“What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate.”
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
That which was the wyrm did not arrive, it appeared.
And there have been many like it, in myth. Serpents medicinal and brazen and those encircling the world. Prismatic dwellers of the waterhole. Lesser dragons cursed from the skies to vacillate in poison. Swallowers, birth mouthed, of taproots beneath, tails autophagous, suns themselves.
Wyrm is all of these.
Not beheaded but headless. Without any demonic, coin-eyed stare promising temptation and release. Unpersuaded by the eye, wyrm suggests instead with the body. A rage of coils bedecked with glistering scale, clothed in a sheaf of rotted skin. Heady scented—regurgitated offal aboil in cavities of petroleum, ammonia. Wyrm swells the air with static, a doubled whining: distant insect swarm, cathode ray tubes slaved to the display of trauma.
Rather than any grand collective amnesia, wyrm overturned the world—its previous condition not forgotten, of merely inapposite glamor.
Wyrm, there/here paradoxical tragedy of innumerable presence. Permeating calamitous unifier rather than obliterant. Concurrent substitute for the predicted infiltration of all social spheres with stamping monoculture and the worship of capital. Instead and also came wyrm, globality fulfilling catastrophe. Its form: personalized seducer preternatural. Unending, unbeginning adder occupying landscapes like the circle’s swinging tangential sensitivity to change.
Wyrm seethes in multipresence just outside awareness—a drift on the wind of the incomprehensible in decay, scutes of distant and absorptive glimmer, wisping dry textures of that moist papery skin.
And then, it occurs!
In sudden, rotted glory, making the sound of writhing murk. From unformed, dissociative blip on the radar of sensation into screaming actual.
Pervasive emissary of a new datekeeping era.
Bringer forth of another year zero.
The scientist talks of “phase change,” of “false vacuum collapse,” but these feel altogether more like allegory. And why, anyway, should either phenomenon be localized? Why, anyway, should Earth’s surface be submitted to this specific rifting?
Wyrm seems more to the rest of us like the dark magic of command.
Never had interstellar observation entered the everday practicality of daily life. Not until wyrm was sighted in a galactic cluster 589 million light years away. As though, defiant of physical law, wyrm had located itself with prescient exactness at the distance of our Cambrian light’s arrival, bearing multicellularity’s effusion of taxa and body plans.
No matter the analytical method, wyrm’s existence is imitative, self-obscuring. An endlessly masked hallucination of persistent and collective effect, in whose wake lie cloven boulders and smothered vegetation.
So then, mentally unconfined actual events—too difficult, really, to believe in.
And too strange to worship.
The rest of the biosphere alternatively approaches in flame-drawn clamor, retreats toward den or burrow.
Bats and wasps dodge coils in their flight. Toothed whales follow along in lazy spiral. Flora etiolate from its shadow and every ape that isn’t human avoids the wyrm whenever possible. Crows, vultures, guzzle at tissue that falls from it like ice from glaciers (alas, wyrm does not join them in retreat). Elephants lapse into mourning when it appears and present corpses of their offspring. Chromatophores of cuttlefish adapt to depict the hell-light of the wyrmsurface. Fungal fruiting bodies, slime molds, take up elaborate and helical form among its detritus. Mature horse-hair worms assemble novel molecular imitations, congregating parasitically their host grasshoppers and crickets into wyrm’s twined shadow, exiting distended abdomens in supplicant, spiraform mass.
Wyrm, in failed aposematic mimicry, brought forth instead a kind of creatural reverence.
The ecosystem was not destroyed but it has been altered.
Spacetime too.
Wyrm emerges, convolute, from peat-black waters of bogged coastal lowlands and in whorls, clutching at ground-down mountain ranges. Patterns, of traffic in alpine cities, of arboreal migration in wooded outskirts, revised indiscriminately.
The oceans of the world stood up, as though suddenly into which were dropped an untold billion cubic meters of coiling fetid biological refuse. Populations fled these twice-new coasts, fled again the risen seas.
Wyrm sheds every of the empiricist’s confines—undulates between depiction and existence, appearance bunched against and sliding past being. Multi-spaced, sub-perceptible, everywhere and suddenly nowhere. Basks in an incident pit whose lure is obsession: gulf into which one inevitably slides, scrabbling steepened walls of yearning until submission asphyxiates desire.
This is wyrm’s guiling time. Spatial exchange, collapse—an array toward which all futures come to point.
Autonomous investigation failed, wyrm suspended in law-like, error-inducing mist. Malfunctioned by way of software incongruity or manufacturing imperfection, all robots found themselves lost, cost maps corrupted by dissident evaluation, planned paths unreeled, whether teleoperated via electromagnetic sign or onboard self-directed controller. They passed every rigor, every fail test—and then wyrm would connive, in series, retrocausal missteps leading to bankrupted equipment in the present.
Appraising the mechanism behind these suspiciously tachyonic, always-accidental failures was left to the physicists.
We tried instead for a sampler who was human.
Pilot for whom all actions leading to pit-sickness would be proscribed.
Sensation was the first, the most obvious, to deplete.
And so was invented the deprivation suit, to access wyrm without accepting its singularity.
Blinded, nasal passages plugged, mouth filled with non-Newtonian neutralizing solution that both discouraged quick movements of the tongue and tasted of blandness. Delicate stoppers, in the image of bifurcated fiddlehead ferns, inserted into the ear canal—vibration damped, noise removed as well as balance. More soundproofing at the neckline, to forget the heartbeat, stifle the pulmonary whir of the ventilator substituting breath. Counterfeit amniotic fluid circulated throughout, warm as monitored temperatures across the skin’s surface and laced with appetite suppressants, deliriants masking agency. Exterior equipped with dozens of neurally operated multidigit limbs, within the profuse motions of which any particular movements were concealed.
The pilot’s path, silhouette like a hundred-handed mythic guard, technologically reborn, planned carefully. The shifting, rotating gait in fact a practiced set of iterative dance, modeled after systems of chaos. Precisely dependent upon initial condition: trivial to simulate, wildly divergent in outcome. Months of training, to suffuse mental states with the cognitive equivalent of polystyrene—most worthless and delicate of permanences, disobedient entirely to rot.
Consciousness malformed, a swollen stream dammed to the blanked and valueless: acontextual linguistic syntax, facade collections of numerically patternless sequence, hazed images and color fields decapitated of emotive affluence.
Anything to stave off the wyrm sickness.
Before the drop, capsules of pharmacological acumen, barbiturates, to impel mental states of both lethargy and precision. Sinuses, bowels, bladder, each invasively cleared.
And finally, on chain of gold, the locket charm, shaped like that omitted fist of smooth muscle beating—hung, for luck, around the pilot’s neck.
Time spent spent inside suit like a snare, an asymptote analogized only from sectioned distance, in tenses of past or future.
This all: an attempt, ill-fated, to engage in ritualistic trickery. To confound a being which sloughs free the real simply as the pneumatic forceps peel tissue.
The first samples fell unavoidably into the hands of the obsessed.
And so was invented the convulsed bureaucratic logic by which the study of wyrm was institutionally enabled.
Researchers, held in atomized ideological enclaves, worked in meandering, procedural vagueries intended to suspend understanding and collaboration—else they each be felled by diseased and reticulated yearning.
Operators worked separate digits of thirty meter, hydraulic-actuated manipulators—efforts concealed within the totality of darkrooms and undergone without electronic or computing assistance. Always unsure as to whether relayed directives undid the work of their companions or engaged them in perverse and unrelated tasks or had some effect in moving the experiments forward. Entrenched, formalized obscurity manufactured official letters of dismissal, delivered upon an individual's failed performance in daily psychoanalyses—the results of which were incinerated, unrecorded in the first place, or set as framed translations into obscure languages above various entryways in the facility.
Managerial decision filtered by the result of double slit tests—final density of those emitted particulate allocating funds for obsolete certifications in yet to be constructed conference halls. The fluorescent night/day cycle of the research facility fortressed in glass and steel scheduled by stochastic processes of radiation. Temp agencies offered out enormous parcels of company stock in exchange for surgical blinding, that unsighted contract managers might sit upon exhaustively wasteful committees, vote upon issues elaborated only by laser print diagram.
All to damn but a mouthful of participants to wyrm-craving.
Wyrm’s viscera are by every account out of context.
Its age cannot be deduced by its strata. There are no standard candles next to which it will be held.
Instead a composite physiognomy of the faceless: newly minted emission spectra from elements along yet-unseen rows beneath the periodic table. Insulating musculature surrounding hardened seams of locomotive fat, run through with rancid parasympathetic nerves twitching vainly, gelatinously, at the behest of immense synaptic ions. The bloated nuclei of an enormous alkaline earth metal, failing to spew radiation and annihilate itself, failing to fester out their picoscale half-lives.
Lurid flesh enfolded by scales apparent to corners of the eye as jewel smeared carrion—grown or existed or conceived in vortical swirling time, layer by fractaline layer. Ingrown, pushed backward and down into their scalebeds. Interfering laterally with the skin-surface like waves crashed against one another rather than awaiting shores. All directions of anatomy, occupied—the hapless physiology of tephra-chronological errata.
Dating methods, radiocarbon or otherwise, offered results in thousand-year swaths, stirred like an incomplete pigment, hue imitative of the obscene.
The volcanism of Pompeii beneath hydrocarbons typical of interstellar dust. A penultimate membrane of growth saturated with Strontium-90, produced only in nuclear fallout. And finally, most recently lain, an iridium layer resembling scaled models of the KT-boundary.
And so on, each scale, each sample, a senseless diorama. Dated each before the moon was formed and after also the swarmed nanosurveilants clogging currently the skies.
Wyrm, fatalistic testament to a world recoiling from rationality and comprehension and all other hideous weaponry of the mind. Do not the curtains of dark hang in unlightable cloud about the structure of galaxies? Does not the phantom accelerant push against the weakened grasp of gravitation to undo the universe?
Suicide cults and eschatological doomsayers avoid its meander. Religion has not frothed itself to prophecy.
Wyrm breaks, individualizes, winds instead particular minds into its mania. Enforces self-reproducing solitude. Like the rabid capitulate, are themselves converted into manufactory, that they might in hydrophobic reckoning fear their cure or even their relief.
We, dissimilar aggregate, incensed foam atop great and careless bulk, conclude: no one has ever known the wyrm and no one can ever will.
Become now instigated collector, compelled need to seek wyrm of which prostration is denied.
Conjoin with constrictor and bearer of this dominion which it came to defy.
And to deify. And to defile.
Wyrm, hypercubic geometry, the three-faced solid: demiurge, predator, curse.
And you will be ingested by mouthless volute.
And you will be selected for the droning and listless coil.
Wyrm has of me and you and this world.
Decay. And revel and fall. Into horror colluded territory, to form a thing arranged.
And compulsed shall you descend.