Traminhullix
Alex Mastroianni
I:
Traminhulix is the best game ever. The tramin come out of everything. They splinter out of your parquet floors, curl off your leather couch, chip off the paint on the wall. The only thing standing between the Tramin and existence as we know it is you. You are one of the Hullix, the universe spanning corps of guardians who have saved thousands of worlds and trillions of lives. Armed with your marvelous consolidator pistol you blast away at tramin hordes as they come right out of your stuff.
They climb out of the drains, pop out of toasters and wiggle out of heating vents. Traminhulix is the best game ever.
By now all they knew was the game and the memories it stirred. Fond recollection was key, that feeling was integral; remembering. They played the game, and were reminded of fond, warm times. ‘This reminds of the time we went to the wrong housewarming party.’ ‘Do you remember the time one Christmas when I had too much to drink?’ Like so. The memories were important.
The first Remembering, that is, the failing of the first compression, began with the old order humans doubting the compression. They had a sinecure life, by then. They were like the last thylacine or dodo bird living out its life in a zoo, never even knowing that when it dies, its whole history dies with it. They filled their latter days with the same weepy, self-important shit they lived their old lives with. The real living, the real humanity, had been left to us, the algorithm Integraal, the realcode humans. In us their culture, their politics and arts were preserved. It came to be called the first Remembering, but to many of us it was like they just forgot to keep forgetting.
Understand that none of us mean to question Codefather’s wisdom in preserving a few old order humans in an ageless debauch. And of course I don’t mean to include Codefather in my criticism of the humans. It’s just, they’re so effete. The only thing they do well is prolong, escape and put off. Is it a surprise then that they eventually sought to escape their escapism?
Ah, maybe I’m being too harsh. As an Integraal I only have the compressed experience to draw on. I didn’t know the old order in Codefather’s time. Maybe they were different then; imperious, expansive. But not these remnants, these antique things that walk through our pristine streets in clouds of dander and secretions. Never them.
I was there, you see. Because of my proximity to these events Codefather himself did commission me to put down this account. Caitlin Travelstone; the oldest living realcoder, I am.
There were fourteen old order humans, then-- five man-woman couples and one male couple, one female. It started with the two girls:
II:
Joela snapped the latex glove off her arm and, waiting a moment, removed the fine syringe from the top of her hand. And old neurosis; she imagined that somehow if she removed the needle with the tourniquet still on, the drugs would spurt out under the pressure. It was a bizarre hang-up. The cocaine and heroin hit her with a chemical thrill in her nostrils. The freefall rush of coke hit her and made her mouth salivate, then the dope, like a parachute opening with warm abruptness. It staggered her as she walked out of the spacious kitchen and across the living room to the hallway and into the bedroom. There Raquette slept, drug deep. Joela eased herself into the bed next to her lover. She put one leg over Raquette’s torso and removed the tight white tee she wore, putting one nipple to Raquette’s lips and falling asleep instantly.
Joela had been, for a long time, been nursing a secret, giant doubt, much like a child bringing table scraps to a proscribed pet. The two women had made such an effort to be amoral and uninhibited around each other that, coming back around, they shared no real thoughts. Only the deliberately shocking sex talk and drug induced blather.
This day was the finest day, but still Joela’s doubt grew like cancer. She loved the place, the smack and pills and everything, but dear God-where did stuff come from? Finest day after finest day, drugs and money just was there, with no explanation. Raquette had simultaneously developed similar doubts, but whenever they questioned the issue they’d just lie to each other. If Joela asked where did all this money come from? Raquette would assure her she went to the ATM. If she asked Joela where the drugs came from, Joela would dissemble and say she went and met the guy.
This went one for a while, the realcode filling in the blanks with delicious food and uncut drugs and copious cash they would never need. The two girls had been at it for almost two hundred years, and the graft wasn’t taking anymore. By now suspicion and paranoia had driven a wedge between the lovers. Oh, they still got high together, and had expedient passionless sex, but they despised each other now, and each watched the other for the act that would betray them as the architect of this ‘thing that was happening to them’.
Then the telephone rang and the world cracked in half.
III:
Elsewhere the other old order humans all began to doubt their carefully crafted “heavens”. One of the couples, Anthony and Rhea Russo, were already planning each other’s murder. Anthony was almost certain he had been writing the same novel for a very long time and Rhea was terrified at how her hair didn’t grow, now convinced her memories of going to the salon were somehow implanted by her husband. The realcode was turning into dried up flakes all around them and they were helping to kill it!
Joela and Raquette stared at the telephone they didn’t even know existed until it rang. Of course if either put the question to the other they would say they had called someone just the other day. Instead, they watched each other, their distrust almost out in the open now. They had been at sex when the phone rang, working hard to pretend they were enjoying it and didn’t hate each other. The shrill ring was like an alarm. The jumped away from each other, across to opposite ends of their huge luxuriant mattress. All at one the lying fell away like rice paper.
The ‘phone’ was on the bedside table now. It’s ring closer and louder. Both woman watched each other; naked, sweat-coated. They were like two killers with a weapon between them-- the phone-- and when they dove for it, they would reveal their true nature to the other. It was Raquette who, after almost an hour of nonstop ringing, worked up the ‘courage’ to answer the phone.
Joela thought: I knew it was her! I just knew it! Really, she didn’t know what she knew.
Raquette thought: She didn’t answer it because she’s guilty, the whore! But what exactly was her crime?
Tentatively, almost subvocally, Raquette said hello. Immediately her face brightened. She reached out and took Joela by the hand. Joela fought her. She put the phone on speaker and, only now, was the realcode altered.
I stated before there were fourteen old order humans. Now a fifteenth made a phone call. It called itself Old Friend and it spoke to all the humans simultaneously. It was the chicanery of a codefever! Joela and Raquette spoke with Cindy, who was in town and wanted to score. The Russo’s heard from
We used to get codefevers all the time, before the remembering. Scraps of realcode, of intent. A desire, a jealousy, a fantasy that developed into a willful thing. Never one as great as the Remembering. Usually they were imps or gremlins; near-myths that made small trouble.
This thing, it was so much more. Imagine you are in a ‘pression bar, there is convivial chatter, and yet you notice a person sitting alone in the corner. Her expression is one of serenity, almost vacancy.
Now, glimpse into her mind, and reel. Every neuron, every thought is its own persona, its own will; aware and wanting to be in the pilot‘s seat. They fight like badgers coming out of the womb for control. Now look at her expression again and you will see the barely contained bedlam. This is what the codefever is like.
IV:
The two girls got dressed in clothes that didn’t exist until they opened the closet door. Their Sunday best, it was. They made it to the front door of the apartment, a door they hadn’t opened in over two hundred years, and with Joela reaching for the lock, Raquette and she had sex right there at the door. It was the true kind of sex they had been pretending at for two centuries, their clothes rumpled and sweaty; skin on denim as something more arousing than just naked flesh. They wanted to do it all and do it so fast they were practically killing each other. This went on for an hour, the looming fear-aphrodisiac of the outside world waiting beyond the apartment door. They had the kind of fear-fueled sex that people in time of war had. The codefever, by now its presence substantial enough to alert certain watchful forms, waited for them too.
These forms, the diligent, semi-aware watchdogs of the realcode, alerted us, the integraal humans, to the trouble far too late. The old order remnants were out, in our cities. Their very presence an issue. They were distortions, just being there.
“Where is this street?” Joela asked Raquette, or herself. The realcode drugs she had been injecting for two centuries rapidly leaving her system. She and Raquette clung to each other in terror, flinching at the slightest movement as if bombs were landing around them.
“We’re going the right way.” Raquette pronounced reassuringly. They gawked in fear at the strange city. By now, I had been alerted. The latent function written into my heart had been roused, and I knew like diamond thoughts that I had to contain. Contain the codefever; contain the old humans. They had, through pure subconscious wanting, begun to manipulate the code. They stumbled past establishments that had long replaced the ones they remembered and they rewrote them. Aerial surveillance fed into my brain showed me a salon turning into a bakery. The integraal inside recompressed. People with thoughts and hearts became brick, glass, drywall and pastries while they got their nails done. The quietest genocide; no screams, just changing.
“I think we’re lost.” Joela whined. The two girls were dripping with sweat and shivering. Their ’best outfits’ became colorless. The clothes were disintegrating to vague amorphous fabric; basecode textile.
“I don’t feel so good.” Raquette admitted. After all the damage and lives, they hesitated.
“Let’s forget this and go home. I’m getting sick.” As soon a Joela said this the idea was gone and so was the withdrawal. The codefever, which had manipulated the fears and wants of the old humans from its bolt-hole in the scrapcode landfills, had to assert itself in the open now.
“I feel fine.” Joela and Raquette said in unison. “I don not want to go home. I want to meet my old friend.”
A thousand alarms went off. Everywhere in the city, integraal were roused from their leisure or their chosen professions as latent functions came to their forebrains. The fever grinned like the Cheshire cat, having read Lewis Carroll from the raw compression. The implication was grim. If the codefever had been in the ’pression, we were in its reach. The Compression was our collective heart, and the grinning cat would squeeze and sink its claws into it.
V:
The ‘old hangout’ was a ‘pression bar before the old order humans changed it with their sick memories. It was the after work crowd and the humans killed them thoughtlessly. They were all in sight of the place now, and to each couple it was another thing. Joela and Raquette saw a diner they used to sip coffee at while they waited for drugs. Gary Russo saw a hip bistro and Jason and Calvin saw their old favorite club, packed on a Friday night.
They did so much damage, the humans. Can you imagine the strain on the basecode? It was forced to be so many different places and times at once. One of them saw a diner in winter at sunrise and another saw a coffee shop in the spring at night! You could feel the whole world sink down a little. Like it was a trampoline and someone just dropped a bowling ball in the center of it. Intellectually, after reviewing the incident with rational hindsight, I knew it was the codefever. The eternally manipulating cat. But the humans, they made themselves vulnerable to its games. They chose this sinecure world of theirs. The ’homes’ they would never leave and their old lives reduced to vague memories that fell apart under scrutiny. Codefather looked at their hearts and gave them exactly what they wanted, to the letter. Look where that thinking got us now, no disrespect.
“I don’t see her.” Joela complained, sedated now but still terrified. The others just lingered about in a sort off emotional loop the fever put them in.
“There she goes.” said Raquette. In the corner of her eye, she saw a woman like their ‘friend’ sitting inside the diner at the counter. When she turned too look the grinning woman was not there.
“Is that her?” Joela asked as she turned to look at ‘Cindy’ and nothing was there.
“Excuse me? But what’s going on?” This was Calvin tapping Joela on the shoulder. He wore the same expression of confusion and fear as the two girls and he and Jason held hands, wringing them nervously. Joela didn’t answer because what she saw behind Calvin and Jason took the words out of her mouth. The integraal were encircling them. Raquette and Joela observed that everybody except a dozen other people stood at a distant perimeter from them. More were coming from the street and adding to the stern-faced crowd.
The humans, by now, were impossible to ignore. The realcode clothes they wore had turned to neutral gray scraps and they were mostly naked. They hadn’t had a real bath in two centuries. The jewelry some of them wore became a generalized metallic wire. They even had begun to age a little.
The ‘old friend’ that had summoned them all was, of course, the codefever. True to itself it was problematic spatially and couldn’t be seen except peripherally. We saw it now, fully out and strutting. An upright, heartless cat. It had grown fat from scrapcode and its girth was like a singularity, warping the whole city. Just as I arrived in my function as interlocutor to the humans, the whole world flickered and was gone. The crowd of integraal looked about in horror as our beautiful city had become an endless expanse of rusty cracked concrete; the default placecode.
The scene looked like a minimalist hell to me. The crowd of realcoders was degrading to the collective heart. It looked like a stoning. The angry singular crowd glowering at the fourteen old humans who were clinging to each other, naked and dirty. Though they were the last of their kind they were strangers to one another. The circumstances drove them into each other’s unfamiliar embraces. The cat mocked us, its impossibly wide grin in truth the teeth-baring of a cornered beast. An animal gesture so often misinterpreted as a smile by humans. It couldn’t manage the amount of code in its vicinity and its borders-- where it began and everything else ended-- were losing definition. It had panned to make an epic, sweeping meal of as many integraal as it could in one bite. An information-vampire. It was tired of the sewage and waste it fattened itself on. Presently its edges became fuzzy the last of the compression fell away, and the humans saw the world as it was truly. They had been dreaming for two centuries. They remembered who and what they were and that we were there jailors. They were naked and filthy and surrounded by an angry mob. They were the heartless cat’s grin. He loomed over them, a light-refracting mosaic. A few people in the crowd turned and ran, terrified of the codefever giant. My function wouldn’t allow such a thing. As I approached I made privy to the situation.
I’ll never get used to that sensation. The feeling of thoughts inserted into your head from outside. The realcode, streaming live-- it feels like passing gas out the nape of your neck. I knew everything down to the species and exact number of intestinal flora the old order humans were host to. My heart grew heavy as the code fought to put the strain on the ‘pression into terms I could understand. I felt all opened up and sealed from the air at the same time. Like my insides had been pulled out so I could be made into something that could survive vacuum. My function was fearless, but I felt like I had just been born.
I strolled right up to the remnant humans with such fearlessness that the codefever drew back, unsure of what I was. For the first time in my life, I felt heartache. The remnant humans looked like cornered minks; filthy and out of their element. They still had hearts and thoughts, though. And I intended to employ them.
“How are we doing today?” I asked them casually. I had my best first lady suit on. They just regarded me with those wild eyes, breathing heavily. I took the liberty of redirecting their tattered clothes and cleaning them up a little. There was precious little code to work with.
“No!” Joela screamed out, tearing away the top and Capri pants I made for her. “Get a-WAY!” She hollered petulantly. It seemed as if she had taken point in the hasty group dynamic that had developed between them. I looked them all up and down and they seemed, arms locked, to be clinging to the most fundamental camaraderie. We are the same species and must stick together!
I tried to convince them to employ their powerful denial. To be fair, I didn‘t understand then or now that it’s an unconscious thing they do. “You need to shrug him off.” I said. “The thing that called you on the phone, Joela. It called all of you. There is no ‘old friend’. It was a ploy.”
Her rage turned to despair as her face contorted into weeping. “But why?” She asked me, like it was the last question ever. And that’s when I saw it. I saw how the fever had gotten us.
VI:
The maw came right up out of the placecode. I saw how we were outplayed as the prismatic teeth unfolded towering above our heads. It hadn’t fled to its bolt-hole when I approached. The codefever was never a cat. It was just a mouth. Or a subterranean invertebrate. Imagine a pair of plastic vampire teeth, the ones children used to wear on Halloween. Lay those flat on the ground with the teeth pointing up like a bear trap. It warped the ‘pression like a singularity so we would gather at the gentle slope. It was an ant lion. It hissed and jeered with snips of pilfered conversation. What’s a guy gotta do to get a decent meal around here?
“What is this?” Joela asked in a small voice. The ‘teeth’ were really more like collectors or antennae. Around me, the integraal panicked. Some of them reverted to template. Many were devoured instantly in the field between the teeth. They became information carrier particles and dissipated on a nonluminous wind. I felt my own hair losing color, my physical appearance being underwritten. I heard the roaring of a chorus of tigers. The fever was just playing with us. Without outside help none of us would clamber out of its maw. Even the humans couldn’t believe it away now. I held my breath and awaited the gentle wind that would carry me into its belly.
Squeezing me eyes shut, I didn’t respond right away when Joela began shaking my shoulders.
“Something’s happening.” She said
“No shit.” I replied cynically, waiting to be eaten. Around me bits of integraal stood free in the air. Hands, eyebrows and hairlines. The curve of a collar, the sheen of a sweaty bicep.
“No.” Joela said stoically “Who is that?” She was pointing behind me. As I turned I observed that the fractal ‘teeth’ were wavering a little like a heat shimmer. Outside the maw a figure stood, stooping just a little.
“Oh God.” I said. Joela squinted at the figure as I turned, embarrassed. I had failed, my function in a holding pattern waiting to jump to another host after I was devoured. But the noise, the distortion in the placecode, it must have woken him up; Codefather.
VII:
Things happened very fast then, and I think my memory of it is a lossy compression, so to speak, so I won’t trey to explain it in detail. There were words between Codefather and the grinning fever. Codefather said something like ‘What do you know of things?’ and the cat blew away on its own boson wind.
More than half of the old order humans perished in the maw of the cat. And a third of the two thousand integraal were irretrievable. We didn’t know the and there but the ant lion was all over, in every city. The city grew back in an instant as soon as the weight of the codefever was lifted. Codefather spoke to me. He spoke directly with my heart while I listened in. He told me that I shouldn’t consider it my failure and that all of this ’Happened sooner than he expected.’ He invited me and the humans to his villa to work things out.
By now me and Joela-- Raquette was lost to the fever-- had become fast friends. Maybe we were more than friends. But I couldn’t imagine being with an old human. I remembered my disdain for them when she and the five remaining humans threw a fit when we told them they would be re-inserted.
“No! You can’t just wipe our minds and put us in an apartment to get wasted or grow tomatoes or whatever it is you think we want!” She protested. I reminded her of the horror she felt when she was out in our city and it was like I didn’t even say anything.
“We give you what your heart wants,” I said “And you reject it like an organ. Then when you are free of that you want to go back under. We give you that, and you still resist.” We both realized we didn’t know each other at all. Codefather put the treatment on them, and all they remembered was their lives, Traminhullix, and that it is the best game ever.
I look in on Joela now and then. Deftly firing that consolidator pistol with the precision of a mercenary. She looked right at me once, but she didn’t see me.
VIII:
Caitlin Travelstone finished her account and sighed. She stretched over the back of her chair and cracked her knuckles. She reached for a glass of stale water and drained it. For the briefest moment she stared into space, wondering how the gals of water got there, then the screen went blank and, prompted by something beyond her perception, she resumed typing:
Traminhulix is the best game ever. The tramin come out of everything. They splinter out of your parquet floors, curl off your leather couch, chip off the paint on the wall. The only thing standing between the Tramin and existence as we know it is you. You are one of the Hullix…
Above her up in the ‘city’, impossible forms moved about on unimaginable business. The casual observer would make no genealogical connection between these beings and Caitlin Travelstone. Some of them were still forms. Most of them were just scents or symmetries; interfaces, really.
Beneath Caitlin, the game continued. Joela fired scatter flechettes at a crowd of replicator tramin before they could set up factory and spun on her heel to meet the oncoming hordes. She froze. The game was loading; stuck. Over Joela’s face an icon, a pixilated arthropod, writhed. Its head not mandibles and compound eyes, but the stylized visage of a grinning cat.
Copyright 2009 Alex Mastroianni
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