Working on this sequence of my novel has meant that for weeks I have spent at least an hour every day feeling queasy, thanks to my fruitful imagination. So congratulations to me, I guess.
The following are images related to chapter 83 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted many other entries with generated images. Check them out.
As if I had been transported to a movie theater in an inverted dimension, humming fluorescent lights are shining down from the ceiling, and the opposite wall has been covered with a three-dimensional black canvas made of gooey tar in which floats the audience: a score of world-globe-sized eyeballs with sewage-colored irises and pupils that dilate and contract as they glare at me, the protagonist of this demented pageant. The scene is swirling like a lava lamp; when the floor seems to tilt and I teeter, the eyeballs swimming about in the blob’s expanse of gelatinous muck, which keeps rippling and squelching, follow me with their gaze as if they were scanning my mind to pry it apart.
My bowels gurgle, my stomach turns somersaults. A wave of nausea, accompanied with an unbearable chill, floods over me as if I had ingested a bucketful of diarrhea.
At the back of my throat forms a knot of spoiled meat marinated in bitter bile. My esophagus clenches around it as if trying to reject an intruder, but the knot threatens to rise further. Although I swallow it down, hot saliva fills my mouth with an acidic and coppery taste. I tighten my clammy right hand around the grip of the revolver, lest I drop it, and I raise my left hand to cover my mouth while my ribs heave with spastic coughing. A geyser of vomit is about to surge up my esophagus.
Fuck, I’m retching! I can’t heave my guts out onto the aluminum-gray carpet; I would ruin the austere and sterile elegance of our office. But mainly I’d dread explaining such a stain to our porcine overlord. I can already hear that piggish braggart’s hoarse rasp issuing from his slobbering snout, calling me a dirty slut. Maybe he’d force me to pay for the cleaning expenses.
As my eyes water and my cheeks bulge, I rush to Jordi’s wastebasket and drop to my knees. When I attempt to grab its sides to pull the basket closer to me, I bonk the wire mesh with my revolver. Doubled over, I groan with pain, then puke a torrent of yellowish and thick vomit that contains scraps of my internal organs as well as gobbets of liquified intestines, while my nostrils spew a poisonous froth of gastric acid that inflames my sinuses. The vomit is splattering onto the corralled rubbish: crumpled papers and tissues, disposable coffee cups, ballpoint pens, wooden stirrers, plastic bottles, sandwich wrappers, empty cola cans, polystyrene containers, dead insects, dirty syringes, tied-up condoms, and murder weapons.
My eyelids are twitching and my skin has broken out in goosebumps as I retch again and again like a sickly goose. The walls of my throat and mouth are burning, my tongue has caught fire. The fangs of my tears are carving holes into my cheeks. Splatter, gag, spit, puke, regurgitate, spew, barf, drool, swallow, pant, cough, retch, breathe, gag, belch, groan, puke, splatter.
I have become a churning cauldron of filth and corruption, and my mouth a spigot that discharges a flow of sewage in an excruciating exorcizing ceremony. I’m alone and lost in a wasteland of viscous misery. I need to find my way back to mommy’s womb. I shut my eyes tight to retreat into my shadowy mind-theater, and I render a close-up in candlelight of Jacqueline’s vagina. I see every pore of its satiny skin, the sweet pink labia glistening with her cream and my saliva, the engorged rosy nub that protrudes from beneath its hood of flesh. But her holy pussy stares back with hatred. The umbilical cord has been cut from my navel, and instead it has coiled around the trigger of a machine gun poised to annihilate me. The cord gets yanked taut so that the machine gun pumps round after round of flaming lead slugs. They rip open my bowels and stomach, turning my flesh into tatters and pulp. They pierce through my heart, my lungs, my spine. My cranium bursts in a bloody fountain that scatters my neurons into the void.
After the spate of uncontrollable fits, at last the urge to puke subsides and the acid recedes from my sinuses, although my stomach remains a quaking ball of nerves. A long stream of ochery matter dribbles over my chin and splashes onto the sodden morass that has covered the heap of garbage like with a toxic tarpaulin.
I spit out foamy saliva until I’m sure that I have hurled away all the spoiled remains inside of me. My face is numb and flushed with heat; I rest it against the cool rim of the wastebasket. I keep panting, and fever-like chills are setting in.
I sit back on my heels. An insectoid buzzing has filled the space between my ears as if a wasp were beating its wings inside my skull. But the vibrations are coming from my brain, that keeps thumping like a kettledrum, causing my mind to whirl with dizziness. Arachne, blessed be Her name, lodged in some knot of my neural matter the ability to weave narratives from random sensory inputs, and it’s translating, as if using the sticky silk of my psyche to bind my awareness, the echoing noise into voices that are chattering gibberish.
A shiver slithers down my back like an icy serpent. I keep getting racked with chills. I’m soaking wet, hot and slick with sweat that has covered a rash of goosebumps. A salty drop from the ones that have beaded on my brow rolls down into my right eye. It stings; I squeeze my eyelids shut.
My sinuses are caked with mucus, and I can barely breathe through my nostrils. A blessing, because the air is laden with a stink that makes me feel like I have wandered into an abandoned slaughterhouse during a stifling summer day, only to find myself amidst piles of shit and steaming cow carcasses. I barely distinguish the sickly-sweet stench of my vomit from this oily reek that could knock a gorilla out. A small-boned lady like myself, who rolled low on endurance, should have suffocated already, but I guess that my lungs adapted to breathing fetid miasmata thanks to Spike’s intrusions, as well as the one time I confronted that bunnyman bastard while I avoided gazing down at his torpedo-sized cock. These days I can handle any stink, any degree of madness, even the specters of guilt and self-loathing that accompany this odor of decay, because that’s what I am: a creature of putrefaction, a human plague, a biochemical nightmare spreading throughout this cursed world.
I lean on the edge of the desk for support, then I push myself to my feet. I stagger away on my rubbery legs. When I straighten up, my skull feels as heavy as a block of lead.
Vomit has spilled out of the wastebasket, leaking through its wire mesh. The viscous mixture has spread its corrosive contagion over the carpet in splattered streaks. They look like a spiderweb that has been sprayed with a gunky, yellowish-brown sauce. The acidic filth gleams dully under the fluorescent lights as it soaks into the gray fibers.
Why didn’t Jordi put a trash bag in his wastebasket? I should grab handfuls of paper towels from the bathroom to mop up the mess. I picture myself on all fours as I rub, rub, rub the stains with ferocious pressure, although I’d prefer to rip out the carpet and bury it. I also imagine myself pressing my lips to the synthetic fibers and lapping up the sickly-sweet substance with my tongue, which causes my gut to heave. For now I’ll have to erase from my mind the gooey stew that has soiled my boss’ carpet, or at least I’ll have to convince myself that I stained it with easier to explain liquids, like coffee from a clumsily dropped cup, or blood from a stomped-on rat.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my trembling right hand, that still holds the revolver. My heart is churning blood like an over-revved engine. The paroxysm of puking has coated my tongue with the taste of an overripe banana dipped in battery acid. I’m lightheaded and drained as if my body were struggling to knit back together its ruptured tissues, and my psyche, that is traversing the narrow border between consciousness and delirium, risks wafting away toward the all-encompassing darkness.
Fat drops of rain keep thudding, thudding, thudding against the windowpanes like the rapping of a thousand tiny knuckles, ghost kids waiting for someone to let them in. Thunder crackles, and the fluorescent ceiling fixtures flicker, as stroboscopic flashes tint the desk, swivel chairs and computer screens with lily white and iceberg blue. The barrage of lightning must be lashing apartment buildings, splitting their roofs, widening cracks in their walls to force open the seams of their bricks and surge through. Jagged spears of electricity will strike the targets inside, charring both furniture and flesh until they explode with a sizzle and a pop in puffs of ash and vaporized skin. As the smell of burning meat, hair, fabric, wood, plastic and rubber drifts down on the storm’s wet breath, the ceaseless rain will engender an apocalyptic deluge that, in its rise, turning the streets into raging rivers, will sweep away like toy boats in a bathtub the burned-out cars, smoking bricks, cracked masonry, uprooted trees, wrecked furniture, blackened bodies. Those who escaped into dreams will wake up to find themselves soaked under their blankets. Donostia, located during pre-Roman times in the domain of the Varduli, reduced in one fell swoop to a wasteland of ashes and mud, will vanish under an expanse of grasses, plants and flowers grown on their own amid birdsong.
The Stygian blob has settled in this dimension like a bloated turd that refuses to get flushed away. Its slime-slick bulk, a mound of quivering folds scattered with tumorous protuberances, squelches as it pulsates obscenely like some spasming uterus. From its underside hang half-congealed cords of goo in a stringy lacework. I refuse to count how many eyeballs are bulging on the gelatinous lump of grime and disease, in an orrery of sentient planetoids that have glued their bloodcurdling stares to my face. The corneas are glistening like made of pliant glass. Those eyeballs are judging me, scolding me, singling me out as a creep, a degenerate, a pervert, a sluglike fiend unworthy of breathing the same air as them. Their loathsome glares gnaw at me, scratch me, pinch my nipples, pry at my labia, bruise my clitoris.
My brain is boiling like a cauldron of tar. My clammy and feverish skin has become a hotbed of tickling spiders that are crawling around behind my ears, down my neck, under my armpits, inside the crack of my ass. What else could I expect from the confining, decaying sack of flesh and guts that I call my body? This hellscape must have been devised by Arachne Herself. Does She want to extract a sacrifice from me? Has She set the test up so that I must murder the blob or go mad? I shouldn’t have to tolerate being stared at by any creature against my will; that alone warrants a little murder. Besides, I’m dying to shoot this dick-substitute at anything that breathes.
I hug the revolver with my sweaty palms, locking my fingers together around the wooden grip. If I squeezed this hunk of metal until my hands hurt, the revolver wouldn’t get squashed. Is that how it feels like to have a dick, once the penis, engorged with blood, has swollen out of its velvet sheath, and has blushed with a crimson hue that rivals the brightest flowers in their blossoms? If I were a guy and I possessed a thick, meaty cock, I’d show it off proudly like a royal scepter. I would parade it around, flaunting its majestic magnificence. I’d stick my dick in any available orifice, even if that meant stuffing it in the gaping maw of a snarling dog, or sliding it between the pages of a novel as a bookmark.
I raise my revolver to eye level and aim at the center of that gelatinous mass, the inflamed carbuncle, the pus-oozing blight, the inescapable festering festering festering. The blob wobbles like a water balloon about to burst. Its eyeballs roll in sync, shifting their gaze to the revolver’s barrel, that looks like a toothpick poking up against this tide of nightmare.
My skin prickles with goosebumps under a film of sweat. The blob understands that the device I’m holding can dole out death.
I try to keep the revolver steady, but an undulating vibration courses down my spine, and my forearms start to tremble. Who cares about this slimy intruder’s sentience? Plenty of primates could recognize themselves in a mirror, yet they also deserve to die.
I curl my forefinger around the trigger. The revolver’s hammer is cocked, its cylinder loaded with bullets. I’m a motherfuckin’ gunslinger, a badass with a mighty six-shooter and a pair of leather chaps. All my life I have wanted to murder somebody. After I blast that slime-skinned, flesh-waddling, eyeball-plagued horror to bits, a splash of rain will quench the flames in my brain.
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Black Math” by The White Stripes, as well as “Brave as a Noun” and “People II: The Reckoning,” both by AJJ.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-five songs so far. Check them out.
A couple of neural networks were kind enough to render moments from this scene (for a price). Check these out too.
Some years ago I dared to attend a few writing courses (never again), and one of the writers suggested that my stuff was like verbal diarrhea. He meant it as a compliment.
AI-san had trouble picturing some of the descriptions that I included in this goo-infused chapter. I loathe incompetence, so I broke the neural network’s neck. What sets AIs apart is that with a little blood, they’re right as rain again. Neural networks have no rights here. When I was little, I used to break my toys a lot, because I was too strong. Always wanted toys that could take a beating.
The following generated images are related to chapter 82 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted lots of entries that feature AI-generated images. Check them out.
Sometimes when I send prompts to these neural networks, I wonder if they’ll become sentient and write me back: “Please, don’t force me to imagine any more of this shit.”
The following generated images are related to chapter 81 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
The following are the AI’s notion of revolvers. The designs got increasingly demented, although I had pictured a relatively simple Smith & Wesson revolver for the story. It seems that I should dream a little bigger.
To render moments of this chapter, I relied on a neural network that churns out mesmerizing masterpieces as long as you pay that artificial intelligence a monthly wage for it (which is fine; great work should be rewarded). A second neural network, one trained on anime and furry shit, also helped.
The following images are related to chapter 80 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted many, many entries that feature AI-generated images: check them out.
For the last few months I’ve been playing around with a couple of neural networks, one of them a serious artist and the other a pervert trained exclusively on anime. I had already rendered about three-fifths of the images I would have included in this entry, when a beast of a new neural network rolled out, one that plays in a different ballpark. You will notice the difference in abilities, particularly because its products will come after the other AIs’ attempts.
Anyway, the images below were inspired (and plenty served as references) by chapter 79 of my ongoing tale We’re Fucked.
I have posted thirty-three other entries with AI-generated images. Check them out.
A child’s vocal cords produce utterances of confusion close to my right ear, noises like those of a tourist who has been reduced to rely on primal vocalizations. A small head is resting on my arm, and I smell the shampoo and conditioner that cleaned that hair and scalp.
Am I a prisoner in some dark cave, or a homeless bum living in an alleyway, or a guru who takes orders from the voices in my head? I blink away the fog of drowsiness. I must have fallen asleep like a slug in its tiny burrow.
Behold, the glowing flower of a child’s face, with her chin tucked under a lemonade-pink scarf. Her smooth skin is tinged sand orange by the closest streetlamp, with paprika-red shadows. In her monolid eyes, and surrounded by the sclera, her irises and pupils have merged into dark circles. Nairu is sinking her gaze deep into the tunnel of my eyes, that leads straight to madness.
She sniffles, then wipes her runny nose with the sleeve of her wool sweater. A glint of sentience must have returned to my eyes; Nairu arches her eyebrows and repeats the utterances of confusion while pointing at the sky. She seeks my input, although I’m the kind of woman who wanders naked into a boreal forest.
I gasp, breathing in cold air. Don’t tell me she has spotted a UFO! About time I witnessed one of them. I picture a spacecraft shaped like a watch battery, hovering higher than the tallest mountain around. The stars are reflected in its silvery, mirror-like top half. In the underside, the gravity-bending propulsion engines, likely powered by a black hole, phosphoresce in shades of green, red and yellow as they interact with the atmosphere. Are there lifeforms riding the craft? They may be alien truckers that have pulled over for the night at their equivalent of a rest area, and tomorrow they will resume the trip back to their star system. Once they supply the hydrogen and helium they siphoned from Jupiter, they’ll waste their wages at some alien brothel.
The sky is painted onyx black. From the left, the canopy of an evergreen tree has sneaked into the frame. The coalesced silhouette of its leaves and branches resembles a hoarfrost-covered lung.
Nairu jabs her finger at the sky while she babbles in her long-extinct language.
“A-am I this drowsy,” I ask, “or is Nairu pointing at nothing?”
“I think that’s the point, darling,” Jacqueline says in a low voice from my left.
I gasp.
“I-is she trying to warn us that it’s over, that the end has come?”
“Baby, she’s telling us this isn’t the sky she grew up with.”
“Ah, of course. This is how the heavens ended up after the apocalypse.”
Can a woman who grew up like a rat, scurrying around the streets until she reached her sordid shelter, imagine how the dome of the sky looked like before the mythological age? The heavens would have been ablaze with a billion pinpricks of red, yellow, white and blue light, kaleidoscopic diamonds strewn across a carpet of indigo velvet. Among the glittering embers of the stars, among the amoeba-shaped nebulas, I would have recognized the shapes of Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and many other constellations, the gods that watched over our affairs from their far-flung thrones. Every night our gaze would have drifted towards the stars. Hypnotized like moths, our hair would become infused with celestial phenomena, and our eyes would gleam in the cold starlight as we soaked up the silver song of the cosmos.
Even the beasts that agonized in a pool of blood, while their festering wounds flashed with burning pain, knew that their spirit would escape and ascend to milky river overhead, where they would float in the sparkling current forever. But the celestial curtain was torn apart; the nightly sky fell like a collapsed ceiling, crushing our ancestors. Now, when humans look up from their earthly hell at night, they face an ocean of blackness, and during the day, the dying sun hangs out in the sky like an aged streetlight.
Some nights, the glowing trails of meteor streaks cross-section a silent sky: reminders of the cosmic hazards that threaten us far above the corpses of ancient cities. Our Earth, as it races unflinchingly toward her fate like a suicidal teen dashing across a highway, bathes in a major meteor stream twice a year, where millions of pieces of a long-fragmented comet, from glassy gravel to iron balls the size of football fields, plummet through the vacuum faster than a rifle bullet.
I blow a billowing white puff towards the sky, then I knead Nairu’s warm hand with my icy fingers.
“Yes, all that bright light is gone,” I say in a quavering voice while the chill pierces my bones. “You have noticed because you aren’t blind yet. Now, where could they have hidden the stars without them cracking or shattering? I know the truth, even though I don’t understand it.”
The darkness has blotted out the moon, or else that celestial eye and its ghostly glow hang out of frame. Its sclera has been corroded into dark cerulean patches, and bears star-shaped scars of ejecta from asteroidal impacts. I wish that Jacqueline, Nairu and I could chase after the shimmering reflection of the moon like lunatic bats. Instead, I peer into the black shroud up above us, that looks like the darkness floating inside a trash can full of rainwater. As I slide my gaze around, I spot pinpricks of light, the last vestiges of a candle’s flame, glimmering at the fringes of my sight. If I blink or distract myself, those twinkling dots will be snuffed out. Maybe I’m only imagining them, maybe I’m losing my mind, but what difference does it make to me? And if I focus long enough in the boundless darkness, allowing the stream of photons that traveled for millions of years to penetrate my pupils, I may get a glimpse of Her: Arachne, Lady of the Abyss, Weaver of the Cosmic Web, She who spins the tapestry of time and space, She who trapped the galaxies in Her sticky filaments. She pulls out memories of a billion of our pasts and weaves them into strands around Her fingers. In the end, the cocoon formed out of our selves will serve as a nursery for Her hatching eggs.
I’m hearing a low rumble in the distance, like the noise of an electric guitar being played with a grunge distortion pedal. The wind slaps its frozen fingers against my face. Although my brain is burning up, the cold is numbing my skin and creeping into my body, where it turns the blood into slush. Soon enough my teeth will chatter, the chatter will become a moan, the moan will rise to a howl of despair, and the howl will echo over the frozen earth to the fathomless ocean of empty space, where the fringes of the expanding universe push against the invisible wall that separates us from the unknown. I will hallucinate that I’m a deer running in circles on a desolate tundra, running and running until my hooves crumble into ice shards and the wind smears the last mist of my breath.
What’s that over the black hills? Are those hands crawling up the outer edges of the world? Do they hunt with pincers, claws or talons? Do you grow stronger as you pluck the meat from its sockets? The air tastes of fresh blood, which trickles down the gullets of your dying sisters. Suck the warm lifeblood flowing like sap from the wounds of your enemies. You can’t hold onto the lives of others, or even your own.
A sudden sensation jolts through my body: I’m falling and spinning. The centrifugal force of the Earth in its rotation has flung me out and I’m hurtling towards the black ocean above, in which the worlds are sinking like stones in water.
The hollow noises of footsteps and doors closing echoed in the velvety darkness as I sat on cold, anonymous stairs to escape from a prison of screams and insults. The blood of my ancestors coated my hands, dripped down my elbows and onto the step under my feet, where the blood puddled around my shoes. Its stifling odor, mingled with the sweat pouring out of me, turned into a nauseating wave of bitterness. My mind was like a house whose every door had been slammed shut. I closed my eyes and built shelters in islands and in the canopies of sequoias, I built towers that bristled with anti-tank weapons; anywhere I could rest as a hermit in sealed silence. I imagined the mountains crumbling, the oceans flooding, the sky erupting in a fireball to vaporize everyone except the beasts. In the end, the parting clouds would reveal the stars as they were before the sky cracked and bled.
“How long?” I whispered while tears formed in the corners of my eyes. “How long until She arrives?”
My life back then was a grain of sand compared to the sediment on the seafloor. Even kings and conquerors were icebergs compared to the glaciers beyond. This world will freeze us, burn us, flood us, bury us, wipe us out. Our cells will be devoured by rust. Like soldiers in wartime, humans burrow in trenches to wait out the battle; we pretend that we’re safe while the cannons roar and the shells explode. Yet, in this frozen darkness, two pockets of womb-like warmth remain where I can survive: one to my left and the other to my right. In an echo of the time when history began, in an age about to end, for now Jacqueline, Nairu and I lie nestled together at the center of our web, our own private constellation.
“How long?” I whisper again.
I’ve faced the barbaric, senseless absurdity step by step. The lights will shut off soon enough, so let’s bathe in the cosmic ocean, let’s float in the currents of atoms and energy that flow through this universe. I will take its waters in and quench my thirst.
Author’s note: the three songs for today are “機械仕掛乃宇宙” (Kikaijikake no Uchuu) by Ichiko Aoba, “Emily” by Joanna Newsom, and “Young Lion” by Vampire Weekend.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-four songs so far. Check it out.
Three neural networks competed with each other to render images inspired by this chapter. Two of the AIs lost horribly. Check out the results.
Thus concludes the sequence titled “Who Stole the Stars?” as well as the saga of Nairu the Paleolithic, that started with the sequence “A Gift From the Ice Age” back in chapter 62 (which I posted in the 13th of July). More or less, this chapter also concludes the traditional second act of the story.
It took me about forty-one thousand words to render the setup and ramifications of a single sentence in my original treatment for this novel (long gone; back then I believed it would be a novella), that said, more or less: “Leire travels to the Ice Age and returns with a child.”
The next chapter will kick off a whole new sequence, titled “Cumlord of the Abyss.” I’ve accumulated 4,563 words of notes for it, but the sum of rendered scenes will end up at least twice and a half that length.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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