PREAMBLE: NOTES FROM AN INSANE FUTURE
A lot of people believe in bleak futures these days, a frequent centerpiece of this outlook being the rise of Artificial Intelligence. The specifics of humanity’s decline is a point of contention, with ecological collapse, economic woes, war, and all the other etceteras competing for the crown.
Few would expect Fandom to be a factor in our collective demise (well, maybe some cultural critics, but who gives a shit about them?). Fewer still would anticipate that God would simply become bored with us and string a long rope—presumably among the multitudes of stars—to hang Herself out of creative frustration.
But I am positing that this is exactly what will happen, what can happen, and possibly (since the Divine is timeless) what has already happened.
Through a process of automatic writing which I will not disclose, I have seen, vividly, such a future. A future ruled by a deity who would rather do Hatsune Miku karaoke than make the various dusts of Creation dance. A future inherited by confused cherubics traumatized by God’s sudden departure from the cosmos, who would attempt to win her back by any means necessary (and here, “any means” includes cosplay, child sacrifice, and reliance on insane authoritarian governments). A future that belongs to the youth, but only because they’re smol, kawaii, and fit into the child-sized niche of God’s Young Adult fiction obsession. It’s a future that, I am sorry to say, belongs to all of us.
The particular glimpse of this eventuality that I will provide is a cultural one, a fascist rock opera (in the genre of “military suicide euphoria”) wrought by the child soldiers of an empire whose hallmarks are mandated illiteracy, a fear of storytelling, and a technonihilism that has produced both intelligent microorganisms and a virulent strain of anti-intellectual posturing among the population.
The following is a musical album pulled from Father Time’s own discography. Because of the aforementioned proliferation of illiteracy and “skill atrophy” (a related disease) in the future, this album was not crafted by human hands. It is an amalgam of ethnographic accounts by regime shock troopers assembled with generative AI for jingoistic purposes. Via the miracle of computing, with the aid of various divinatory and alectryomantic tools, I was able to transcribe the lyrics and reproduce its sound using the exact weights and figures of the period’s native AI models. The album cover and decorative elements are my own; I thought they looked jaunty! All of this is an approximation, of course, but I believe it to be 97% accurate.
The contents of the album, titled simply “WAR IS A GAME”, are shocking, both in existential terms and purely from the perspective of its subject matter. I ask potential listeners to keep an open mind and understand that this is content made by (and for) fascist stormtroopers, who no doubt bopped and jammed to it while uncountable inhumanities were being perpetrated.
God spare us all!
-- Dr. Moron P.W. Barker
LYRICS
“VACUUM” — You should never misunderestimate the capability of the Enemy, and so I’ll say that angels are capable enemies. Then I’ll undermine that by saying that most angels are really dumb enemies. The ones we fight with are against God, which is kind of like being against life itself. It’s against you and against me, like the band that sings about people who stick needles in themselves and wanna wear the boys dress uniform when they’re girls. I know it’s because the angels are sad. They’re sad because God just left one day, lmao, and that’s wild to me. Just took off. At the same time, I get it, because that’s how my mom was. She left and didn’t come back. The angels on our side think God is coming back, and they want to punish the ones who don’t think that. Anyway, the doubter angels are Rebs and they’re stupider than my cousin, who is a mong obsessed with the Duty and Honor video games. Like, my cousin is fucking STUPID in that game: no scopes like dumb dude, and he won’t stop. When he was conscripted, they put him with the droners because his fingers move faster than his brain. He’s a drone commander now. He shits in diapers all day and gives orders to the swarms. Some of the orders are questionable I guess, but people don’t really question it because they know he has trouble communicating. I’m not gonna question it. But like I was saying, these Rebs are dumb. Command had intelligence that one Reb battalion was obsessed with the show Sherlock, so they had a plane fly over and drop Sherlock DVDs all over the field before our human wave attack. When the wave crested, these motherfuckers were out of their trenches scooping up movies. Some of their officers were in the trench watching Benedict Cucumberbatch on their TVs. We took a lot of prisoners. The bloody brass said we could kill them if we wanted, but then shiny brass rescinded that. Said that we should let them finish the season. Said it would be cruel to let them die on a cliffhanger. Shiny brass are all angels themselves, all lunatics obsessed with films and worldbuilding and characters and shit. Fandom is what they call it. More like Fandumb. We took so much ground that day that Heaven’s rogue engine hadn’t even finished fully making the area behind the front line yet. It was half formed, and I knew because my jumps felt floaty, like in a vidya with bad physics. The ground was hot, golden tar gradually becoming a torn up no man’s land. My CO and four of us were assigned to raise the flag. Whenever we push deep into unknown territory, the flags don’t wave because the adams and polycules aren’t there to do it yet, is what I understand. I guess there was a guy who once said “Flags don’t wave in a vacuum” or something, and he created the theory, so you can ask him why it’s such a pain in the ass to set up a bivouac after a big push. I heard he was a vacuum salesman, selling suck to homebodies in my great-to-the-8’s time. My great great great great great great great great grandma was doing the electrolux with a little bastard biting on her tiddy. When I get done my tour, I’m going to be a homebody and give the State like 10 kids. But what wound up happening is me and one other grunt got put on flag detail, which is pretty sweet since you just sit there and re-pose the flag every 5 minutes so that it looks like the air’s moved it. There wasn’t much air yet, so we had to wear respirators. We mostly just sat around and played paddycake for 6 hours. I lost a lot of the matches because paddycake is a brokefuck gacha game for retards. Still better than digging like 72 angel graves. That shit is for fucking virgins.
“AM I A STORY?” — The wendigo’s dragging us across the finger-painted sky. Paint by numbers sky. That feel when thirsting to be in the 80% projected casualties margin. Tales were made and now they're real. Make us march, Make us feel! My feel when that curse lights a pyre. Oh my feet! My fiery feet! My feet of fire! “How high is that?” I ask. The XO tells me to give her the bird with both hands. “That’s an order.” Catch a backhand anyway for doing it. “Insubordination.” Not the first time I've been punished for following orders. Not the last. She helps me up, then holds me close like a sidearm and says that all the fingers I had down were the people who would be blown to bits. Tales were made and now they're real. Make us march, Make us feel! My feel when that curse lights a pyre. Oh my feet! My fiery feet! My feet of fire! War is pretty good at doing cannibal stuff. War is grinding death and metal. War is the Cannibal Corpse song about doing shit to dead kids and other people. The wendigo is shifting around with us inside it. They say the word wendigo is from a lie-story made by a fandumb that existed long ago. A fandumb filled with people like us, who looked like us. It was a warning about things that could be happening at some point. Am I a story? Am I the thing happening? Is this some point? Red light. Wendigo’s maw opens wide. We hold chutes ready to bloom. Chutes and Ladders.
“GOVERNMENT” — Before God faded into nothing, She was on the toilet shitting out a creative brick. The place where I’m from—the place that bleeds young adult fiction from stigmata wounds that reopen every November, the place where we OC’s compete to stand in spotlights like they’re breadlines, (the place where RNG Jody is fucking the guy I had a baby with)—is the turtlehead poking out from God’s asshole. All good fiction needs villains, so Government was created in ages past to oppress everyone. The Worldbuilding Committee must’ve just been sadbois in dirty pajama bottoms with nothing else. That’s how someone like Lord Nim—an incel fagort with mommy issues who happens to be an anthropomorphic fox—becomes dictator for life. Heaven’s lucky. Dictators are ambitious. Dictators create somethings from nothing, like God. Dictators queer up nature with biotech because of anomalous touching that happened years ago. Genitals and armies swell as a result; the new precocious YA protagonist is a nein! nein! nein! nein! years old G-gxrl delivering a healthy baby to the state. Dictators put raw power into the hands of kids like me: guns!, grenades!, MRE packages (the kind with glowsticks!!), e-tools for IRL Minecraft or Mein Kampf. Raw power = more death for rebs lmao, because dictators also believe in making deals in vape cloud-filled rooms. Soldiers for the loyalists, bullets for rebel brains, magic carpet rides for Lord Nim. If you’re a loyal fan still waiting to see if God will look at Her turd before She flushes, dictators are bright red blood in the bowl that screams “this might be cancer.”
“SINGLE-BODY STATE” — According to Government, there’s a bunch of little creatures inside of me. Little me’s. They’re all me, and the sum of all of them is me. When I was born, I had to get my conformities like everyone else. Conformities are like a cootie shot that stops the creatures who move things through my blood, or protect me from outside-me’s, or sew up my ouchees from unionizing. When the insiders become union varmints, me’s and you’s die because union workers are lazy and disorganized. It’s communism, the worst disease Ever. Judgment and reflexes go to shit under communism. My uncle was patrolling the Wastes and got bit by a commie. He bit three people in his unit before they shot him, then those three bit five more, which turned into double ten and triple ten, on and on into the night, which was probably not much of a night but instead daytime with all the flares going up to signal that Mommy and Daddy were ready for the bomb stork. Then uncle’s friends were dominoes that fell into each other while ... CRASH, BOOM, WHOOSH or (noises of air being sucked out of lungs). Anyways, an oligarchy of the little me’s in my head controls my body absolutely and I’m glad. When I think, is it “I think” or “we think?” Dunno. But in this foreign land they marvel when I suppress my period Berlin Uterine Wall and in the sniper perch I punish enemy domers who reveal themselves through unheld sneezes and tardive dyskinesia.
“TACTIGHOUL” — House to house, Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, Rebs deloused! Fully destructible walls! Ghosts confused, Muddy shoes, Quasimodo rucksack, Labyrinth and Bowie blues, Kill Six Billion Demons! Ghosts and Skels in the closet, Glasnost, see right through 'em! Better come out of that closet Or we'll hit you with Fifty thousand lumens Fifty thousand lumens Fifty thousand useless lumens Fuck. Blood in stool, Motor pool, Fire team, Entrenching tool, 1917 pizza party! Werewolf, Air Wolf, She-wolf, Lampshade (We don't ever get paid). Ghosts and Skels, in the closet, Glasnost, see right through 'em! Better come out of that closet! BLAMMERACK, THWOMPGUN, ZIZZERZAPPER, SNOOT-SCOPE WOBBLEFLOP, NIZZLE-BRAKE, GLOPPOMATIC, DOPE GRONKHELM, WHUMPVEST, KNEE-THUMPER, GORPSACK SNICKERSNACK, SNICKERSNACK, SNICKERSNACK, SNICKERSNACK—Or we'll hit you with Fifty thousand lumens Fifty thousand lumens Fifty thousand useless lumens Fuck! Listen up, Over this rainbow bridge, There are animals That need to feel owned. Check your kit. Augment reality with duck tape, Check the scope on your AR! Full kit synergy, Taking stock of your cosmic place, Only the dead use that stock, Tactighoul! Goggles that see through concrete Also see you crying, See you crying In the war, you dumb idiot boi, boi you're too obsessed with war drip drip blood into your new grip, grip, grip the Nanny State’s hand you fa- Ghosts and Skels in the closet, Glasnost, see right through 'em! Better come out of that closet. BIPODDLE BIPPETY BOP LUMENBLARF, MOLLIFIDDLE, KLICK-KLACK, STOP TRI-FANGLED, RIP-AWAY, BLIBBER-BLABBER, BREACH FWEEP, FWEEP, FWEEP, FWEEP, bitch, we'll hit you with Fifty thousand lumens Fifty thousand lumens Fifty thousand useless lumens, Fuck.
“CAPTAIN CALDERERO” — Captain Calderero of the Nigger Knocking League, open sewer hatred, he is beautiful indeed. Cock-strolls (cock bulge!) through the gene soup, with a raiment of stars sent for night arraignments of guilty commissars. Rock guitar. Captain Calderero saw a hobbit on the street, raised his trinket luger, and took a shot ANY DAY OF THE WEEK (bring it). The good cop working O.T. trying to round up that bread, was a fucking piece of shit on the street dead. Captain Calderero. Yeah! Can we shake it down? Shake it, shake it, shake it down. Perf against the wall like a Gollywood thriller. Then man take her down, down, down to the cold ground, maybe put a good round in her skullcap. Can we shake it down? Tremblin' and shakin’ now, brains vs brawn on the cobblestone scoreboard. Can we shake down partisans in this bleak town, now? Oh, we float, in a sea of drake-fat soap. No hope for statistics, or the fags who elope under pantries in the Big ol Kitchen, but when lights get turned on, the Falange is gonna bring you roaches dawn, c’mon.
“SIEGE” — The siege of Olgaeb’s Tower lasted about 10 adult fist time plus 2 adult fingers shoved in you by a lonely dude who came over from the next trench, claiming he was a “Spaniard,” which I heard is a type of hairy, trench-dwelling orc (Any land and Underground). The morning it began, arty and small arms and breathy death screams were performing a noise rock concept album titled “Fuck You.” After the bangs stopped ringing in my head (not the fingerbangs), I went down below ground level and cried in front of lance corporal Turok, which was not a war crime because the chain of command was essentially liquid by that point. I’m not responsible, is what I think I said or something else stupid. He shrugged and saluted, but didn’t hug me. I almost ordered him to, but remembered that that would be a war crime. Everybody was playing poker that day in the trench, as usual. The FNG didn’t know poker somehow, and I had to explain it. Hold 3 cards in your hand and don’t show any. No, draw them from the deck. Draw doesn’t mean color on them (and I wouldn’t let the brass catch you doing that), it just means take 3 without showing or looking. If you’ve got any that look like people—no don’t show me, we’re playing—those trump when everybody shows. Better looking ones trump more. Taught about the garbage cards (the ones with copies of dumb symbols on them) and how you just count the symbols up and that’s their name. 5 shovels on the card is “5 shovels,” etc etc. I’m a LT so it was my job to count all the garbage cards higher than 5. They trusted me. Mostly garbage and numbers didn’t matter because you just look for the prettiest/dumbest/scariest faces and those win. The other thing about the cards is they were orders. Grunts don’t know which are witch. But command (mostly shiny brass) uses them to form up squads to do things somehow. It’s literally all in the cards. This battle, this whole war. For you whinypedias out there, this is widely disputed. But fuck, I believe it. FNG showed Scary Harelip Woman along with two garbage (9 hearts, 9 shovels) his second game. I read the garbage ones as 7’s, because everyone says 9’s foreshadow over the top. When you go over the top, you die because the trench is surrounded from all sides by rebels. I called them as 7’s because I thought it might save him. It didn’t. Within 5 fist time he was shot through the eye by a sniper while waiting on the first level. He was gonna get sent over the top, I know it. Turok said that the bullet that killed him looked like a 9. I don’t really know what that was supposed to mean. Every night this old woman from Mong Company comes in and collects all the cards. She’s one of McNamara’s morons. A trainable designated live fire mitigation (bullet sponge). But I’ve never seen her go into the field. She just picks the cards up each night, and every morning they’re shuffled and back on the table in #5 mess. If there’s any bent or lost, she lets someone up top know right away. You’re punished and, believe me, you will never see it coming. They once hung some ordinance clerk upside down in mess and beat him like a pinata for marking a 5. They unfucked the 5 with some crayons, but told us to rape him and we got in line while a bloody brass stood watch. We all had to do it. That is, until the brass left to do warfighting stuff. There were like 4 of us still lined up at that time. Clerk’s face was all runny camouflage mascara—dirt, sewage, cement. We didn’t have to at that point, I guess.
“TOTAL WAR” — Total War. The latest morale quandary that neither me nor my superiors care about is the roguelike city: an urban environment that changes its layout everytime we bomb it. All the cities in the center of Heaven were built this way for reasons I’d probably understand if I read architectural plans or Ay Oh Three. In this war, we believe in killing men, women and children In this war, we believe in kicking doors down, bullets between eyes In this war, we believe anything the High Command says "What did you do in the war?" Violence We only use drones to terror bomb now. If the commander looks on the screen and sees no hospitals or residential blocks, they scrap the mission and send the drone to refuel. When they send it back to reengage, every building is someplace else. Repeat + reload until no more home front. Rebel scum. Total war is a real scene with a capital S: EXTERIOR. SOME SHITHOLE - ANYTIME. A constantly-reincarnating bunch of soldiers and civilians pass around the same ten ferryman's coins. In this war, we believe in killing men, women and children In this war, we believe in kicking doors down, bullets between eyes In this war, we believe anything the High Command says "What did you do in the war?" Violence Cattle run away from danger, cowboys run towards it. Me and the 54th are factory farmers. Wait for the wild West to crash loudly thru our space and put man and beast out of commission. Total war means don't be a tryhard. I feel nothing for rebs and everything for my squad, cause we're all too fucking broken to queue in a breadline ever again. Band of Others. In this war, blow up buildings In this war, we use flamethrowers to set piles of books on fire l.o.l. In this war, don’t really give a shit "What did you do in the war?” Anything at all.
“STUDIO GHIBLI” — The generals gathered in their masses. Don't have to fight the war. Sucks for them. I've been insanity wolfin’ the valley Blowing houses down. And the wind rises. If the word ‘zaki’ means “killer of elves and mothers”. Then Miyazaki. Ha-yay-ohhhhh!! Everytime we're supposed to go home. Stop-gap says no, no, no. Howl’s moving goalpost chains, We're dancing in the rain! Every minute of this game! Every minute of this game! Every minute of... If you're sad in a war, Better look at the pastels (dried blood, jaundice of prisoners, trench berm dirt) Better think of the wonder weapons. Better hide your alien. Better Combine than Columbine. Listening to speeches from City Seventeen. 10 hours of reign sounds, Whatever seventeen is. Seventeen’s a grandma in a historical cartoon. Seventeen in a combat zone, that's basically elder abuse. Seventeen is the extra bullet for the person on your shit list you didn't know hurt you. Everytime we're supposed to go home, Stop-gap says no, no, no. Howl’s moving goalpost chains. We're dancing in the rain. Every minute of this game! Every minute of this game! Every minute of... This here is the bridge, Engineers move up, Mortars free fire, Let's put danger close far, far away. Good effect! My head is OPFOR. Targets: 0 meters. Blow up every bridge ever. Family, friends, pets. Denying the enemy. Don't read on me. Don't read on me. Don't read on me. Yellow snake! Take me out of your stories. Don't read to me. Don't read to me. Don't read to me. Kill me before you tell my story. Don't speak lies. Don't speak chrono-illogically about shit that didn't happen. Fandom is not our culture.
“BULLET HEAVEN” — in bullet heaven dodging patterns of abuse. In bullet heaven creating patterns of abuse. In bullet heaven we bayonetta angels thru their skulls. In bullet heaven there are friendly angels who believe god will come back. In bullet heaven there are bad-guy angels who believe god ann-heroed instead of anne franking. We put out so much fire, the rebs just fall apart. Shells raining on golden streets, shells for hermit crabs. We never stop the shooting, we can’t stop anyway. Fill the god gap with metal slugs. In bullet heaven there are the fandoms. In bullet heaven they argue over which things should kiss. In bullet heaven things are devil-angel and totally fucking six-seven. In bullet heaven we make them kiss the business end of seven six two. In bullet heaven we hear a lot about how angels made the world and then made it worse. We put out so much fire, the rebs just fall apart. Shells raining on golden streets, shells for hermit crabs. We never stop the shooting, we can’t stop anyway. Fill the god gap with metal slugs. God made the world. God, a fan of her original characters. God, who loved young adult fiction. Angels put children in compromising positions to bring God back. Damn! In bullet hell we’re cogs that turn an engine. In bullet hell that engine is designed to ritualize sacrifice. In bullet hell the goal isn’t territory and military acquisition. In bullet hell the shiny brass take bets on whether God really hung herself from the big dipper. In bullet hell, she probably did.
-- Kill Rudy Johnson. Please.
