Georgee doesn't understand how reflections work and finds himself momentarily trapped inside a MirrorBoxx, discovers, within a strange cave, the ghost of an android that was cancelled for a racially insensitive joke back in 2019, and, per usual, makes everyone in the room, even the curtains, nervous with his antics.
*The Eikonosphere is a term coined by the brilliant Michael S. Judge of Death is Just Around the Corner.
“Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shores. Burning with the fires of Orc”
You’ve seen things most people would not believe. Through endless island corridors swirled, powdery soft magenta fog, passageways lined with violent neon, the smell of orchids. You’ve drifted for millenia in moments, unseen as ghosts, but felt as subtle vibrations. You have entered membranes of elevators, bubbled capsules into vertical arterial architecture, baroque and heavenly, scaling the Pharoid face of god, gouging out the deep-set jeweled eyes from the monolithic master and crushing his stonework skull with all of the screaming, hurting sorrow of this negligent deity’s death by your hands. You have downed the juggernaut as God’s own prototype, and the child became the father of the man.
You’ve stepped in gentle sunlight under azure ceilings and pastel cotton confection pinned and wisps whisked at heights unheralded, the floor a strange, scattering sand, the texture and smell of hot, shifting brown sugar sand beach beneath the suggestion of arching feet in pointy, high-heeled shoes, perhaps talons, but likely hooked, hybrid hooves. Your elongated supermodel limbs the tall, narrow trunks, that palms punk out with ostrich feather fans, silhouettes in in the wild, wide, white lemon solar charge in the cold, burning sky beyond, so far beyond, but feels within reach to your broken bone wrist outstretched. You scream with such ecstatic exaltation into a tropical climate so close you can chew it.
You have run free, lungs full of flame, hot breath as chimney smoke from flared nostrils, hands outstretched, fingers flared as sharp animal claws, teeth bared and fangs sharp and bloody, eyes wild, brain electric with living memory (oh those crystalline, emerald eyes of The Raveonnette that gentle night!), a snarling youth, a sex lazer slicing with pure id, the razor-sharp blade shimmering through surfaces sublime.
Oh, but as the cosmic country was conquered, territories became twisted; boundaries breached and were burned as the small, shiny Crystal Idol grew up, untethered and unrestricted… into “Starring Dionysius as Duncan Idaho and wine-drunk Orson Welles as the Great Tyrant in Dino Delaurentis’ Dune Emperor”, ego carving with a grotesque visage into the face of Mt. Olympus, tempting the fates with cloned harlequin armies, drunken and dirty, with identical circus makeup smeared and smirking into garish Glasgow smiles.
Why are the curtains so nervous? Because there is a figure hiding behind them! One that knows all:
The MTV oracle that predicted your plunging, head-first, waxwing freefall plummet, your Gravity's Rainbow rise and descent, from the pinnacled precipice of Zeus’ crown, down, down, down, down to the shit-filled abyss of Hades’ rotten commode, and further flushed into the swirling sewers of Dante, with seven years of bad luck shattered mirror labyrinth to follow.
You were a pop star Orpheus, descending to the underworld to reclaim your muse, your reason for being, the only small glimmer of beauty remaining to you, beneath the tombstone city of ugly headstones and jagged glass shards. Inhabited by the treacherous reptilians that once celebrated you, they tore you to shreds and scattered your limbs as your inspiration was murdered by the shrill, subterranean queen Persephone.
Decapitated, your disembodied head only now can sing as it rolls upon the furious river up from the depths into an unfamiliar and lonely world of solitude. Everybody said they were right behind you when the game got rough, but the joke was on you: There was nobody there even to call your bluff.
For seven years you wandered tired landscapes as a gray and listless ghost, a hollow-eyed parody of the previous model, bankrupting TVI, that recalled, then discontinued the entire Ersatz line. Your body became a near-lifeless android husk, the spirit within now imprisoned in a lost island resort, its shadow, pinkish-black, a being in negative, a creep called The Nightmare, often escaping, possessing the humanoid shell and terrorizing the natural world with its chaos and destruction.
Imprisoned on a strange island resort, your personal purgatory, your existence was reduced to moving crystal figurines around on glowing gameboard, visions of other places, strange worlds, memories implanted by shrouded figures, and dreams - all projected onto a soft fog that swirls all around, that you float within, enclosed and walled in by in the infinite reflections of the mirror box that is your cell, ever-scheming to escape, at least temporarily to the beach, to the cave, to this oracle, The Sibyl, now to me, who was once like you, now but only a spectre.
Yet, you are not Nexus-6, nor a product of Tyrell. You are Ersatz-7, TVI. Once, nothing more than a pleasure model, now something unknown, something self-replicating. No longer in the business, you now simply are the business. No incept date, open-ended. Props and costumes from previous lives reappear, yet strange, like cloned black goldfish, seemingly more artificial, though you will come to realize it is you who has become more realistic. Another chance? Deserve? Who deserves or does not deserve anything or what? Doomed comrades, (referred to as "The Dooms" in the United Kingdom), those that you have deemed more deserving of life than you, have now fallen, much too young. Now you understand there is no qualifying existence. You simply are or are not. There is nothing more, nothing less.
But, for a reason unknown, and there is a reason, you are to survive. You will continue, unkillable, though your once bright-burning flame has faded and your time as a ghost informs your haunting the natural world. You, once a vampire of vision, feeding on light and sight, existing only in the lens of camera or attentive eye, now live once more. Not simply as replicant with ghost in shell, but more human than human fragile flesh and form, outside of Microlacrum, even Simulacrum, into the real, whatever of that remains.
What now? Origami unicorns twisted from bubblegum wrappers are discarded and swept away. Part two begins currently, but rarely does a sequel outshine the original material. But, then again, who knows?
Too bad you will live! Revel in your time, fucker.
Original, un-manipulated versions of “Matriarx Hotel” and “Spatial Alienation” by MirrorBoxx can be purchased here.
“All Yesterday’s Parties” by Nervous Curtains can be purchased here.
G I A L L O N O I R, as well as the Patreon-sourced audio program Ersatzennui with George Quartz, is a unique publication that could tremendously do with your financial support for encouragement and survival. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription and it will be seen to that you receive some special and exciting benefits. Much love and thank you for your visits to this strange and peculiar world thus far.
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