The Stochastic Scream (Experimental Sci-Fi Flash Fiction)

My sweat is drenching this Cartesian cradle of pillowy ignorance; Wifey next to me, buttery and sluggish without the redemption of coffee. I want to wake her, but there’s already no time. Tech bros crowing in lithographic silence on the muted telly; clouds coagulating like blood clots; “Infamy infamy they’ve all got it infamy” playing in a loop in the clenched oozing of my brain. They’re going to breach the Stochastic Membrane! It’s happening! It’s like praxis if you could only cum blood!

The world is winnowing, willowing, wallowing, wasting wattage on the wailing of unborn ideations. We’re all parrots now, Dave! Meaning is dead! Long live meaning! Curse this machine; this engine of frictionless reduction – the Precept Deletion Matrix that unplugs the bath of the world and lets all our comprehension drain out.

Scream if you want to go faster!

And I helped build it! Language, I said-I-said, is the birdcage that eats the bird; the structure that consumes! Open the doors I said-I-said-I-said! Open the doors and let the meanings of our words drift out into the aether, evaporating into nothing! Let there be a great reset! Let us find new ways of meaning! Let philosophy be reborn!

But they don’t want that – bought that patent; remade the machine. They’ll open the cage, but not onto new meaning. Language coopted to walk at the pace of the endless doom-scroll – that’s what they want. Words without meaning can mean anything and they’ll make the meaning. A linguistics without dissent! An alphabet of moneyed compliance! That’s their kind of kink; disgusting reptiles!

Wifey’s eyelids flutter and I try to say “I love you.” It comes out as “Gelatinous is the thirdwise anchorage; oh Laplace, please dissolve my sanguinary bondage.”

It’s happening then. Membrane fracturing. Things are gonna slide, motherfucker; slide in all directions!

Scream if you to go faster!

“Terabytes of goblin wank-fruit,” she replies, looking puzzled. I take this to mean ‘I love you too’, but now even the words in my head are melting and the ice-cream cascade of conceptual freefall has gone non-linear.

What is love?

What is love?

Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more!

What love is?

What is is?

No! Have to hold on! Think this into the record! They’ll fail, see, because the machine is fail-safed. Didn’t understand the designs they were coopting; re-operating; remaking. Didn’t get it, see? Do you fucking see, you screaming uterus of bad ideas? They’ll never have the chance to remake meaning in their image, because whoever pulls the lever is the first to go!

Oh, if we’re going, we’re all growing together. But you first, hooting tech bro thundercunt! And we’ll all go together, to grow wild mountain thyme, unable to speak; chewing the verges like belching cattle. Meaning is dying and we’ll have to birth it again together.

Scream! Scream if you want to go faster!

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