CRUEL OATH

<<if visited ("Seg01") >= 1 and visited ("Seg02") >= 1 and visited ("Seg03") >= 1 and visited ("Seg04") >= 1>>Something draws your attention to the mirror. An internal drive? An external force? Perhaps it is the mirror moving towards you while you just stand still. \n[["\su21C0"|Seg05]]\n\n<<else>>The functionally-sized bathroom contains a [[toilet|Toilet]], [[shower|Shower]], and [[sink|Sink]]. \n\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n<<endif>>

There is no fading to black. No sinking into a dark void. No emptiness of posthumous experience. You are immortal, after all. Death is merely the cessation of experiencing a persistent "I", continuing only in the refraction of other persisting subjectivities by mere habit. Their collective memories composing a disfigured portrait of who <i>you</i> are.\n\nYour synthesis with Vereena is virtually seamless. Now you sit alone. Forever alive, forever conscious, forever present. A form-of-life wherein each of the nested layers become transparent, indistinguishable from the [[hollow|Seg06]] permeating within.\n\n\n\n\n\n

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In 2046, early adopters of eternity fell into a profound boredom after exhausting all human indulgences. Many stopped moving altogether. Some stood, some laid, some contorted their bodies with whatever object was nearby. Legacy humanity (humans that had retained their mortal coil) found this sight surreally unsettling. \n\nThe mortals gathered these unmoving immortals and packed them in the most optimal position until there stood, in a private storage facility, the largest manmade monument to Promethean ambition. A fleshy cube composed of still-living humans set next to one another in an ordered arrangement. Each layer was stacked, latticing up until it was about ten feet tall. The immortals existed there for a long time in relative stillness.\n\nIf you watched the cube closely, you could discern a gentle undulation of chests breathing, causing the structure to faintly wobble as if made of gelatin. The stack stayed undisturbed with each immortal staring absently in any direction their eyes fell. Looking, but seeing nothing. [["\su21C0"|Desk04]]\n\n

by [[William Lee|http://www.geistworld.com/]]\n\n

<<if visited("Open") >= 1 and visited("Dissolve") is 0>>Sunlight beams through the window...\n\n[[Look out the window.|Blinds]]\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n<<elseif visited("Dissolve") >= 1 and visited("Open") is 0>>Faint waves of various colors slow dance on the floor...\n\n[[Look out the window.|Blinds]]\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n\n<<elseif visited("Open") >= 1 and visited("Dissolve") >= 1>>The image remains the same.\n\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n\n<<else>>A cascade of light bleeds through the [[blinds|Blinds]], scoring the interior... \n\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n<<endif>>

<<if visited("Open") is 1 and visited("Dissolve") is 0>> \n<<addclass "body" "whiteout">>After basking in the aesthetic sublime of simulated nature, you tap the glass to access the menu:\n\nPress [[Dissolve|Dissolve]]\nPress [[Close|Window]]\n\n\n<<elseif visited("Dissolve") is 1 and visited("Open") is 0>>\n<<addclass "body" "whiteout">>You press on the glass once more to pull up the menu:\n\nPress [[Generate View|Open]]\nPress [[Close|Window]]\n\n\n<<elseif visited("Open") is 1 and visited("Dissolve") is 1>>You look out the window. No matter how close you get to the glass, nothing is reflected.\n\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n<<else>>You look for a chain to open the blinds, but there isn’t one. Instead, you try to part two vanes, but end up touching glass. The giant screen registers the pressure of your fingertips and a window prompt appears hovering in glass:\n\nPress [[Open|Open]]\nPress [[Dissolve|Dissolve]]\nPress [[Close|Window]]\n\n<<endif>>\n\n\n

Honey still sweet\nCherries still tart\nMushrooms still savory\nSaffron still bitter\nSkin still salty\n\nAt least, you think so. [["\su21C0"|Desk02]]

You recall the countless times you were entwined with your various lovers. Limbs flailing while simultaneously pulling each of your bodies closer and pushing each other apart for air. Yet, no matter how close your bodies got, it was always impossible to truly know one another. It became a routine of guesswork, apologies, and compromises. \n\nAfter years together, a palpable disparity had manifested between you and your mortal companion. If the relationship had not ended before you actually went through with the procedure, it certainly would have with time. [["\su21C0"|Desk11]]

Vereena amplifies your thoughts by instructing the nanos to administer regular doses of nootropics and mild hallucinogens, making your brain more susceptible to running augmented dream simulations. Your brain becomes a site where the elusive experience of subjective interiority materializes into something more lifelike inside the mind. \n\nImagine your physical body as the first anatomical shell of a matryoshka doll. Second comes your squishy, three-pound brain, and your sapience as the hollow nested within. Now with the aid of advanced computer intelligence and nanomachines, you are able to nest that hollow within another shell made of equal parts coding and imagination. All wetware. This third shell is a simulated body, a kind of out-of-body experience, but inward, an internal projection called an <i>oneironaut</i>, or oni. The recreation of a skull-bound, first-person subjectivity is essential to keeping your identity consistent, reality salient, and mind free of rot. [["\su21C0"|Intro_02]]

In this projection, you traverse an isomorphic mindscape that, like in the first shell, approximates reality. You are now capable of processing more complex informational structures thanks to Vereena lessening energy expenditure coming from having a human-level consciousness. In a titanium can propelling across the cosmos, you open your eyes to a new category of [[darkness.|Seg01]] \n

Games:\n<i>Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag</i> by Ubisoft Montreal\n<i>Dark Souls 3</i> by From Software\n<i>Deus Ex: Mankind Divided</i> by Eidos Montreal\n<i>Event [0]</i> by Ocelot Society\n<i>Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain</i> by Kojima Productions\n<i>Nier: Automata</i> by Platinum Games\n<i>Remember Me</i> by Dontnod Entertainment\n<i>Resident Evil VII: Biohazard</i> by Capcom\n<i>Sleeping Dogs</i> by United Front Games\n<i>Tomb Raider</i> by Crystal Dynamics\n<i>The Witcher 3</i> by CD Projekt Red\n\nMusic:\n"The Water Shelf" by Disasterpeace, <i>Hyper Light Drifter OST</i>\n"Heal" by PENTAGON, <i>ICO ~Melody in the Mist~</i>\n"Exhalation" by Ted Chiang, read by Ray Sizemore\n"La Coronacion" by Globus, <i>Epicon</i>

<<addclass "body" "whiteout">>\nA low voltage shock ripples throughout your body, but only for a moment. As you look into the eyes of your reflection, your oni starts to become transparent, phasing in and out of visibility, but the mirrored image remains consistent. You hear muffled scrambling, the kind of cacophony you don’t so much listen to, but feel when you watch noise on mute. [["\su21C0"|Bathroom03]]\n \n\n\n

You are a cut, a blind spot receding from nature. Consciousness only functioned as long as it avoided holding a mirror to itself. It needs to be distracted, but eternal life eliminates all distractions until there is only being. Then, the problem arises. A limitation in your ability to think thought itself. An incongruous vision of a subject constituted by historical experience on one side, and mere evolutionary adequacy on the other.\n\nYou would always be you, always experience your life as yourself. A never-ending stream of me, me, me. Immortality is the antithesis to adaptation. Your body no longer needs to evolve. You do not get sick. You do not age. You do not flinch. Humanity reached its apex with its physical integration with biotech, having created an always-new life. [["\su21C0"|Bathroom04]]\n

Imagine, once again, that the hollow space between each layer of the matryoshka doll is emptied out as it becomes unnested. Your consciousness dispersing into the atmosphere, lighter than dust. Each layer of the doll is then reassembled. Still hollow inside, but now constituted of a different hollowness. [["\su21C0"|End]]

You splash water on your face...\n<<timed 3s t8n>>You feel refreshed.<</timed>>\n<<timed 5s t8n>>[[Leave|Bathroom]]<</timed>>

<<if visited ("Desk04") >= 1 and visited ("Desk08") >= 1 and visited ("Seg02") >= 1>>The cube remains perpetually buoyant above the surface of the table. Memories collected and stored as nothing but light. \n\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n<<else>>The desk is made of rosewood, tough and slightly fragrant. It is sturdily constructed with joinery and doweling, leaving no unnecessary screws or bolts exposed. The only thing on it is a holographic cube ominously bobbing. \n\n[[Touch|Desk02]]\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n<<endif>>\n

<<if visited("Books") >= 1>>Worn books sit on your shelf. Some have bookmarks, dog ears, or sticky notes that fray out of the top and side. The baseline human brain can still only process limited information in a logical sequence. Hence, the inclination for the book format. \n\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n<<else>>The shelf is made of hard oak and is very heavy. Surprisingly, print has not depreciated over time. This is due mainly to its tactility, like the persistence of keyboards and mouses, navigation is more convenient when spatialized materially. \n\nThe bookshelf contains works of the technical philosophy genre popular amongst immortals when there used to be some who read and wrote. The lack of imminent death which had inscribed mortality means that artworks are no longer attached to preserving trauma through constant rehearsals of struggle and drama. Language is employed for the sole purpose of clarification. Imagination is emancipated from the bog of endless speculative inanity, and actually put to work. This being the case, most immortal writings are oriented toward exposition, with every description amended with a how and why.\n\n[[Peruse|Books]]\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n<<endif>>\n

Cruel Oath

For immortals, a life-long relationship is ironically less sustainable than when there was the fail-safe of death. The nanos have not only preserved vitality, but youth as well, or rather they have stabilized epidermal age based on when the procedure was done. You can have your skin tightened, add more of a sheen, moisturize, or even heal scars, but only to an extent. You cannot reverse what aging had already transpired, but could accelerate if need be. \n\nThere was the hope that time would allow you to get to know your companion more. That a more sumptuous and complex emotion that was more than love would emerge. You wanted to know the other deeper, to know them as themselves. But, as with any human mortal or immortal, nothing laid beneath. [["\su21C0"|Desk10]]

<<if visited("Room") >= 2>>You observe the confines of your room for a moment. You stare at nothing in particular. Periodically, you catch glimpses of dust particles materializing in and out of space.\n\nFacing the right of your [[bed|Bed]] begins a [[window|Window]] that stretches almost the whole length of the longest side of the room before becoming a wall again. Next to the window is your [[desk|Desk]] and then your [[bookshelf.|Bookshelf]] Perpendicular to the bookshelf is a door leading to the [[bathroom.|Bathroom]]\n\n<<else>>Every surface is made of a black material that, in dim light, makes the space feel larger than it really is. Adding to the sparseness is the fact that it contains only the barest ornaments of a lived-in space. This lack of distracting elements makes the room highly conducive to meditative states. \n\nDuring mortality, sitting in your room alone with your thoughts was seen as unproductive because you did not appear to be working. Working was the sole state in which an individual could contribute to society. Eventually, it became less about what was actually being produced, and all that mattered was that your body was in motion. Meanwhile, the mind became occupied with telling yourself to keep moving. Meaning was circuitous. You did more work to create more meaning in the work to keep working. Stillness was criminal. \n\nThinking suffered under perpetual movement and knowledge was churned out compulsively. Whatever point or statement someone made, another merely needed to respond with the opposite argument. Inevitably, sustained critical thought degenerated into reactionary discourse. At specific historical points, it had not even mattered what was being said, only who was saying it. This meant that certain viewpoints were prematurely dismissed in favor of what felt good at the time. \n\nAfter letting your mind wander, you look around. Facing the right of your [[bed|Bed]] begins a [[window|Window]] that stretches almost the whole length of the longest side of the room before becoming a wall again. Next to the window is your [[desk|Desk]] and then your [[bookshelf.|Bookshelf]] Perpendicular to the bookshelf is a door leading to the [[bathroom.|Bathroom]]\n<<endif>>

During the emergence of immortals, or the Descension as mortals called it (despite theological references becoming archaic), there was a fear that the immortals would evolve into a predatory species. This was ludicrous, of course, as cannibalism is neither nutritious nor necessary since eating has grown less and less common among the inhumans (another term mortals adopted to prosecute the deathless of their alleged perversion of both humanity and nature, tearing the heavens and earth asunder). [["\su21C0"|Desk06]]\n

Time expansion has the unfortunate, though not entirely unforeseen, consequence of mindrot. In expanded time, death no longer circumscribes life, rendering consciousness redundant without the threat of finitude. Consciousness evolves out of a survival instinct of fight or flight and into a cruelty of sapience, where self-awareness enables sophisticated geographical positioning for the exploitation of vantage points over less intelligent beings to ensure subsistence. The accumulation of life-extending practices ushers in the development of civilization, where humanity comes to dominate the food chain and begin to manipulate the environment to benefit itself as a place to live, not just to survive. \n\n[[Return|Desk02]]

It has been a long time since you have actually consumed food. Immortals generally only ingest a supplement called "nutri-gel" (jelly-coated stem cells that are received by the nanos once they enter the digestive tract and then distributed accordingly for vital upkeep). The devolution of appetite means that despite still being able to taste food, such things do not inspire any sort of disgust or desire. Indeed, the gel tastes like nothing.\n\nTaste is now merely another means of identification without subjective preference, like the saliva swishing between your tongue, it is neither here nor there. [["\su21C0"|Desk08]]\n

You curl, twist, and fold your tongue into different forms. Numerous lingual papillae brush up and pressing against each other in various angles and muscular pressure. Saliva shifts and spreads across changing surfaces until it dries out, or you end up swallowing it. \n\nYou try to identify the taste on your tongue. [["\su21C0"|Desk07]]

<<if visited("Bed") >= 2>>The bed is made with gray covers neatly tucked underneath the mattress, leaving no sign of having been laid upon.\n\nYou look at it, but you are not tired...\n\n[[Turn away|Room]]\n\n\n<<else>>A ceiling emerges from a black fog, unveiling smooth curvilinear patterns interweaving to form an intricate, tentacular firmament.\n\nYou stare for a moment. The lines seem to slither as your eyes adjust to the half-light.\n\nYour body finally registers the weight of the atmospheric pressure, now calibrated to normal. You are in your bed.\n\nYour [[room|Room]] is spartan. Facing the right of your bed begins a [[window|Window]] that stretches almost the whole length of the longest side of the room before becoming a wall again. Next to the window is your [[desk|Desk]] and then your [[bookshelf.|Bookshelf]] Perpendicular to the bookshelf is a door leading to the [[bathroom.|Bathroom]]\n<<endif>>

The cube emanates an amaranth glow with holographic glyphs streaming from all sides, flowing inwards along labyrinthine paths with some junctures forming trefoil knots, while others trace stranger topologies. Pressing on one of these streams causes the cube to shatter into a mandala of interlocking menus storing memory saves.\n\n[[Touch trefoil knot|Desk03]]\n[[Touch Whitehead manifold|Desk05]]\n[[Touch inner ring of a six-component Brunnian link|Desk09]]

You take a rinse...\n<<timed 3s t8n>>You feel rejuvenated.<</timed>>\n<<timed 5s t8n>>[[Leave|Bathroom]]<</timed>>

The expanse is comprised of several swirling gaseous bodies, each with their own deeper blending of colors. Out of some, pillars of clouds billow in all directions. Light emanating from a dwarf star outlines more effervescent arrangements.\n\n[[Watch|Watch03]]

A distant moon disintegrates into rocky morsels that begin drifting away from its now nonexistent orbit. The planetary debris accelerates as it gets swallowed by the vacuous mouth of a nearby collapsing star.\n\nVereena has enhanced your sight to see more than is evolutionarily available for humans. This is the wager of becoming immortal. What is the body other than a tool for reason to exercise its own agency by learning and making sense of perception? To have an imagination is to synthesize anticipatory and experienced external stimuli to construct causal sequence of reality. The only real limit is reason's embodiment in the brain, where it stereoscopically merges with notions of subjectivity, where human and inhuman are bound.\n\n[[Watch|Seg04]]\n\n

Space moves slow. The intensity of dying stars and the violent distortions surrounding black holes churn in sedated, deliberate formations.\n\n[[Watch|Watch02]]

config.addVisitedLinkClass = true;

Immortals are sterile. It is a trade-off: Extreme longevity over equating futurity with progeny. Getting into a romantic or sexual relationship with another immortal is purely experimental. For many, desire has ceased altogether. Love is just a plot device. \n\nFor those who manage to prevent mindrot, the mind begins to crave something more than just pleasure. More than the constant perpetuation of desire. More than fetishizing the unknown. It wants to consummate a different form. A form of thinking that knows itself. Being immortal primes one to offer subjective identification for a level of consciousness that can examine itself for what is really is. A simulation. It wants to [[grasp|Seg02]] what subjectivity is when unbound from the skull.

<<if visited("Open") is 1>>Instantly, a hole expands from the center of the window until it reaches the border and, where the vista used to be, only blackness remains. You take a moment to adjust your vision. Your iris dilates to make sense of the depthlessness beyond the glass. It seems flat, as with most seemingly infinite expanses. \n\nShades of orange, green, blue, yellow, pink, and red all start to faintly bleed in, as if you had dripped some water colors onto the glass. The contours of different gaseous forms appear. You now look out into a nebulous haze of vibrant colors. \n\n[[Watch|Watch01]]\n\n\n<<else>>In an instant, the blinds disappear, opening to black. You take a moment to adjust your vision. Your iris dilates to make sense of the depthlessness beyond the glass. It seems flat, as with most seemingly infinite expanses.\n\nShades of orange, green, blue, yellow, pink, and red all start to faintly bleed in, as if you had dripped some water colors onto the glass. The contours of different gaseous forms appear. You now look out into a nebulous haze of vibrant colors. \n\n[[Watch|Watch01]]\n\n<<endif>>\n

You sit on the toilet...\n<<timed 3s t8n>>You feel relieved.<</timed>>\n<<timed 5s t8n>>[[Leave|Bathroom]]<</timed>>

<i>The outset of the 22nd Century…</i>\n\nA small recon shuttle, the Vereena, zooms through celestial debris and dark matter at 300 parsecs an hour toward the Sculptor Wall. Inside the hull, you sit cross-legged in lucidity, a state of computer-assisted meditation. A swarm of nanomachines swims through your body. Each of which communicates with the Vereena’s intelligence to monitor vital signals and run dream simulations during deep torpor. While the nanomachines preserve cellular integrity by mending atrophied muscles, stimulating scorched synapses, and reinforcing withered bones in order to keep you physically immortal, they alone cannot account for the cognitive shifts in the experience of extreme longevity. [["\su21C0"|Intro_01]]\n

The quiet wriggling of the slugs is disrupted by the songs of finches. Small straw-colored blurs dash between the branches. Some sport reddish crowns that make them look like comets. \n\n[[Listen|Seg03]]

You notice a banana slug, radiant yellow and secreting thick trails of mucus along the brush-laden soil. More appear the longer you look at the ground, with some being as large as your forearm. They glisten in the sun as they slither over dried leaves and twigs. Their eyestalks curiously wiggle to sense the surroundings.\n\n[[Look|Look03]]\n

The rusty trunks of sequoia trees ascend upwards. Most of the leaves and branches are concentrated at the top. Smaller, thinner branches spiral up and around the circumference of the trunk. Sunlight is cut and dispersed, weaving through every tree.\n\n[[Look|Look02]]\n

<<linkappend "<i>Intelligence and Freedom</i>" >>\n<blockquote>"It was difficult for those who still upheld outdated conceptions of freedom to truly liberate themselves from the constant cycle of conflict and strife. Postmodern malaise had eviscerated truth into a multitude of groundless subjective opinions, and any claim to objectivity was deemed oppressive or a product of scientism. This aversion to acknowledge the differences between natural and normative laws led to a conflation of whimful fantasy and causal reality. It seemed as if claims to the real were too bold and a vulgar skepticism took its place. What is needed is a revision of the ways we conceive of truth by first acknowledging that they exist. We just need a system to delineate how, which ones are natural laws, like chemistry or physics, which are ruled by abstraction, but nonetheless have real ramifications in the ways we exist in life, and which are normative laws, socially-agreed upon rules that govern how we as humans should behave amongst ourselves and the world. The latter of which is subject to change with regards to new discoveries and new truths. Anything less is willful ignorance, or in other words, stupidity[...]"</blockquote><</linkappend>>\n\n<<linkappend "<i>Background Color: Thinking Difference in Futuristic Imaginations</i>">>\n<blockquote>"For decades, oppression narratives in popular science-fiction media had always seemed unconvincing. Instead of representing actual oppressed groups, they substitute the marginalized with white people playing non-humans. Aliens, androids, monsters, all portrayed by white bodies as metaphors for real world suffering subjects. What this substitution does is relegate the bodies of marginalized peoples to the background as inanimate props for the setting, as flavor for the main plot, while securing the totality of the struggle as one by and for whites only. No matter how intricate the narrative structure or how radical the ideas being played with, they never breach the possibility that non-white subjects could have equally or more vivid imaginations about the future. Ones in which the post-apocalypse is not a world to lament the loss of Western civilization and traditionally American values, but a future that realizes that the apocalypse has always already been in effect for the lives of the oppressed and that a post-apocalypse is a utopia.\n \nYet, there is also the potential for the quest to (re)write history as merely an attempt to change the coat of paint on the abstract narrative structure of any genre, rather than actually reconstructing whole new modes of storytelling, historicizing, or living[...]"</blockquote><</linkappend>>\n\n<<linkappend "<i>Promethean Fury: An Archive of the Firestone Collective</i>">>\n<blockquote>"The Firestone Collective is arguably one of the most controversial insurgency groups to have assembled in recent history. Each member were from varying occupations ranging from engineers, programmers, and biologists to historians, poets, and philosophers, though mostly all were female-identified. They had one main goal, to annihilate the historically entrenched notion that fertility was an inherent good, especially as a trait to define the female sex.\n\nTheir support of in-vitro fertilization, voluntary sterilization, and life-extension research marked the collective as a divisive figure, even in the progressive climate of the latter 21st Century. In terms of political strategies, they employed everything from lobbying, education, and when the situation called for it, violence. Indeed, it was this particular penchant for organization, strategization, and execution that separated them from the resurging mystical goddess sects of the era, who would rather revert to a naive primitivism as symbolic empowerment than to revise gender, sex, and societal roles by taking into consideration advancements in the sciences[...]"</blockquote><</linkappend>>\n\n[[Return|Bookshelf]]

The core begins to thaw, then kindle. As each wire-frame stretches and shrinks and tightens to an accurate representation of your form, you feel liquid, perhaps blood, slither outward to trace a functional nervous system. A surge of vitality coursing within a mesh, warming the body back to a lively 37 ⁰C. The virtual representation of the subject becomes indistinguishable from its fleshy counterpart. Lines of DNA mirrored in lines of code. Consciousness reorients itself inside of your head. Rays of sunlight beam through the blinds and press against your face and arms, where beads of sweat secrete like morning dew. [["\su21C0"|Bed]]

[[Unbag, Issue 02: End|http://unbag.net/]]

Each oni is reanimated within the same parameters, a controlled environment to make logical sense of the transition. You feel cold, the extremities of your hands and feet coil inward as the mercurial matter of your consciousness consolidates into a dense core. As this happens, all coherent understanding of sensations are eviscerated into senselessness. [["\su21C0"|Reanim02]]\n\n\n

<<if visited("Dissolve") is 1>>A view bursts from the center of gaseous pandemonium to coalesce a more familiar scene. Wispy cirrus clouds score an azure sky, spiraling out to the horizon. The view overlooks a redwood forest.\n\n[[Look|Look01]]\n\n<<else>>The blinds rotate 90 degrees into profile before disappearing to reveal wispy cirrus clouds scoring an azure sky, spiraling out to the horizon. The view overlooks a redwood forest.\n\nYou soak in artificial sunlight for while. Warmth is achieved by the light-emitters in the glass that are heated according to the simulated direction of the sun in the scenery. \n\n[[Look|Look01]]\n\n<<endif>>