seconds. Check them out.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 97 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

I must have been thirteen when I was startled awake by my father barging into my bedroom. His brown hair, disheveled and matted with sweat, as well as his beard, sported patches the color of dusty cobwebs. He stopped mid-stride. His gleaming eyes widened in their sunken pits, his wrinkly face scrunched up. His cheeks flushed crimson as he glared at my crotch.

I remembered: an explosion of ecstasy and relief had knocked me unconscious. My inner thighs were coated in dried juice, and my folds still felt puffy from the punishment I had meted upon them with the sticky dildo I was holding.

I sat up with a jolt, horrified that my father was getting an eyeful of my pussy. As I stuttered an apology and scrambled to cover myself, the old man let out a strangled grunt, lunged and struck me square in the face. The whiplash cracked my vertebrae and blanched my vision. An overwhelming pain swelled behind my shattered nose as if I had inhaled icy seawater. I was yanked off the bed onto the wooden floor, where my father delivered blow after blow as if I were a piñata. Darkness was pouring in like oily tar. I must have missed my father’s footsteps leaving the room; I was writhing, sobbing and bleeding when he dropped a damp washcloth on my face.

“Quit whining, little pervert,” he said. “You’re lucky I caught you first.”

In one of the first memories that my defective brain bothered to save, I was sprawled out face down across my mother’s lap as she spanked my bare bottom. She’d smack me so hard that the shock traveled along my spine, and the stinging skin of my ass cheeks broke into droplets of blood that dribbled down my thighs. I squealed, I pleaded for forgiveness. My tears seeped into the fibers of the living room carpet. I begged to know what I had done wrong to deserve this pain, but my mother repeated, “This is the only way to get back on track for a better life.” After her wrath subsided, while she caught her breath and my ass burned bright red, she would squeeze me against her chest. Her cheap perfume cloyed my nostrils. Her fingers trailed along the sensitive skin of my back to knead my buttocks. She whispered, “I know you’ll make me proud someday, my baby starfish.” I wanted to ask when would that day come, when would I be worthy of a loving embrace.

Ages of this world have come and gone. Try infinite loneliness. I remember floating inside the amniotic sac, inside the womb, as an embryo. Tiny hands grasped at the umbilical cord. Warmth encompassed me in a soft embrace, a protective fluid that buffered me from the horrors outside, that flowed down my nostrils and caressed my tongue with its velvety texture. The baby starfish swam inside its mother’s tummy, and when it heard music, it waved its tube feet. I was waiting for something, or someone. Perhaps it remains within me, that insatiable longing.

I have been shot, stabbed, strangled, drowned, electrocuted, exsanguinated, eviscerated, crushed by boulders, frozen solid, blown apart, thrown off a roof, run over by a truck, trampled, hanged, crucified, burned at the stake, boiled in oil, decapitated by guillotine, impaled on a pike, poisoned with cyanide, flayed alive, torn to shreds, eaten and excreted. Yet, I still operate a flesh-and-bone mecha from the command center housed within my skull. A couple of years ago this body passed the vertex of its parabola from growth to decay, and began the accelerating descent that one day, turned into an arthritic hag, a withered husk covered in sores and boils, will land me in a grave, to linger as bones with flesh clinging to them while I join the cosmic reservoir of carbon and silicon and phosphorus and hydrogen in the great big mess known as Earth.

My unsteady legs want to drop me like dead weight. Those intrusive daydreams had blocked off the stream of colors and sounds and crazy that reality dishes out, in which I’ve spent a lifetime wading neck-deep, but I feel it rushing back in through my pores, flooding me. I hunch over and hide my face. Some tectonic shift has shaken my mindscape, plunging the plate of my sanity into the ocean, locking it a thousand kilometers below sea level, down into the pitch-black, icy trenches of despair. My brain craves to squander what remains of its energy running in an idle loop, turning over and over on itself.

“What the fuck is wrong with you now?” the blob spits out.

My chest tightens. No, I can’t bear to look up at that rotten blancmange sprinkled with eyeballs. If I’m doomed to receive the visits of sentient monsters from some interdimensional abyss, why couldn’t I have met a half-woman, half-octopus who used her tentacles to draw intricate artwork on the seabed? Or a man with the wings of a bat, who spent his nights soaring through the sky, seeking out those in need of an angelic guide. Or a half-woman, half-serpent who became a healer, milking her knowledge of venom and antidotes to save lives. At least a witch with a vagina of glittering gold. Instead, a black-humored goo-pile, like the foul sludge from my mother’s bowels, got its shit together and came stumbling through a dimensional rift to annoy me.

I’d love to tell my former co-worker to piss off, but my voice would push against the lump in my throat. An insurgent faction within my mind is attempting a coup d’état to usurp control over my nervous system. I turn away from the contaminated wall, then I stagger past the wastebasket where my vomit must have cooled. With my trembling hands, I pull Jacqueline’s chair and I slump onto it, making the chair squeak and skitter closer to the window.

As cold pellets of water splash against the glass, the office lights are contouring in white those raindrops that streak down in zigzag over the black canvas of this night. Amidst the pitter-patter of rain, the wind howls and thunder grumbles. Toss thy dildo at the reflection in that cracked mirror.

The outside world awaits me in a superposition. In how many of those probabilities has everything already come to an end?

I close my eyes. I take measured breaths of fetid air to steady my racing heart. The cacophony of noise and colors fades into the background, and my mind starts painting on the void. A cabin, its cedar boards grown mossy and bowed with age, its shingles weather-beaten by decades of harsh winds and rainstorms, its wooden shutters hanging crooked on their rusty hinges, stands on a plot of land by Crystal Lake, surrounded with snow-laden fir trees. I’m sitting next to my father on a bed covered in blood and hair and bits of bone. As usual, the old man is naked. He’s combing the hairs of his forearm with his fingernails.

I clench my eyes tighter. In the vast, dark, cold ocean of my mind, an intricate tapestry blooms as it unravels, stretching to infinity. Galaxies shine like jewels, glued to trillions of purplish-pink, bioluminescent threads woven in a cosmic web.

I’m an infinitesimal starfish suspended on a silken thread over an abyss. My lips have been sewn shut with tiny sutures by my surgeon goddess. As Her glowing, blood-red gaze penetrates my consciousness, I expand through the vortex of Her web.

A silver-white flash dazzles me. I’m melting. My cells burst and ooze with viscous juices, and my atoms break down into electrons, protons and neutrons, until only my ghost remains. A phantom, a specter in the void, a lost soul drifting through the endless expanse of space alone.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Oh Sister” by Neutral Milk Hotel, “Made-up Dreams” by Built to Spill, “How Does it Feel” by Roy Harper, “Always This Way” by Laura Marling, “Fallin’ Rain” by Link Wray, and “It’s Happening Again” by Agnes Obel.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout the novel. A hundred and forty-six songs so far. Check them out.

You would love to hear Leire narrating this troublesome chapter, wouldn’t you? Maybe you would not, but regardless, here’s the link to the audiochapter.