Weird Fiction

Lord Quagczar here, groggy, soggy and as grumpy as Gaia during the 6th extinction.

I spent yesterday evening below ground, percolating with the souls of pedestrians past.

An abandoned underground corridor was activated electronically and collective memories reawakened.

As this vestigial organ of the urban apparatus was re-animated with industrial strength images and sounds both diegetic and non-, I was reminded of just how foolish you humans are. The site of one rat is cause for alarm and shrieking, while you all wander quite contently in the smog that gets passed off as breathing-air here, once called India’s garden city.

Let this be a lesson you can’t learn: rat’s don’t kill; air pollution does. Too bad your puny human brains are not wired to understand this simple fact. You are always looking for faces in clouds rather than looking for clouds in faces. If you had any sense you’d all be running around shrieking in fear until the air was cleared and the non-linear climate dynamics of spaceship earth were brought back from the edge of chaos.

I guess you humans had a pretty good run with rationality and the scientific method, but you are gonna get blindsided by the limits of this line of inquiry. As my minion Gregory Bateson pointed out long ago: the usefulness of a map is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness.

To be honest I am looking forward to the completion of your tale, for then I will be released from my duties protecting the fecundity of your information ecosystem, and I can get on to more interesting work in other, nicer, galaxies.

Well….I guess I have to return to my duties of churning your data smog and info-toxins into anomalous ideas. Try to open your third eye every once in a while, or at least try to see your head without a mirror, it might open pathways out of the local optima of rational processes and linear and into unexplored areas of the problem space your collective mind needs to survive another generation or two.

Or not. The faster you die-off, the faster I can move on to galaxies that are a little more hospitable to beings of wisdom such as myself.