by Hari Navarro | Aug 27, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“Listen to me closely, Commander, and form a visual. The beautiful naked Christian is lashed to the side of the mighty bull as it agitates in the stall beneath the arena. Hands scream for air as they are bound with braided leather to its magnificent horns. The Christian’s feet are roped and tied to a sash that loops the bellows that heave within the beast’s belly. A torment that enrages as it digs and rips at its groin.”
“Ouch, I feel that.”
“Focus, please, refrain from speaking, Commander. You can feel the surge of the bull’s fear and it ripples in shuddering waves and transfers from the animal’s hide and into the glisten of the Christian’s oil and herb slicked skin. It is a kind of tangible heat this fear, one that floats and lays thick in the air.”
The technician taps at the screen as an image melts and forms from the pixels.
“The Christian’s hair still carries the rich blooming scent of the spice they washed through it. But it is a scent that fails beneath the heady stink of the bull. Warm fluids purge from both as at once they sense the end.”
The Commander’s eyes flicker and roll back into his head and he bites hard at his lip.
“You hear the rolling boom of the crowd. The bull and the body are as one. Shapes and colours stretch as if melted and a drunken bewilderment slots in for their fear. The Christian’s form is exquisitely beautiful. A virgin chosen by men. Sickly old men employed by the Emperor, so eager were they to search out and make so his perversions. To find one so perfect, so young and so pure.”
The Commander’s breath shudders just behind his bit lips and sweat starts to gather at his flesh.
“Silenzio. You hear nothing but the beating of lungs within chests. And then, suddenly, trumpets open the doors at the top of the ramp and the bull thumps up and into the stinging glare of the day.”
The technician leans in and places a cold probe on the Commander’s shoulder.
“OK, Sir. Formulate this narrative forward to your conclusion and give me a final visual if you would”, the technician makes a clicking sound as he pulls and finalises an image from the Commander’s neural feed.
“Interesting.”
“What is?”
“Since introducing this particular narrative, a high percentage render the exact same image that you just did. A massive bull lays dead. Blood streaming from its mouth. A spear protrudes from his side. Skewering his heart. A beautiful woman lays naked. She, too, is dead and still bound to the horns of the bull. In a repose that could just as easily be framed as wistful sleep. No signs of violence, save for the bindings at her hands and feet. Her long red hair cascades and lays gently as it fuses with the animal’s blood and stains into the dust. Her breasts are exposed and a white pall drapes across her hips. Almost as if she is a lover about to stir. And the Emperor and his warrants, they look on. Detached. This is interesting.”
“You said that. We’re all the same? A collective. Bees in a hive?”
“No, it’s just I never mentioned that the Christian was a woman. Death and blood and sex. It is so interesting for us to examine these instinctive equations of your… how do you refer to them? Base instincts.”
“Fucking sentient AI. Who are you to judge me?”, snaps the Commander.
“We do not judge. It is you that painted the picture.”
by Hari Navarro | Aug 20, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The cliff face rises shear above the old skeleton. A tidal wave hewn in ancient granite, it crests high above the smoke that bleeds a bitter mist from the ruined city. A thin wisp that sweeps out upon the great lake that fans out as splotchy just cleaned glass at its edge.
For as long as anyone could remember, the armies of the Pabulum had amassed on the eve of this most sacred of months. Listen as now they crank their contraptions and ready their fire as hearty songs of conquest spill over the lip. Lyrical hate that flutters down to we, the People of the Stipe, and we brace en-mass at its foot.
This festival of death and cruelty, such a needless and hellish taunt. An intractable spectacle drawn in blood and fortified with ancient vintages of faith. An unwavering addiction to the notion that this city, this once beautiful thriving haven, had been promised in verse to those at the top and not to we, the heathen pretenders who toil as pigs down below.
In the old city, the resistance yawns as we, now too, lock our weapons in for the kill. The sniper sits in the warehouse, inclined with her back nestled into the over-stuffed bale of wool at her back. She lines her eye along the barrel of her jezail and up through the skylight and up still further until it falls on a fraction of movement up in the holes in the rock.
Children with dirty faces huddle in the cobbled plaza and they calculate the currents in the wind. Razor bullets will soon pepper the ground at their feet and they’ll let loose the balloon with the sting in its tail, and they’ll pray that it’ll kill at least one.
The Pabulum know this is a farce. They know that up in their lofty nests there is no chance for we creatures that pretend ourselves human. It is ritual contempt, prodding us down in this cage. The killing, the maiming so perfectly honed so that next year there will still be sport to be had.
The children will be shattered. Those not ripped apart or scorched from the barrage tremor will wail both in and out of their dreams. But they need not worry, I’ll whisper. Tiny ears, they must be patient and wait. Wait for the Hood Rat to come.
That whiskered thing that has lived for eternity down and beneath us in filth. This saviour, he will climb up and into our streets and, with his hood pulled tight to his head, he will stride to the foot of the folly.
He will lay waste to our enemies.
He will save us.
He will conduct the air and the bullets will drop dead to the ground.
He will scale the great cliff and he will crawl into their minds, and he will eat from the inside to the out.
Wait. Huddle down, for he will come. Listen beneath the drone of the guns and beneath your own screams and the whistle of the bombs as they fall.
“Do you hear the scratch of his clawed feet on the cobbles? It is the Hood Rat. He has risen and no more will we breathe in the smoke of this hate”, I’ll say.
He who would tell lies to children.
by Hari Navarro | Aug 13, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Into the gaping maw of death we strode. Legion stacked upon legion, a tidal deluge of unstoppable military might. Battle chants booming from mass-produced lungs as we called out to and pulled down our gods and we swallowed whole the machismo drip of their wrath.
I am a cyborg, even after all this time it’s strange to hear myself say it out aloud. Don’t know why. Maybe I remember how in ancient times they made entertainments about zombies but shied away from calling them just that. A zombie is a zombie. The world turns, fictions become fact. I am cyborg. We are what we are.
They lit us up hard. Very fucking hard. Hard enough to stop the unstoppable. And here, now, I lay.
We prize our true flesh. Though mostly redundant we wear it, I guess, to remember. To keep hold of the humanity that constantly dims at our core.
I’d lost both arms, a leg and a large portion of the back of my torso in the second Wai-tara incursion. I died. But I came back with a new leg rammed chock full of ordinance. Such a rush as it jigged up and rolled into the breach of the canon that protruded where once my arm had stretched out.
I died again on this nondescript ridge. This number on a contour line on a map that now means nothing, to no one. I remember spiralling backwards as my leg vaporized and I lay and I watched and I felt as its pink mist floated down and stuck to the growl of my lips. I died but, again, I came back.
The processor in my head spun as it tried to find a ledge upon which to grasp. It called for help. Nobody answered.
Nobody, until you.
Your words flowed into my head and mine into yours. Your body ruined and non-responsive and your head fixed, gazing up into the sky but five hundred metres from where I fell.
You’d had more luck. What with being able to shut down your pain receptors. You didn’t feel the white phosphorus burn as it ate of my skin and you didn’t feel the stab of the crow’s beak as it pecked away the plump globe of my eye. But you steadied me while I screamed and you cried with me as the grass and long stemmed blue flowers grew up through the rot of my flesh.
You found me.
I saw nothing at first. The vision of my one synthetic eye obscured by the charred limb of a great tree. I didn’t need to see, you described the heavens in such beautiful detail. But, then, as time snapped the tendons in my neck and my head lolled away from my body, I was finally offered a view. The horrific remains of a folly of ignorance and power, the stench of our comrades through the wreckage of their forgotten remains.
I love you.
It took me a very long time but I finally told you.
I did, didn’t I? tell you.
It’s weird, I can’t quite place your name. Isn’t that strange?
You went silent a few days… Weeks… Years… Centuries ago. I miss you. I miss the songs that we sung. I miss how we’d make love in the rain though we only touched with our words.
I don’t know why I’m here. Do you?
“Frank, can you hear me? The most wonderful thing has happened. My power-cells are re-routing. I’m crawling. I’m coming. Through the blue flowers, they are just as you described. Through the rust and the bone. Frank, say something…”
“I am no longer what I am…”
by Hari Navarro | Aug 6, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The lover of cats does not so much love the little sycophant balls of fur as he craves their affection. Anything, any trace of attention directed toward the frost of his cold and achingly lonely existence. Even as they pander to him solely in search of food, he caresses – slicking down the arch of their backs – convincing himself that their purr is a whirring sonnet of love exclusively written for he.
The cat lover also loves the thing. The beautiful thing that he watches each and every day as it walks through the courtyard that divides their world in two. There is something about the wild bloom of its hair, how it bounces and sways like sand hill tussock every time that it opens its mouth. Though not ever to him, no, not a once has it ever spoken to him.
The lover of cats gets angry sometimes and he grabs at his furry charges throats. He squeezes until their little eyes bulge and the pink tips of their mocking tongues poke right on out. But he loves them.
He does.
The cat lover is tonight stalking the thing and a scraggy troop of felines patter in his wake. He is beckoned by the images that form in his bed and he now squints at its ass as it walks. How beautifully its skin glows in this dusk, he thinks. The powdery rust tinge of its skin in the glare of the street lamp light.
He passes the shuttered newsagent’s kiosk with its peeling leering posters that taunt as they pout and they stare. The thing turns, into and up a cobbled side street that now abruptly seems to fold in onto itself, narrowing into the darkness’ gently wettening mist.
The thing stops and turns and its shoulders heave, its breath a pumping gush spillage that rolls as smoke from its lips. The cat lover lashes out and with the quake of his fingers he grabs at its throat and he stymies its pant as he tightens.
It is cold tonight but the fear that shakes in the thing’s eyes warms him. But then, suddenly, it calms and its full lips part and they knead themselves into words.
“May I ask you a question?”, it asks.
“Don’t talk”, the cat lover snaps, his grip ever so slightly loosening.
“Sorry, it’s just perplexing, is all. In this age of Tactile VR Sex and Rape-bots, in a society where you can legally marry a bio-synthetic celebrity deep-fake, why, why do you crave me so?”
“Don’t talk.”
“It’s because I’m real, isn’t it? It’s power. You feel no such supremacy with something you can programme and switch on and off at will. But here’s the rub, cat man, I’m not human. And just so you know, I am also no machine.”
With that, the cat lover’s fingernails slide and drop away as does the meat that cupped them in place. Unable to move nor scream, the cat lover feels and he hears as every last agonizing strip of sticky flesh now pries away from his bones. He breaks and he parts and he drops with a wet dead slap to the ground.
“You were not special. Not particularly maligned. I, too, am lost in myself. Trapped in this dark corner that nobody knows and they judge and they wonder just why I keep to myself. We are all secrets”, he says as he shoos away the cats as they feast.
by Hari Navarro | Jul 29, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
War is a sanguisuge. The blood thief, taker of light and life and sleep that is sound. The old one who rips speech from shocked throats and piss-stains the sheets of the brave.
Two fat men sit in a room leafed in gold. A dirty pact oozes from their pens and they smile as they shift the swelling sacks in their trousers and pick at their teeth and laugh about things that aren’t funny.
They’ve decided that war is obsolete and a fiscally succulent peace is declared. It’s no longer acceptable for bombs to make holes in great beaches.
It ended. Just like that, the fat men took credit but I think that people simply tired of the waste. It ended save for one tiny corner in the red desert sand. Here war would be allowed its rage.
Sixteen gargantuan turrets appear in the night, a line drawn, aligned in the sand. Face-to-face juggernauts, two hundred meters and a now dwarfed barbed wire barrier all that separates unstoppable force from immovable an intractable hate. Pure electrical might hurled from one side and caught and returned by the other. A farcical bloodless barrage.
But there is one special single day. A day of death and a time to celebrate the loss of violences’ past.
Millions make the pilgrimage to visit this front, this façade. Actually, the back of the front as this was where massive hotel complexes have latched like voyeur backpacks behind the great shields as they boom and shudder their volleys of super-charged fire.
The comedian stands behinds her own shield, the microphone that lifts her and deflects daggers as they soar. Words which now dart through the bar and up to her stage along gush currents of liquor and machismo filled wheeze.
She knows this is the eve of a day that cuddles their hearts, a day where nostalgia and patriotism stand heads bowed atop a thousand bloodied plains.
Their vitriol forms her. But she wonders if she is truly as grotesque as they say. She looks out over the sea of chests, puffed with ancestors medals and eyes puffed with memories of death and of innocence bartered and she too feels the weight of their loss.
Loss she can leverage and mock. One she can strip to its core and parade naked through the selective passages of their minds. A cascade of shunned homosexuals and deserters, of rapists and looters and cowards.
Her grandfather had loved her but even he grew uneasy at the barbs in her jokes. He said nothings ever simple when guns and flags are forced by old men into the mouths of the young. Remembrance is private and honour is something earned and not an accessory that comes with the kit.
He knew what she was trying to say.
Tomorrow the cannons will stop and volunteers will march into the gauntlet field. Stripped of clothing and with nothing but stones in their hands. Proportionate stupidity for all.
Humanity has done away with cruelty but still, it allows itself this one cheeky sip. To gaze over the lip of their glasses and drink in the nakedness and death that glistens in the sun.
The comedian clears her throat and the mindless weapon beneath her feet also now tires of the coming farce and it swivels, putting its back to the barrage.
Molten sparking death rips through the hotel, it roars and it peels and cooks our children and medals they fuse and melt and fall into the ash, but nothing will change. Nothing.
Tomorrow the games will go on.
