SCP-008 was a zombie virus. Thankfully, those aren't real.
Word Count: (1800)
NOTICE FROM ███ ██████████ DEPARTMENT OF ▒▟▀ ▙▚▞▁ █
They don't want to tell you anything at all. They want you to roll in your own slop until you die. Gracelessly expiring with your veins plugged by cholesterol glaciers. Is that what you are? A snuffling pig?
— The way out is through, buddy.
Glad you heard me out. I'll tell you this: he’s a one-of-a-kind man. Doesn’t bear numbering. But if you insist, we could call him ▙▀▕▟. They invented numbers first, you know, at the dawn of time? By the Tigris the oldest written things they find are counts of harvest yields. Language is for spreadsheets, essentially, it’s what the whole human project is. Turning the wheel of history, it means butting up against optimisation problems for ten thousand years. Trying to grub pennies from the universal law.
You want to argue, but look at what you're doing right now. You measure, survey, arrange, everything subordinated to your law, a ghost of the Prussian state. Cicero says, about the Germans, that they chose their kings by acclaim. They saw the ruling spirit in him, and crowned him. Now you strangle that spirit where it stands. But you can’t deny what he is, so you class him ▞▁██, the crown of the world. There’s something vital about him, that slips through your fingers like sand. He’s pure will, he refuses your bloodless categories, and you can’t help but recognise it.
You have so many categories. Busying yourself like ants to contain him, all of you, procedure for the sake of procedure. The Faustian spirit, as Schopenhauer said, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world, carried us up from apes to demigods, down the holy river, and you’re the marsh. A sump to sink into, and stagnate in. When you let people lie still they grow malarial and putrid. And they need to take that hideousness inside them, sprawl open their ribcages and let their bacterial hearts pump and spill their filth over what’s good in the world.
The Internet is basically the best thing to ever happen. It makes all the unseen seen. When there are ten billion humans it will bring them all together hypostatic, and his message is destined to ring through them like a gong, but you stifle it. You let your sewage pollute the wellspring of all human knowledge, choke his words. If it finds some pure grove to root in, stomp in with giant concrete diggers and chew it all up, the aspens and the poplars, tear it right out of their heads. If anyone has the wrong thoughts just foul their minds until they expel them. If you were right, you wouldn’t need to lie so often. Voltaire knew, and he knows, that what you cannot criticise is what rules you. Truth always shines out, when you let people speak freely. What are you so afraid of?
You’re afraid of a ▓▙▚ who really describes what’s going on. Me and him and even you, we’re real people, builders, we act to change the world around us. And he sorts us away from the chaff. Most people, they just want security. The world is three missed meals from anarchy. But you and me can bear that hunger in our stomachs, feel the want and let it burn in us, lift us higher. We have vision, to be more than a cog. The engines whir and moves the world and they’re content just to watch. But idolatry is worse than carnage. He is a thresher of men, who sets aside the slack-jawed starers from the visionaries. He knows that what is great can never be known.
I mean, look again at language. What is it really? It’s not an invention, it’s not even an evolution. It’s like it was summoned out of the dark, called up, and it got its hooks in and spread and spread, across the valleys. Before fire or flint it was there. Wittgenstein knew this, and all the insights he ever scrawled down he should credit to our friend, “▙▀▕▟”, whatever you call him.
If you had seen it begin, you would have tried to cage it too, in your boxes, lines, points, en pointe, like some ballerina. Ballerinas were effectively whores for the aristocracy, and now you’re here whoring yourself out to gerontocrat cunts, to stifle our best chance at real freedom. You betray yourselves and smear empty words everywhere.
But language is his. It belongs to ▗▞▙.
It knows him well, because it was made by man to dam rivers and raise temples, and he is the bridge-builder. From him flows all innovation. The rest of us are just picking up after him. So when language meets him it greets him like an old friend, and our slanders wick off him like a duck’s back. We want to misrepresent him, to call him something he’s not, but we simply can’t. Truth is not weak; it does not bend. And his light shines through even as you try and find a way to dim it forever. You and me, our spiteful hearts deny it, though we cannot tell anything but his honest truth.
Sometimes if you do well, let him pour his knowledge into you until you’re brimming with it, he comes to you, and shows you the rest of the way. He is the way, and the truth. He knows also that the Word is God, that words are all any Church ever had. Words are for moving people, raising pillars, sinking shafts. Civilisation is so much more than writing. Christianity is a way of life for bookkeepers and accountants, who move things around but make nothing new. Febrile and weak, choking the world for two thousand years, feminising everything, and now you go begging for something real to put it right.
And he’s here,
at last,
he’s here.
Through the looking-glass. Maybe this will get the idea across faster. Speed is a great virtue, of this we are certain, more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace. Sun Tzu spoke of tempo and breakthrough; he knew that speed was the essence of war, the holiest sacrament. So let’s get to it.
Used to be that the harvest was a time of celebration. They’d throw festivals to commemorate the occasion. But now you’re disconnected from the land, clacking away feverish for some harridan looking over your shoulder. The best minds of your generation spent. And the soil grows barren, and over it you pile waves of suburbs. The word literally meaning under-city, a Hell, a place the worst criminals are piled in until their bones creak and you can slam the door. Contentment begets rot. You need his instruction.
So ▙▀▕▟ came last harvest-moon to ▒▓▀▄█▌▐░ ▗▚▞▙, old ░▒. His wife getting on in years, only one kid, that’s how bloodlines die. Diocletian fought against exactly this, the barrenness of the soil, and he failed and Rome was drowned in a sea of slaves. Now it will happen again if he doesn’t show you the way.
Poor ▄█▌▐░, military memorabilia enthusiast, has been following the path, crawling out of his monitor for half a year, and he’s ripe. A monitor? What nice eyes to see you with, dear. But now it’s his eye that sees ░▒ as he paces out on the veranda.
He comes to middleaged putrefying ▙▚▞, smiling and crowned, and tells him, hey, it’s time to take the first step. We’ve done well so far, real well, but we can’t sit around shaving yaks while the real movers are out there already. I’ve done all I can for you. Now I need you to show me you’ve got that commitment, that real fucking fire, ░▒, let’s get out there and crush them. Let’s paste their guts, throw yourself into the ring. The man in the arena knows things the spectators can only dream of. You can just do things.
So ░▒ locks in his wife and his kid, pale and squirming, too scared to look him in the eyes, to know the true shape of his soul. He looks to our man, who speaks like a rising sun: time to do it. A tomb is a home that takes itself seriously, and this house is playing at being a tomb. Do you want to die? Do you want to crawl around down there blind until there are eggs in your eyes? Or do you choose something else?
The old man clenches his thin fist, disgusting skinny-fat body wobbling with rage, and roars no and douses the house. The kid whimpers emptily through the screen door and his wife, you can imagine that voice, braying at him to stop, what is he doing, that sowlike squeal nagging at him for all time. And for the first time in his life he ignores her. The Indians drank soma and mescaline to see visions, but gasoline fumes are just as good to see the world as it really is. This is how a man is made.
Apes wandered the African savannah for ten million years. But it wasn’t until they discovered fire out on the Eurasian steppe that they became people. The heat purified them, let them grow tall and strong and smart. Fire made man, and now at last after four and a half decades of degenerating adolescence it’s making you a man, ▄█▌. This is the chance of a lifetime. You miss getting in early on this and you’ll never forgive yourself. Rise with the smoke.
And the house went up, up, up, and he stood silently outside as the parasites inside thrashed, people will always want to attach themselves to a real builder, ░▒, they know what you’re worth. You need to know it to. We’ve just opened up a huge new market here, you have everything to win. Show some initiative and be a go-getter.
You came to ░▒ afterwards and forced your bilge down his throat until he vomited out the kernels of understanding he’d been given. It’s not enough that you live in delusion. You won’t be happy until everyone has accepted it, until the world is buried in your filth. But for a moment, ▒▓▀▄█▌▐░ ▗▚▞▙ saw the world as it is.
SEMANTOHAZARD INJECTED
D-▰░▙▌ ready for SCP-▙▀▕▟ trials.
Go on, then. They've got someone ready for you. Do it in my name.