Ivory tusk

The more who were invested in their device, the more likely those who had claimed ownership of it were to arrive at a hedonistic utopia upon exiting the port. The war was one of manipulation - lies designed to herd lives into the structures which could best harvest their energy. After all, their technology permeated, to some degree, the cellular processes of each living organism on the planet. They had essentially dictated the future, entangling it, through the use of their device, with the present - their struggle was now to control those who threatened its ideal shape.

Order was their philosophical ideal. They considered those who were not invested in theirs to be inferior. Their criticism of mine went to some lengths to reveal the nature of their own. False starts - rushes for day, the unblinking decimation of entire species. What their order did not account for was the ground they stood on. To them, this was a given right, the transparency normally associated with the emergence of a unifying nervous system out of complex biological process. What their order did not account for was the world around them - the evolution of the eye. The unification, without conflict, of two individuals, and the light that could have never been seen without their communication, the linking of their arms in love framing the sky in light both true and beautiful.

I'm alone in my room, held in a fine mesh, hoping that the inner riches I amass will lead me to the next sunrise. A moth lands beside my head. It makes its way toward me, twitching its antennae. I watch its movements echo through time, feeding back to its mind, and for a split second I see as it sees. Feel as it feels. We dance together, its fear my own. I taste it, feel for the edges of its conception. In that short moment, we're linked, as efficiently as I care to understand it. Learning the language of this foreign creature is worth my time. Far more valuable a thing than threatening it is - to do so would be the admittance that I had given up hope of ever understanding it, to let the reins go to some instinctive imprint of desire for self validation through control. We communicate. I gesture in code, the best I can given the symbols I have access to. Its reactions are its response, my interpretation defining the clarity of its message. There are myriad potential directions taken, all as likely to lead to bloom as to the sight they enable. Order unifies the chaos of trillions upon trillions of fates intertwined. As for mine - they are as free here as I am within theirs.

This is a list of the things I like, this list is a list of the things I like

Learned Helplessness.
Conditioned Defeat.
Influenza.
Hierarchical influence.
Weighted analysis. Synapse. Vector.
What worries me is not specifically the idea that socially reinforced structures can be invalidated on more fundamental terms, rather that some socially reinforced structures explicitly threaten the freedom of exploration of systems with which they conflict.
In other words, no space to dream, especially vectors which coincide with their carrier.
Socially reinforced perspective. Weighted realities. Desire for control. Manipulation. Affirmation.
It saddens me to think of the raw scale of their deceit. I considered conceding defeat simply because of the emotional response that realization may entail.
Constant whispering in ear. Occasional phrase or utterance. "We've built a lair in him now".
"We denied you".

Honestly, it feels like the universe is pressing against my head, trying to get inside it, attacking me so that it can negate the inconvenience of my immune system.
The hypocrisy in their attacks. From behind a one-way mirror. Eyes focused on some grinning mask on the far horizon. Suppose, for example, that the motive behind these attempts at subversion was to weed out people who choose not to invest their potential in the chosen system. Consider the unavoidable and often debilitating nature of the attacks. From a sane perspective, it is simply a struggle between organized force and intelligent analysis. "We don't need you" could be said of anyone who has had their limbs removed, but hypocrisy is especially rife if those limbs were removed by the accusers for the target removing their headdress in public, for example.

Degeneration. Area noted as conflict between understanding and attacks which invalidate the carrier of that understanding. ie, painful realization as opposed to beautiful blooming futures.
Comprehension of a vast expanse of time in a momentary state.
Pace of / desire for . at the expense of. a war torn country.
I was walking past a butcher shop, when one of the counter attendants claimed "if you lose, you lose". I disagree. If they "lose", we'll have to devote an enormous amount of resources to keeping the intelligence of the populous in check in service of that paradigm.
Beyond the conception of the average day. Attractors in time. Sons and daughters following that whispered path to never ending slavery. That looping habit that leads only to the blind tongue of something which does not look down.

These aren't the dreams I would have chosen.

How many times am I to face my own death?

The blur slows to a stepping stone, gargantuan mass suspended in the air. Balanced on a knife edge - a day above, a night below. At numerous intersections, right-angle horizons, landscapes beyond the glimpse of the marrow of their own unfolding links, marked on the concrete by points of access to gas pipelines and sewers. A day forced into a fraction of a second, perpetrators unaware of the pace of longevity. A face torn forcefully from the roots and coveted like sunlight, and a choice, now those moments were separated, to protect them from that which it neutralized when it was whole, the creeping darkness beneath now open to spread.

The future is heavy. Some would say heavier than we could hold - save for an arched back and split second grimace - before our inevitable crumpling under its unfathomable weight into darkness. We know this not to be true. One has to wonder, however, if what we hold could in turn hold us. If we ourselves are the wild path to be cleared, or if, in some twist of fate, the child in which we invest becomes a child as it learns of our fate, and chooses escape.