loopinfinite

Yes, the machine was an ugly thing. Yes, its only purpose was to repeatedly carry out a series of violent steps. Trace could admit that.

But the machine had grace, too. It had rhythm. It followed those steps, but it did that cleanly, precisely. As far as Trace was concerned, the machine was a ballerina. Yes, it was a huge, horrific structure made of rusting metal. It was also a ballerina.

Trace was one of the machine’s guards. He worked the graveyard shift. Late at night, he was alone: it was just him and the clattering, never-ending ballet.

Sometimes Trace left his post on the catwalk and climbed down into the machine’s dark, damp bowels. He would look up and watch the dizzying, intricate dance: cylinder slamming into piston smashing into shaft crashing into mechanized claw tearing into corpse dragging it through the disintegrator vats. Again and again. Beautiful.

Man, fuck this.

I can’t sift through all the stuff I have to read. What if I’ve lost all inherent ability to concentrate? Do I need to turn to methamphetamine? Is that Pharm class’s hidden curriculum?

In March I made a discovery about the campus library: it was infested with ladybugs. They lived at the building’s far edges. They crawled along windows and out of floor vents.

They’d probably spent the winter sleeping behind the walls, huddled in ragged clumps. Then the time had come for them to wake up. Good for them, but I didn’t want to see their migration.

I found that I never had to deal with them if I stayed away from the windows, so that’s what I did. I left them alone and they left me alone. Months passed.

Taking a break today, I walked to a far corner of the second floor, to a tiny alcove. Bookshelves and a window and hard, hot summer light. I had been there in March. I had seen the ladybug swarm.

The swarm is still there. The bugs are shriveled and dead, though. All in a rotting heap on the carpet. Right there in plain view. I think they’ve been dead for months, but nobody swept them up.

A cliff. A hundred miles high. You, at the edge. You look down through an oily lens of foaming, nitrogenous gas. You see the planet’s enormous, graceful arc. The cradle that has safely carried a million generations of mutants through space.

You see the cities: scattered sparks, vivid against the black earth. You see the light-trails that tie one settlement to the next, that fuse them together.

You’re too high up to see any individual mutants running to and fro, but you can imagine them. Do they know the end is coming? You are the end. You are coming. Do they know that?

You’re ready now. “Bring me the first officer,” you say. And now she is here, and she is ready to execute your command but first she asks you to reconsider.

“My liege,” she says. “Do you really want to wipe all those mutants out? Are you really sure about that? I mean, what if they . . . come in handy?”

“Handy?” you say. “What do you mean?”

The first officer does not seem to know what she means. So you give the order. You tell her to press the button.

Instead of listening to you, she decides to stage a mutiny. Her soldiers storm your ship; it takes off without you. You are alone on this cliff. You jump, and land somewhere in that inky hell-world below. You are on the mutant planet now.

Are you about to die? Someone with your ingenuity? Your skill? Your charm? No. Of course not.

Instead of dying, you decide to take revenge. You picture the first officer. You picture her blood. You picture it spilling. You like this picture.

You go to the light-caves, the ones that always glow green with the stuff of myth. The ones where mutants in the times of old forged ancient weapons and shit like that.

You find some giant ants. You talk to them. They point you to a forest, a dark one. You go there. It is full of witches and ghosts and wolves. You kill every last one and pile the corpses high.

You make a small mountain of meat and ectoplasm and then you set it on fire. This is your ritual. This is how you are going to seek revenge. Unfortunately, you did not think this through. All the ritual does is make the forest smell terrible.