WORLD WIDE WEB: HIVE

[DISCOLIQUID 2702]

 

The first portion of this narrative is private, creative writing. It is known to Phithali Xalyth, and her alone. 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Am I yet born? Or am I still down: fluff upon my Mother’s insectoid abdomen? I remember that primordial awareness, the first bite of memory, the lolling of psychosis that came and went with sunlight. What faded never returned as-it-was, but woven. Threaded. Sewn. 

 

This darkness is different. The kaleidoscopic eyes of my kin wore well the shadow’s hame, and through all shadow pierced. I did not even think of it. Yes, it was not until I learned the floundering of prey in that furtive, fecund lightlessness that I could even conceive of what I might call blindness. The eyes sit there, just above the wet mouth & chitinous nose, and to most things that walk and breathe, they carve the known from the unknown with scattered vista. The only occlusion I knew, from youth to yonder, came in the privacy of meditation. Blinking patience, to shut my fluttering lids and welcome in not darkness, never shadow, but a willing blindness. 

 

You can imagine my shock, you violative, probing things, when I learned of sunlight. Oh, I remember its first sting. I snuck away, as the young often do, to claw my way higher out of jejune wonderment. Cities shrunk to caves, shrunk to holes worth wriggling through. A small waterfall, and at its murky subterranean base there grew a collection of rubbery foliage, near pitch in the shade. Yet without some touch of your light, it would have never grown at all. Stabbing pain. Needles in my eyes. I knew it there first, that sense of bewilderment & disorientation. I felt what prey do, when locked in a maze of sublime shadow. My steps grew uncertain. My body was lost without my vision. Was I still there at all?

 

Are you listening? Have you crawled your way in through my ears, yet? I have half a mind to pluck these wet gems out, take up a needle, and pith it through my cerebrum. Perhaps my droning, thoughtless lobotomized buzz will be a whine in your skull – you might afford me a modicum of mercy, and cut me loose. I can feel you, you know. Like cave water catching the top of my crown, slick down my back, descending my spine; that ancestral column of neurotic, soft bone, replete with its own cerebral webbing. 

 

This is not darkness. It is light. It is an ache, and now nothing is straight. All is webbed along these strands, gleaming. What is before me? It is not there at all. The world fell away, and now I hear the singing of silk. A man sighs, sixteen feet to my left. He misses his wife. How do I know these things? The same way a spider knows a gnat has been caught. The web is my body, my body, the web. Proprioceptive flashes, radiographic spectrums of my vessels, my bones, my spine, my nerves, my thoughts; I feel them all like maps of the world with every step I take. I can feel the unevenness of my organs, the weight of blood in my non-dominant hand. But you already know that.

 

Talk back. Talk back, I beg of you. My skull used to be closed. I preferred it that way, capped off with calcium, sewn shut with little ridges, cocconed in the safety of my chitinous skin. You found me in a field of peonies, and you sawed off the top of my skull. Now, it all pours in, and I can feel you all watching. Will you please stop poking at my memories? Will you leave the love I once felt alone? Will I ever know joy again, without your surveillance? 

 

No, I suppose not. Maybe you are all my family now. Maybe you are my loved ones and my enemies alike. Maybe I will plunge a dagger into your backs, a dagger into my back, maybe I will carve everything I can, in order to see if any distinction between me… and you…, us, remains. I am this we. You…, I, we… You allowed yourself to become me. Do you regret it?

 

Am I yet born?

The second portion of this narrative is available to all with Slotted Seerdom. It is a public, widely available message, written in the arcane cryptolect of Caecic. All around the world, little spiders accept the whispers of Phithali. They construct webbing, and upon them, she spins her sightless mandate. 

 

[The Caecic is redacted.]

Codename: HIVE