yawn/scream

We were just trying to innovate, you know? To push things forward. We were trying to change things. It was a place built for people who could change things. A place for these dreamers, these space-heads, these geniuses. All of them with wild, out-there ideas and, thanks to Our Gracious Benefactor, the means to explore them. That's how they liked to be addressed, Our Gracious Benefactor. Each word capitalised. They could totally tell if you didn't pronounce it in capitals, if you were thinking in lower case. That got to be a saying with the white-coats, thinking in lower case, if you weren't willing to go far enough, weren't pushing things all the way out there.

This wasn't me, you understand, I wasn't trying to mess with fabric of stuff or break into some higher reality.

I'm not to blame, is what I'm saying. None of this was my fault.

I was writing press releases. Trying to make them sound less like off-brand Bond villains. I figured out marketing strategies for these things that fucked with reality, that twisted humanity. Just a hired geek trying to sell the end of the world.


It was the white-coats. They were the ones that actually did the things. Your Emmett Browns, your Professor Morriartys, your Doctor Dooms. They'd all been tempted away from studies and tenures, from cushy corporate research. These wannabe Einsteins, these Oppenheimers. From every discipline, every industry, all living and working in Our Gracious Benefactor's gleaming, futurist paradise. Far from government oversight. Far from petty protest. No funding applications. No interference. No questions. Our Gracious Benefactor ensured they'd be free to explore their own unique brand of crazy, fully funded and unfettered. Most didn't even care about money, not really. They just wanted the acclaim. So Our Gracious Benefactor got in people like me. Creatives playing yuppie-troubadour to the white-coat's scientist-knight.


A few demanded that their work not be used in any military capacity. Your hippie types mostly, your bleeding-hearts. So Our Gracious Benefactor had complicated contracts drawn up by lawyers, then checked through by other lawyers, then chewed up and shat out by some all-powerful lawyer's lawyer, by God's lawyer. And finally, these tree-huggers and these wetbags, they'd sign on the line that was dotted. Their worries soothed. Their consciences absolved. A lock-stock, death-free, guarantee. Benevolent applications only, for their disintegrator ray, or their temporal compressor, or their (no word of a lie) mind-control suppository. Come to think of it, the butt hypnosis guy came on board without any stipulations. Dude just wanted to work.


It couldn't last though. You see, things can only take so much messing with before they turn to complete shit. You fold and unfold the skin of the world enough times and it'll start to fray, start to tear. The stuff from between the layers starts to seep out; this snot of unmaking that bleeds through and breaks things down, this bile that dissolves realities, digests them and shits them up, and now that's everything. A world of shit. Loose and lawless and falling apart.


The big-hitters managed to escape the shit in time, of course. In their ships or pods, or through their portals. A few figured out how to ascend to some higher form of transcendental shit and left the rest of us behind, neck deep in it. And that's where we're at now. Stuck in safe-rooms and hot-suites. Passing the time while the outside splits and twists and fractures. A bunch of pen-pushers, safe and sound, watching everything end.

-yotchki