A man on a street corner, detonating.
Frankie doesn't recognize the bomb for what it is, at first.
He finds it on a telephone pole, wedged between an advertisement for a local barber shop and an iguana's lost-and-found notice. He's waiting for the crosswalk signal to turn on the corner of 6th and Pine, battered old violin case slung over one shoulder. The sun is setting, and pallid stars are now only beginning to uncover their faces.
Frankie finds the bomb and discovers that he cannot stop finding it. His eye is firmly drawn. The bomb resembles a paper flyer, because it is one, and it has been stapled at both ends to the pole. It's pasted over with many cut-outs from magazines, from newspapers, from take-out menus and textbooks. A mélange of color and text layered thickly enough to give the page a sort of depth. It almost seems to extend into the telephone pole itself. Into, and down. There, at the bomb's center and nadir, four words crouch in ransom note script. You might already know them.
Without really thinking about it, he's reaching to pull the flyer — the bomb — from the pole. He hears paper crinkle under his fingertips, but it doesn't feel like paper. It doesn't feel like anything.
Snip.
Frankie reels back as if struck. His outlines bleed color. He hears the sound of a single string being plucked, or its inverse, inside his empty violin case. Anti-music. Frankie's personal chronology wobbles on its axis, and he stumbles minutes, hours backwards, blinking in bewilderment as the stars melt away. Air distorts like a heat mirage, and in the flux he glimpses gloved fingers fixing the bomb to the pole without a stapler, catches the glintshine of polished metal pinned to something's chest. A great force closes around his head. Linearity, straining, reels him back to the now, this moment of his undoing. His soul touches flame.
Snip.
Frankie bursts like a surrealist's firework.
Beneath miles of stone and steel and Colorado sky, a bomb of another variety goes off in Site-17 — an explosive not of art, but of frenzied study. A thinking bomb. A brainstorm of two. Look, now. In a requisitioned laboratory something is being built. On nearly every surface, there are papers: design diagrams, scientific documents, art prints, neural maps. A transparent specimen box with an undulating sample of low-Hume matter. Computer parts and camera lenses, scattered like strawberry seeds. It all reeks of ozone or burnt coffee.
On an abandoned laptop, a section of surveillance footage is silently playing on loop. Through the grain and compression artifacts, it can be seen: a man on a street corner, detonating. There is no blood; his skull unfolds like a flower, and strange objects come spilling out. An anvil, a horse's head, a snowcapped mountain, a woman's shoe. His body twists open, pouring forth abstraction, perverting form. Becoming an exquisite corpse.
In the lab, the epicenter of this alternative explosion, a pair of men are arguing. The first man, who is tall, says, "Listen. The underlying principles of TZARA are simple."
"Are they," says the second man, who is short. It's not a question.
Plowing forward, the tall man continues, "We understand how the anomaly works. This anart's chock-full of sensory data linked to a distortion in reality. Think of it as a bundle of memetic triggers for an ontokinetic explosive. I'm familiar with pieces like this—"
The short man mutters, "Familiar, he says."
"—Though I've never seen any nearly as dangerous. Essentially, these things take the conscious and unconscious minds and sort of… jumble them up, drag them into physical space. Make the imagined real, and the real, imaginary. My proposal is we create an inverse set of sense data. New triggers to reorder the mind, and with it, the body. Push the victims' versions of reality back to baseline."
"That's simple, to you?"
The tall man snaps, "Are you just going to sarcastically repeat words back at me, or are you going to actually contribute to this conversation?"
"Fine. Here's a contribution," The short man gestures aggressively with a cigarette he's too irritated to light. "This plan sucks ass. Sensory triggers can't do shit like that — and I know sensory triggers, understand? I can do things with a ukulele that'll make you literally shit yourself. I got a fucking doctorate in memetics, and I'm telling you, it won't work."
The tall man wants to say, I know I can do it. I was cut to shreds, scattered to the wind, and I pieced myself back together. I've seen it. I know how it can be done.
Instead, he growls, "Want to bet?"
There is a sound.
In the scream jumble, many nameless things are struggling to breathe. Each and all is a synesthetic bruise, a sparkplug forget-me-not. Corners are cut, but sharp angles continue to emerge, piercing flesh. Thoughts cannot fit. Nothing fits. The kaleidoscar strobes on and on.
But there is a sound. High and clear as a clarion. A song, or its opposite. The earth is as shattered glass, but a glass is an open wound, and light pours through. A face remembers its eyes, and sees it, the star, the sound, the shape. Movement beneath water. Reflection of a reflection. Scissors, opening for an embrace.
Snip.
Franklin Palmer tumbles to the paper-white floor of the containment chamber, bleeding from heavy gashes, naked, shivering violently, and clutching a broken violin.
