Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, fake voice actors acted out convincingly chapter 91 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Check it out:
Cast
I have produced audiochapters for this entire sequence so far. A total of forty-seven minutes and one second of delightful audio. Check it out.
Alberto, Alberto. Why did my brain tether to that name, from even before I met this oozy slimeball, the urge to fracture my knuckles against a skull, along with the need to scurry to a dark corner and rock back and forth while groaning?
And what’s this attached file of sensorial records? A moment when my breath was coming out ragged, warmth had suffused my groin, and my pussy tingled for me to scrub out at least a patch of the crust of despair, like radioactive grime, that was smothering my mind. I unbuckled my belt, then pulled down my pants and panties. How am I supposed to know which session of self-love I’m recalling?
As I licked my lips, a solid object of rounded, waxy plastic, harder than a dildo, was gliding through the valley of my gooey folds. The monochrome landscape of my brain lit up in a vibrant pineapple yellow.
Lip balm? Why was I masturbating with a tube of lip balm? Ah, because it belonged to Jacqueline.
That evening, seated on my chair in this office, I discovered the discomfort of rubbing my little girlhood next to Spike, that horse-headed golem, while ropy threads of drool spilled from his chin. He stank like he’d been farting spoiled milk. Despite my horsey comrade’s urging me to spare him the ordeal of watching me masturbate, I dug deeper between my thighs as the orgasmic pressure inside me welled up, until that dammed river rushed to release itself in a cataclysmic flood that drowned the world into nothingness.
My head buzzed with dopamine. As I caught my breath, slumped in my chair and covered in sweat, I found myself staring at a paper-thick screen that was hovering in front of me like a solid hologram. Its video feed featured me as if recorded from behind, at a downwards angle, by a surveillance camera. Someone out there, someone other than Jacqueline, had captured me on video with my bare thighs wide apart while I stroked my clitoris and moaned. I wanted to vomit.
My cheeks burn with shame as my heartbeat thunders. How did I come to lay blame at someone named Alberto? I have forgotten the details, but that name and the notion that some voyeur spied on me are twisted together in my mind like a tangle of inbred DNA.
I shake my fist at the night-black blob.
“You miserable sack of sewage! I’m going to smash you open and pour bleach into your festering guts!”
“What the hell is up with your moods, you volatile nutjob?”
“If there were any justice in this universe, and there isn’t, those who ruin a lady’s post-orgasmic afterglow would be executed!”
“Are you speaking in generalities? Before I made my entrance, you weren’t diddling your kitty. I know that much.”
“I swear, what is this fuckery that my life has sunk into?” I clench my teeth and shake my head. “Let’s get one thing straight, shit-brain: I won’t forgive, nor will I ever forget, how your gang of interdimensional stalkers have wrecked my routine, even though all I ever asked was to be left in peace. Do you have any idea how annoying it gets to be harassed by deformed, googly-eyed monstrosities that nobody else can see?”
“You think this is fun for me? I’m risking my existence by spending time in this dimension choked with decay and suffering.”
“If you knew how much I despise you and everything you stand for… I warn you, my great-great-great-great-grandfathers hunted saber-toothed tigers and woolly rhinoceroses. Giant sloths as well, regretfully. My forebears slaughtered those noble, forever-lost beasts and tore off their skins to warm themselves.”
“So did mine. You and I share an evolutionary line.”
I level my index finger at the intruder.
“What excuse helped you sleep at night? Do you believe that privacy is a bourgeois concept? Fuck your surveillance state!”
The blob’s gooey mass fidgets, squishing about, while his dozens of glistening eyeballs roll around as if to locate an answer written on the unspoilt walls. After he lets out an ‘oh’ of realization, his many pupils focus on my face with laserlike precision. My skin crawls.
“That’s why you’re freaking out.” The blob chuckles. “I thought you were coming undone! To be fair, you are overdue.”
“So you admit it!”
“What is this supposedly foul deed to which you believe I am confessing?” the blob asks in a sly tone.
“That you recorded me!”
“Someone recorded you while you were walking back home after finishing your shift? On the train? Wasting away in your apartment while dreaming of a different life?”
My nostrils flare, my eyelids twitch. I wish the blob had an asshole so that I could ram a fist up it.
“I was working overtime, right here!”
“Why would it bother you so much if someone secretly videotaped you while you wrote code? Could the way you press the keyboard keys offend somebody?”
“You know I was masturbating, you vile coagulate of pus, you abomination that feeds on human refuse!”
The blob bobs like a jellyfish, letting out a few giggles.
“That’s right, you were rubbing your clit to completion in the office. Why not take care of business in the bathroom? I’ve jerked off there myself.”
My blood is boiling.
“I’m going to bury you under an avalanche of lava!”
“Hey, a bit of friction is part of a woman’s natural cycle. That’s why nature gave us erectile tissue, right? Because we deserve some pleasure. Go ahead and rub it and feel more at home in this universe! But you’ve gotta do it behind locked doors or no one will respect you.”
“Once you stop oozing goo, you might be in a position to offer constructive suggestions. For your information, I’m pretty sure I had locked the office from the inside, but that’s beside the point with an interdimensional voyeur on the loose, isn’t it? I won’t apologize for doing my duty to liberate myself from the oppression of my inner demons. Anyway, is that why you recorded my sacred ceremony, to blackmail me?”
“I was looking out for you, Leire!”
“How the hell was that supposed to help me, you lumpy gob of mucoid secretions?”
“I manipulated reality to present that screen as a warning: someone else was and had been spying on you and your orgasms. I thought that such a revelation would awaken in you the urge to pay more attention to your deteriorating surroundings, but I keep on underestimating your imbecilic apathy. In short, you should be grateful.”
“Shut up! You claim innocence, then?”
The blob groans.
“Get some antiseptic for your ears. I’m the one who showed you that screen so you’d realize what was happening, you big galoot. Why would I want a record of the silly faces you make while you’re diddling yourself?”
I’m getting dizzy. I cross my arms as my brain struggles to digest this fresh information.
“S-so you have watched me as I played with myself?”
“I’m sorry to report that I’ve watched you do unspeakable things to yourself many times. Believe me, I avoid peeking into this realm, as well as into your life, to preserve my sanity. Yet, I have to check up on you. I peered into neutral territory only to find you slumped in your office chair, rubbing away frantically.”
“My humiliation is complete!”
“I hope that when your ass finally gets fired, someone burns that goddamn chair; I know that you would allow the next programmer to occupy the seat that has absorbed the emissions of your near-daily self-pleasuring.”
“That’s right. Some people tag walls with graffiti; others paint landscapes, write novels or compose music. I bless upholstery with my sticky fluids. We all have our own little ways of changing the world.”
“You are a true scumbag.”
“Wait, what the fuck do you mean by having to check up on me?” I furrow my brows in rage. “That’s like stealing someone’s wallet and then blaming the victim because they didn’t offer it to you first! Why would you spy on me anyway?”
“The ‘why,’ my dear degenerate, is why I’m here.”
As the blob prolongs a silence laden with germs and decaying matter, my heart slows down. This Alberto the blob is just a fucking creep with a jumbled brain, one pus-filled annoyance, more of a disease than a person, but he refrains from running away in fear, maybe partly because he’s stuck to a wall, even though he understands the extent of my depravity. Should I rage against any sentient mass that tolerates the filthy practices that plague my life? Should I run my tongue across his blobbish substance?
I sigh.
“Alright, I guess that as dozens of eyeballs floating in a wall-wide pool of demonic cum, you have transcended mere voyeurism.”
Author’s note: today’s song is “Paper Thin Walls” by Modest Mouse.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this series. A hundred and twenty-two songs so far. Check them out.
The infamous Lip Balm Incident happened ages ago, back in chapter 18. What the hell has happened in the meantime?
Do you want to hear a state-of-the-art audio AI act out this masturbation-centric chapter? Check it out!
Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, fake voice actors acted out convincingly chapter 87 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Check it out:
Cast
I posted this chapter on the 8th of February, but it was the one that remained to cover, as I intended to produce audiochapters for this entire sequence.
Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, fake voice actors acted out convincingly chapter 86 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Check it out:
Cast
I posted this chapter on the 3rd of February, but that was the one that kicked off the current sequence, titled “A Monstrous Ignoramus,” and now that I’ve become somewhat obsessed with these AI voices, I figured that I may as well create the audiobook for every chapter in this sequence, and onwards until the law likely shuts the service down.
I had forgotten how unhinged, even psychotic, Leire sounded at the beginning of this sequence, but then again she’s going through a nightmare. I tried to make her sound extra anxious, to the extent that I created a new voice type just from clips where Vex sounded stressed. As usual, though, I can’t make this AI pronounce Leire’s name properly.
Tomorrow I’ll try to produce and post the audiochapter for the 87th, and also create some small page to track these audiochapters better.
Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, fake voice actors acted out convincingly chapter 90 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Check it out:
Cast
Doesn’t that sound nuts? I can’t train the neural network to properly pronounce Leire’s name, so just pretend that they did.
When the blob stops cackling like a deranged donkey, I unclench my jaw and smack my lips.
“Anyway, I have sussed out your identity: you’re Nergal, lord of waste water and excrement, king of the putrefying dead, who dwells in the sewers underneath reality. You brought about the deaths of billions throughout the ages. I’m one of the few souls attuned to the growth of decay; I know you had been lurking under my ass all these years, so I was waiting for you to rise up and stalk the world once more.”
“Leire, shut the fuck up and listen. My name is Alberto Portuondo, and I’m a proctologist. I’ve never had any formal training in my chosen career, but I can recognize when a woman needs to squat.”
“Proctologists are supposed to treat medical ailments like diarrhea, not resemble them,” I say coolly. “On the topic of pretend jobs, I’m a self-employed dildo sharpener.”
The blob gurgles as if choking on his own vomit, but then he chortles. His bulk spasms with mirth, churning like a sea of creamy quicksand, making his eyeballs bounce about. The underside of the mass oozes in elongating tongues that resemble black lava.
I step back in case the blob spurts a phlegm of rot that may splatter onto my face.
“I believe that everyone should strive to learn something new every day, and this evening I have discovered that I hate to watch an interdimensional puddle of gloop laugh.”
“You should laugh more often, Leire, to better put up with your own crazy-assed nonsense.”
“Oh, I cackle plenty myself. There’s nothing funny about witnessing the disintegration of civilization every time I go outside, but I resort to humor in an effort to prevent further suicide attempts.”
“Oof.”
“As for you, obnoxious ball of pus,” I say sternly, “there should be a law against impersonating proctologists. The audacity to masquerade as the unsung heroes of anal science! To perform that crucial but degrading job, those wretches train for years until they locate the anus. Such ass-obsessed perverts, who dream of slathering up human colons, help millions of assholes reach enlightenment by curing hemorrhoids, constipation, and anal fissures using only a pair of scissors, rubber gloves, and their own saliva. Proctologists are the butt-nuns of our times.”
“No, stop meandering about the subject!”
“Listen to this impromptu ode to anal inspection: ‘The doctor, a blob-faced butt-nun/ Whose talent lies in his uncanny knack/ For excavating human rectums,/ Approaches me with an insatiable urge./ He screws his speculum in hard,/ Filling my virginal bowels with disgust./ It hurts! My soul is coming loose!/ A thousand turds and rotting guts/ Hang out of my anus in a festering heap./ I must escape my prison or end as a ghost./ Twist up an ass-chute!/ Shove stuff up your rectum and pull it out/ All day long, so that when night falls,/ Your anus gleams like a starry sky.'”
The blob’s fat form shudders.
“Your poetry is as horrendous as your mind!”
“It’s part of an anally-oriented verse cycle. We should turn our disgusting natures into precious expressions of art.”
“Alright, cut the crap,” the blob grumbles. “Please tell me that you have retained my name. It’s Alberto, not Nergal, nor any other of the made-up names that may be swirling around in your cracked cerebrum. Just Alberto, which, as far as it concerns you, means ‘the one who is pure at heart, and the king of mercy.'”
“You’re so vile and combative, added to that grating voice and oily appearance, that despite your lack of a dong, you must consider yourself a man. All the men in this part of the country should be named Jon; what dude is worth a second glance after that? And you think I would enjoy fraternizing with a blob of rotten ectoplasm, one that hailed from some hellish dimension to torment and enrage me?”
His dozens of eyeballs somehow lance me with a dismissive gaze.
“I assure you I’m quite the gentleman once you get to know me. Besides, back when I belonged to this reality where we’re plagued with unrelenting ennui, I was as pretty as you. I even had two working hands, two pairs of eyelashes, and a big willy.”
“Let’s pretend that for now I’m buying that you’re a bona fide Alberto, even though you don’t strike me as such. I would love to prattle at length about the topic of identity, as well as the many indignities of having been born, but let me leave it at this: if I had to come up with a moniker that captured the absurdity of your existence, I would have settled for Kafka the Sloppy.”
“You’re too hung up on appearances.”
“The runner-ups would have been Splat the Whale, Stinkerbell the Hiccupping Hellion, Oozie McDozie, Rip van Stinky, Drooling Dracul, Booger Baggins, Snot Gurgler, Scrotal Slide, Blowfish Bowel, Bubba Mubb, and Toxic Sludge Boy.”
The blob snickers.
“These bodies we wear are ephemeral, you know.”
“Also viscous and mutable, judging by how you’re oozing down that wall. Stuffed as you are with hundreds of cubic meters of putrid blubber, I bet the closest you’ve ever gotten to feeling sexy is when you squirt glop at unsuspecting maidens.”
“I get it, Leire: you make jokes to escape the pain. That’s your coping mechanism. What else is left for you to do but whack off inside your little bubble of neurosis?”
“Maybe that applies for when I’m alone,” I say bitterly. “Is there a need to be so cruel, though?”
“What matters is that now you know who I am. I’d like to say honestly that I enjoy seeing you again. Face-to-face, so to speak.”
“I understand that you claim to be named Alberto. What does that have to do with me? I don’t think I have ever interacted with any Alberto.”
While his bulging bulk jiggles, matching the intensity of the peals of thunder outside, the blob gurgles as if drowning in an acid swamp. White light swims in dozens of moist, wobbling eyeballs that resemble the audience at a medieval beheading.
“You’re fucking serious!” he snarls.
I anticipate a blast of noxious fumes, so I squint, and pinch my nose.
“Why do you insist that we’re acquainted? Did we meet in a nightmare?”
“I’m your coworker!”
“Ah, you worked with me back in the day? No wonder I have forgotten you. To preserve my sanity and self-esteem, my mind has rubbed out most details of the jobs I held briefly and that caused me excruciating despair. A case of trauma-induced amnesia. However, I retain feelings of shame, and guilt, and that impression of being surrounded by monsters that resent my existence. There aren’t many humans I could work alongside, or even look in the eye, without wanting to hurl myself under a truck. And riddle me this, you ill-fated lump of ooze: why would I need to be tortured with such feelings when the memories that engendered them are gone? Is that conducive to my survival, in an evolutionary sense?”
“No, no, I worked with you in this office! I sat on your left, on that chair that the redheaded intern occupies! I helped you troubleshoot complex bugs!”
I snap my head back.
“Are you sure you’re not making this up, just to confuse me more? I write my own unit tests.”
“Do you want me to spit in your face again?!”
I slap my cheeks to rouse myself from my daze.
“Okay, give me a moment. Let’s see if I can dredge up some memory.”
“This is a load of bullshit,” the blob bitches.
I close my eyes. In the theater of my mind, I grab a handful of the oily putrescence that has colonized the opposite wall. Handful after handful, the slime seeps away to reveal an animated memory, a GIF image stuck in the folds of my brain like a fly in amber: I’m slumped in my swivel chair, at my workstation, but I’m looking up at the lanky man who’s standing to my left.
He’s in his late forties. His straight black hair, overdue for a cut, is streaked with ash gray. Under dwarven-thick eyebrows and steel-blue eyes, both his eyebags and laugh lines are pronounced. His stubble resembles fuzzy snow. The man’s mouth moves as if he’s talking to someone across the desk, likely our boss, but my brain failed to attach audio to this clip.
I recall why I tried to forget the guy even while he worked alongside me five days a week: whenever I primed myself and asked for help, often because I had run aground as I was navigating the Byzantine logic of his code, he eyed me like a derogatory basilisk, and I was forced to endure his snarky remarks and sour moods. ‘Hey, do you mind telling me what the fuck you’re doing with my code?’ Sometimes he smacked his monitor. Worst of all: the volume of his voice hurt my delicate eardrums. With that walking ulcer around, I barely heard myself think. I wished that I could get away with wearing noise-canceling headphones during work hours, or at least punching him in the throat. When our boss told us one morning that the guy had quit suddenly, I breathed a sigh of relief. Thereafter, the silence at the office tasted like the sweetest ambrosia, except for Jacqueline’s choice of music, but I have long absolved her of that sin.
I snap out of the GIF.
“Shit, you did work here! Your name was Alberto, then. What the fuck happened, dude? You should take better care of yourself, you’re really bloated.”
The blob lets out a grunt that sounded critical, as if I had committed a heinous faux pas.
“What, are you still pissed because I forgot?” I ask. “It’s not my fault you weren’t memorable. Or are you ashamed that you went full fatberg, so humongous that you’re forced to enter rooms through another dimension?”
He deflates like a punctured blimp.
“You aren’t playing with me, right?” the blob asks in a pitiful yet grotesque voice. “Do you remember me now?”
“Yes, yes! You’re that gray-haired, worn-out coworker of ours, a crotchety prick who dragged Jacqueline and I into arguments about women because you hated your ex-wife, who cheated on you, stole half of your stuff, and left you to rot.”
The blob’s eyeballs shine like candles in a crypt as his bulk goes lake-still, except for the tears of melted rubber drooping from his bottom.
I allow him a few seconds of silence before yanking him out of his hole.
“You should have let go of that bitterness, man,” I say grimly. “There are far worse things than living life alone.”
Author’s note: below is the list of songs for today, a total of seventeen (!).
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and twenty-two so far. Check them out.
Did you know that a new artificial intelligence can create humanlike voices that pass the Turing test? I forced it to act out this chapter! Check out the result.
Who would have thought that the idiotic interactions between a deranged human and a cranky interdimensional blob would become the inspiration for such AI-generated beauty?
The following images are related to chapter 89 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted many other entries with generated images. Check them out.
Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, convincing fake humans acted out chapter 89 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Check it out:
Cast
Damn, that came out good. I couldn’t get either voice to properly pronounce Leire’s name, but just pretend that they did.
I have discovered that I vastly prefer AI audio to AI images. It’s like having professional voice actors at my beck and call.
“So what’s your game, you gloppy bag of pus who gets off on tormenting innocent people? Why are you making me waste precious time with your toxic oratory? You haven’t eaten me yet; although you’re clearly unhinged, you must have some sort of agenda. Am I facing the squid-god Proteus?”
“I’m no squid. And as you should have figured out by now, we know each other.”
I snap my head back. I picture myself taking a shortcut at midnight through a grimy alley, that stinks of dog shit, urine, cigarette smoke, stale booze, and dime-store perfume. A rat scampers along a clogged storm drain. Some vermin is scrabbling in a trash can. Shards of broken glass glitter like slivers of moonstone. I’m stepping on yellowed papers and food wrappers when an orange-sized, black glob of snot drops in front of me and splatters on the piss-glazed cobblestones. The sticky substance has stained my shoes. I peer upward. Dozens of bulging eyeballs are observing me, glued to a gargantuan garland of slimy tar suspended between the graffitied brick walls, like a forgotten ornament for some holiday that honors a god of putrefaction and deformity.
My skin crawls. I want to shriek.
“I’m afraid that you must have mistaken me with someone else, you festering, foul-breathed abomination. It would explain why you thought that I wanted to be eaten. Perhaps a brain malfunction?”
“Oh, but you are. Didn’t you hear me call you by name? I think I did it twice.”
“Look, if you had checked the yearbooks in your high school’s library, you would have realized that I was in middle school when blob-people made their debut.”
The blob gurgles like a busted-up washing machine.
“Pay attention!”
“Alright, asshole. I’ll listen to the sound waves you’re generating with some mercifully hidden sphincter, if it means you’ll leave me alone. Go ahead, try your best.”
“Leire. That’s your name.”
I raise my hand to wipe the clammy sweat from my forehead.
“I’m struggling to remain sane despite your nauseating stench, but let me tell you: someone gave that name to me without my consent.”
“Is this a matter of freedom again? Or do you just hate sharing your name with thousands of other women in this province alone?”
I resent the cum monster’s derisive tone. Should I expect decency from someone who spat at my face, though?
I glare at one of the blob’s glistening, moist eyeballs, that’s drooping in the black goo like snot dribbling from a nostril. I want to gouge that eye out, then unhinge my jaw wide enough to cram the orb in my mouth. The eye would slime my lips and ooze onto my tongue. Maybe it tastes like rancid curry. I would sink my teeth into its fibrous sclera as if into a jawbreaker, and the released vitreous humor would shoot through my nose. I would keep chewing on that eyeball, and sucking up its viscous fluid, even as my jaws ached and my cheeks bulged like a puffer fish’s. Such gluttonous cravings overwhelm me in moments of revulsion; one time I was about to lick a tied-up condom left on a park bench, before I snapped out of my daze. But who am I kidding? If I were ever able to fit melon-sized stuff in my mouth, I would have already died of joy, and asphyxiation, while deepthroating one of mommy’s mammoth mammaries.
“What’s with your creepy grin?” the blob gurgles.
“Nevermind. My point was that people are assigned names so they can be addressed by others, so those other humans know to whom they’re referring when gossiping about you. Besides, how often have I wanted people to bother me? Before Jacqueline blessed my existence, my interests were always solitary. Therefore, the best name for me would have been none, and those knuckleheads who insisted on trying to address me would be forced to rely on expressions like, ‘Hey, you!’ Imagine the silly conversations they would be engaged in with each other as they criticized my personal habits, mocked my weaknesses, and debated the color of my undergarments, but doubted if they were talking about the same person! What an unhygienic lot! And over time, my lack of a name would become so awkward that I would be erased from the social memory of everyone around me, which would free me to spend my time contemplating the absurdity of my cosmic joke of a life. But yes, why choose the name Leire, with which thousands of females across the province are burdened? To whatever extent a name becomes the verbal attempt at manifesting one’s destiny, weren’t my parents setting me up for mediocrity by giving me a commonplace moniker instead of, say, Flower-Duster, or Unsliced Saliva’s Fondness for Fishbones? Once your essence has been tainted at birth with such a clichéd alias as Leire, does it ever regain the power of flight? Why pursue a dream when you’re doomed to become a mundane drone? To be fair, though, I’m warming up to the name Eide. A creative forest fae came up with it, maybe because she understood I had a penchant for being an untamed bohemian. Oh, I forgot: during a recent nightmare I was also christened as Gummo, but that rabbit bastard meant it as an insult. Besides, who would go by the name that an anthropomorphic bunny, or a fucking hamster for that matter, bestowed upon them? No, beyond that: who would want to associate with a cacodemon who came all over the pancakes they cooked for breakfast?”
The blob shifts about restlessly, squelching like a filled fleshlight.
“Astonishing ramblings by a half-wit!”
This interdimensional tapioca pudding, if such a slimeball is worthy of the name pudding, can undervalue me as much as he pleases; I’m a helium balloon soaring above the mountains. Explaining myself at length exhilarates me.
“I’m serious. To regain the joy of the naked, unsullied state, we must venture down a path that leads to our names’ total evaporation.”
“You moron, even if your parents hadn’t named you, other people would refer to you by your relationship with others, as in, ‘This guy over here is my son, that bitch is my ex-wife.’ And eventually they would stick nicknames on you, the sort that your parents would have avoided for their beloved progeny. I can think of half a dozen such epithets. The Wretch, for example, or The Thirsty One, or even that old standby, The Cunt.”
I guffaw to release the frustration and unease swirling inside my ribcage.
“Very funny, pus bag. Those who would push an unflattering identity on me will be dismembered, their pieces strewn along mommy’s balcony to be gnawed upon by crows and other feathered scavengers.”
As the blob oozes angrily, he glowers like a shit-faced T-rex in a sauna.
“How the fuck would someone without a name get by in modern society?! Unless you live in a cabin in the woods and subsist entirely on nuts and berries, you’d have to provide proper ID to open a bank account or apply for a job. And don’t you think that the government would intervene if they had trouble collecting taxes from you?”
“I know, right? They would seize on my lack of a name as probable cause of terrorism. Those depraved cretins! Why do we let the state encroach upon our personal affairs? How far we have fallen since our fabled Paleolithic ancestors, whom I’m sure were freewheeling hedonists of great renown, roaming free in search of the perfect nipple. They never needed ID; they would simply paint a smudge of mud onto their foreheads and mumble into the trees, ‘Here I am, a boob for you,’ and any gal nearby would come crawling across the woods with her hair matted in clumps and her tongue out like a begging puppy. What a life of luxury they were blessed with by mommy Earth! Damn it, when was I asked if I wanted to partake in modern society?!”
The blob rolls his dozens of eyeballs so far back that they sink into the squirming goo, spin, then spring to the surface again. As films of black slime slide off the eyeballs, the sewage-colored irises dart about erratically like startled from a dream. When they focus on me, the wall-wide gelatinous bulk sags with a deflating groan that could be interpreted as a sigh, but that may have been a fart.
“I can’t believe I have fallen so low as to entertain your lunacy,” the blob moans. “It seems I have nothing better to do than listen to your absurd babble about names and nipples.”
“You’re just pissed because a big black squid’s arguments don’t stand for shit. Nobody else has ever complained about my eloquent sophistry. Why do you hate the truth? Is the mere existence of logic and evidence so unbearable to your warped little soul?”
“I might just be anti-nonsense.”
I take a deep breath.
“I’ve spent decades searching for some sense in this absurd existence, so I expect the same consideration and intellectual openness from others. At least don’t spit at me! But I see that, for you, I must simplify reality down to its rudimentary forms.”
“Please do. This has gone on long enough.”
“I’m indeed one of those unfortunate humans whose identity has been diminished to the name Leire. I’m also a thirty-year-old programmer without friends.”
“How very pleasant to meet you, Miss D-D-Dumb-Dumb-Dumb.”
“You bloated, pustulating turd!”
That bizarre bastard bursts into laughter, cackle after cackle. As the ghastly racket resounds, the mound of sludge shakes and ripples like the belly of an obese man who has gorged himself on a vatful of lard, and with each gargle and snort, the squelchy mass threatens to eject several gallons of its rotten innards into space.
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Never Ending Math Equation” by Modest Mouse, and “Peacebone” by Animal Collective.
I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and five songs so far. Check them out.
Do ya know that some artificial intelligences can create images out of whatever prompt you send them? Well, do ya, punk? It just happens that I sent one of those AIs lots of sentences from this chapter. Check out the results.
Did you know that some neural networks can produce human-like voices? I exploited the best of those cutting-edge services to generate an audiochapter for this entry. Here’s the link.
This chapter was the most fun to write in quite a while, and the audiochapter that I produced from it turned out fantastic.
Thanks to the revolutionary new AI from Eleven Labs, fake humans acted out convincingly chapter 88 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Check it out:
Cast
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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