Terra Infirma (A preview)

Part 1: Writing the Terraformed – A Godly Pursuit

There is a full sky. There is a syringe. 

There is now a syringe full of sky.

A god sits upon a rock, meditating on injecting the self. Acclimatizing has always been a funny business. When you hadn't travelled into a body in a few decades, some things were just plain rusty. Air, for example. Or the measly representation of air that this planet provided. Breathing air to survive always took the god too long to get used to.

Planetary atmospheric pressure as another thing. With so many worlds available, getting used to each one was like suffering spiritual jet lag every time. Hence the syringe. It had a ritual of injecting him self/her self. Which self was it today? For crying out loud! This planet still used polar gender genetics! It was going to be a long weekend.

She looked at the seemingly empty syringe in her hand. Millions of microbes danced in her hand. She raised it, as if making a toast. Injected slowly into carotid, according to the forms. And fell over, grabbing at her mortal chest. The best way to describe it is: it was almost like a cellular heart attack. All of her being exploded in an awareness of the living conditions of all living things on this planet. The shock kept her seizing and twitching for a few minutes. And then stillness. She’d be okay, though.

Ah, dying. Always interesting, not always fun. She woke up feeling refreshed. Feeling like someone pushed the RESET button. Dying! Nothing like it. Now he - oh damnit! - she needed to find out what had happened on Three-Rock since he-self had last been here. Twenty years was a long time, here. Nice sun, though. God-self always did love Three Rock’s sun.

The City looked the same, mostly, except for the 8000 missing souls that had disappeared since he-self had last left. God-self had met with a few other selves from Three Rock. Most of them were always under the illusion that they were the only conscious thing. The wise ones had abandoned Three Rock a long time ago. Some in dramatic suicide-by-mob fashion, some through magickal means and some just got out, bored of the mediocrity. Some selves visited this place because it offered solitude. The cosmos was actually quite overpopulated. Barely any one knew where the so-called Milky Way galaxy was anymore. These were long forlorn pirate paths. Only the lowest forms of selves wanted Body. Even the narcissistic hedonists got into Universe Engineering eventually.

God-self was here for information. And this body would help. The only reason bodies were still being created here is because some unknown prate-self was pillaging consciousness for fun. One pirate in a forgotten part of the cosmos wasn’t worth any attention. God-self had a reason for coming to Three Rock. It even had a reason for choosing a she body. Soon, she’d communicate with voice, but…one step at a time.

Part 2: Terraforming the Writer – A Prayer for Two

God-self woke up, in female form, still. She was in bed, and a he body lay with her. God-self remembered that they had met in the out-skirts of the city.

They had walked together to his place. A small house close to the periphery of Three-Rock’s capital, Azania Plek.

 They had worked together to remind her body of this ritual of “lovemaking,” as they called it. She wanted to argue that love cannot be created or destroyed, but she had other things of import to share as they lay in the afterglow, basking in the light of his ganja cigarette. 

“Ink flows out of my mouth.  I know because I have had to change my sheets in the morning, ” she said.

He looked into her octopus ink-blue eyes and said,

“Sometimes, lead grows instead of fingernails. And I draw fantastic spaces with six fingernails.”

“I am sure my blood is gasoline. That my cells are petroleum drunk. If I didn’t know better (and I do) I could swear that Engen mines me while I sleep.”

With a caress of the bottle behind her, he pulled close to his mouth, saying, “I used to donate blood, but my skin is paper, sometimes. Tears so easily. A needle or a careless toddler could rupture me.”

What I am not, most of the time, is space. I travel it, oft-times, and watch dendrite storms or the churns of the digestion tunnels.

Body, body, body.  Become,already. Why are you always just becoming?

Addendum:

[ Sometimes, I fill a syringe with sky. Inject myself ]