"O wonder!
    How many goodly creatures are there here!
    How beautious mankind is!
    O brave new world,
    That has such people in't!"
~Shakespeare's "The Tempest", Act V, Scene I.

[A SciFi SpaceOpera] *Parts of this work are in fictional format, others in poetic; a combination of prose/poetry, or of sorts.

X. FIRST IMPRESSION:

It had been raining piss yellow for months; the air in
the wet streets around Wonderland was toxic,
sweltering and sick.
Cars were left abandoned as
the city's citizens
had no reasons left to care.
Even the rats that ran down the open
roads and hidden alleyways were cancerous,

their skin ulcerated,
falling away in lumps;
an old black man sat on
the broken ferro-concrete step
of an old charcoal-grey doorway,
the building's windows empty, hollow,
corroded and indefinable;
he sat at the step of this apartment block
with an old Gibson Les Paul and played
with his skeleton fingers
the one G-string it had left...
he stared into the senilty
of memory w/ cataract-filmed eyes.

Trees stood barren and black. The sky yellow
w/ the crack of horrible years gone to hell. The
smell off the dirty river a sweltering stench
of disease in this last year of the Sun.

On that last of all days, Ankor W. Harriz
dusted off a very old record, (actual vinyl!)
a recording called "Brain Salad Surgery"
by Emerson Lake & Palmer (1973!).
He listened to the tracks called
"Karn Evil 9 -1st, 2nd & 3rd Impressions"
and dropped a green Hallucinogenic pill.
Ankor stared at the cover,
the surreal, nightmarish biomechanical art by
someone named Hans Ruedi Giger.
He stared for what seemed forever.
"Skeletal and beautiful," he whispered in awe
as the classical, jazzy piano notes vibrated
through his opiate and rotting mind,
his mouth salivating, his eyes open in mute
pain vaguely remembering a bad winter
from a misplaced childhood...

The Earth's sun had been dying for about a hundred
years before Ankor was even born.

(Across the hallway in room number R333
sat a terrified girl named Allison Rand,
an exotic dancer in Wonderland. She
pushed a full bags worth of heroin,
"the angel's dust",
into her shivering veins
and waited for the slow soft comfort
of the drugged blanket...
drifted into softness,
into silence)

"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends
We're so glad you could attend ..."
Ankor began singing along to what may be the last song
he'll ever hear,
and even he saw the irony in the lyrics;
"Come inside! Come inside!
There behind a glass is a real blade of grass."
The Earth's sol was going supernova!
and he was a nobody, thus knew he would perish.
He stared out through his spiderweb cracked
and dusted windows at the dirty city,
down across the line of fragmented rooftops
and dying rooftop gardens and rusted clotheslines,
the twisted satellite dishes and telephone lines.
He watched as the windows in that
small rat infested Wonderland studio loft of his
started to melt into weird and magnificant colours...
Wonderland,
on the edge of the glass-and steel-covered Boston,
was one of many cities in the world
that never had a Bio-Dome built over to shield
it from the sun's dying toxicity, the yellow rains;
even the subways were blocked from entering the City Zone.
Ankor laughed because he knew that wouldn't matter
anymore,
and then he heard... "what?"
a saxophone? Someone screaming,
someone crying, someone yelling in madness.
Gunshots and dogs growling, barking...
The wallpaper turned into crawling insects,
peeled away like the rine of dead fruits, strange fruits...
The drug? The song seemed to last
for hours, and even though he knew it was a
20+ minute song in length, when the
windows and walls
collapsed and crumbled
he knew he was not getting
through the song's
First Impression...

"Soon the Gypsy Queen in a glaze of Vaseline
Will perform on guillotine
What a scene! What a scene!"

...there was an amazing white-wash, then nothing.


1. GENESIS 4114 AD:

Earth and it's Solar System,
in the Milky Way galaxy, as known to humankind
was destroyed the day their G2 star went supernova.
Planet Earth had been blown out of the elliptical orbit
into a thousand-light-years and beyond, fracturing
and splintering along at it's terrifying
speeds through spans
of geologic time,
breaking apart in terrestrial chunks,
tectonic plates splintering
w/ volcanic activity
like so many different countries
when Pangaea/Παγγαία had first fallan apart...

..continental wide terra sections drifted apart
towards the unknown Panthalassa System;
flora and fauna
and humanity immediately
dying.

[Olympus Mons
on Mars erupted in such
a powerful mass of sulfur, dioxides
silicate rocks
& carbon dioxide-ice clouds,
like Hell's snow,
that fragments ripped through
sections of the earth
as Terra passed
through it's destruction.
Terra's moon seemingly vanished
and the world's oceans leapt
like lovers into
empty space...
computer read-outs of
all the other planets and
their moons
were wiped clean
from any survining computer
memory banks.)

There was a thousand/thousand-light-years of nothing...


...ness...

(...celestial pieces
of asteroids,
meteoroids,
comets,
shattered satellites,
interrupted television
signals,
consequence
and gravity gone zero,
interplanetary
dust/static noise,
deformed moons,
elliptic and
scattered electric
energies...

junk).

[Fortunately the mammoth reH-Class Type ships Perihelion
and Aphelion escaped the final implosion/explosion
of the Sun from the distant Z-Station just beyond Charon's
trans-binary astronomical belt outside
the dwarf planet Pluto. Humanities
last resort].

There had been the reSettlers on those
H-Class Type ships, of course. They raced to find
suitable M-planets for their kind to live, but found nothing.
Many of them perished. There were several Museum-Class ships
that broke off from the Exodus:συνοδεία:följe-4114
(due to unseen spacial anomalies: curves and centrifugal forces)
which carried many of the histories of mankind, from
Warhol's Marilyn Cola Prints to
the important SO.CAL/NO.CAL Universal Documents and
anything/everything in between...

...lost in the collapsing infrastructure;
subdivisional shifts...

Humanity had failed.
'EXPLAIN PLEASE?' the CAT AI could not compute.
But perhaps humanity's legacy could be
reDiscovered,
and along with their xy-DNA/digitized embryos
perhaps a cyberspacial chance
for re-establishing
a kind of life for altered, carbon based creatures.
'YES, YES AND YES!' The CAT calculated.
It used it's artificial intelligence
and created a Network Matrix amongst
the surviving H-Class ships...
even used LiquidicEmbryonic-xy technology
to create the Organic felidae ships
and sent them off in
thousand-light-year directions
twisting fractionally towards
possibilities; wormholes; M-planets...
(there were two feline ships sent forward
on seperate missions: to seek and find
any lost/survived pieces of Terra).

"PROFOUND AND IMMINENT," the on-board
simulations repeated
like a distant humming roar
swirling through toxic gases...
:blue & violet &
pale & vermillion &
charcoal, cold:
...of sculpted abomination
as the first felidae ship
sped through spiralling nebulae;
it's praying-mantis wing membranes
fantastical colours...
the ship's first Captain organically
grew from the embryonic vat:
"I was born."

2. THE TEMPEST:

The ship's controller of the feline-ship Felis silvestris
felt the distress rumblings
of his ship as it ripped through
a terrible twisting maelstrom,
a rogue asteroid field;
he lit a last cigarette
as he felt the thunderous humming,
the spinning,
the thinning
the tinning
tinntinabulation,
the melodic cyberChiming and AI harmonics
while speeding through infraRed swirls,
he could see the gnarled black rock
that would rip to shreads
humanities last hopes for ancient literature...

(for tens of thousand years,
most spent in cryonic hibernation,
his ship found valuable books
throughout the expanding universe,
floating through space...
some half-burnt, torn,
ripped and yellowing
and even several frozen pages;
yet many books
were complete...)

...Dr. Admiral Darwin M. shimmered.
He held tightly a book
called "Deuteronomy" then placed it back
on the bookshelf, beside one
called "The Tempest". He then pulled out
"Brave New World" and read through it fast,
scanning much read areas
he had become familiar with
through his virtuality stasis.
"Such irony," he thought
as he flipped through the pages,
flipping through at light-speeds
reading in the UV light as the ship's
computer panel screamed out distress signals
in piercing neon reds...

(the Huxley book he has held to read
the final chapter
until he felt his fate
was near it's end;
his final chapter:
"this dystopian novel."
As it would be).

“Pain is a fascinating horror.”
He felt his individuality and freedom
fade away...

Reading the novel,
he smoked a black kretak cigrarette
while drinking a fine Scottish whiskey blend
as fast as he possibly could.
"Damn!" he muttered,
His stomach was grumbling
almost as loud as the ship's engines;
"of all bloody fucking times!" he yelled into the thin air.
The air was turning blue chrmomium, pale.
And then there was a great white wash in space;
He thought he could hear a song:

"And if you look, you look through me
And if you talk it’s not to me
And when I touch you, you don’t feel a thing"

"Stay, faraway so close..." he sighed.
The damn song makes no sense, anyway,
he thought...
(but he did think of a someone...

...gone).

"Community, Identity, Stability,
so much for utopia," he whispered
as he continued to read
the final words,
then uttered sarcastically
"I eat my own wickedness."


Then darkness.

3. DISCOVERY:

"Nothingness!"

The humming and harmonics faded into the solar flares and died...
Not for some two-billion-light years later has a sound
been heard in that system: a heavy static noise
like waves of white crashing thru white...
something was waking up. The Felidae's dark womb
of fluids, tubes and wires went kinetic
as the feline-ship
(digitally morph/born
out of the reH-Class Type ships)
passed thru the system's sputtering particles...
The vast feline-ship loomed hugely above
the floating wreckage, the black rock:
The On Board's AI established:
E-type planetoid asteroid, and remnants of
the Ghost Ship Siamkatzen which carried
much of earth-1 humanity's treasures;
the AI CAT woke
the reHumans for further
investigations...

...white static...
It rips between the ears from music to a whitewash!

4. FOUND WANTON:

“I’ve been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap...”
And the song ends, abruptly.

Pages scream. Algebraist trapped
 in the head of the trigonometric frame
cold eyes,

an exoskeleton of hydrophobia
made to break bones
from canvas smoke.

      Stars burst in the nebulae wreckage, like pterodactyl wings,
murdered in nirvana.

So many startled angel things, unaware;
    They’ll sleep between the black/white cat’s tiny
invisible space-ship ears,

digitizing...
digesting iridescent scents, seasons
of galaxies, seeds & seas of time
depressing felo-de-se in strings
like Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist”
in blue tragedy; oil on panel
head bent down, fingers thin & long
stretching thru the ghostly solar flares
as if
looking for Cygnus
or Casagemas,

so many cages wrapped around us
(They had been searching a thousand years
for this object, wanton & wandering...)
sentimental tide-pools
in space,
    used as art. Conveying sombre tones
in brush strokes & heart-attacks

Like Paris from Barcelona in a universe of wormholes.

Blue Sunday. The etching of “Le Repas Frugal”
outside the empty VR window-
    -as the trees crack in the collapsing, thinning,
incinerating self. Virtuality is an expense
of the soul.

The Ghost Ship Siamkatzen (thought to be destroyed
a billion years ago) crash landed on the old
E-type planetoid asteroid
in the E’th System. “There!”
There.

And the metallic feline ship Tartessia landed softly.
The children crawl out
(like little mice, the AI black/white CAT thought)
they plunge through the crumbling debris
beneath a liquidic burnt-orange sky
these reHumans
searching for lost antiquities;
they found something:
found the grey & black plate
of the most poignant image:
a tender embrace;
turned heads and distant gazes,
an emotional separation that
contrast w/ the physical closeness...
faded bodies, loneliness.
Found!
amongst the rock’s carbonaceous dust.
It was a saved memory of a time
long gone. The reHumans
would add it to their on-board gallery’s
collection.

Then, like a white flash, they were off
back into the galactic atmosphere
zipping past the comets & dwarf moons
and out of the elliptical orbit
in search for more bones...

...the tale-telling of their wanton history;
alien impositions to
galactic fashion, “Which is not to say
that species in several systems
admire it without quantity, quantum relativity
or reservation,” the feline-computer
often said.

The black/white cat twitched
and the ship curved through diamond dimensions;
it was an uncomfortable shift
as cyberLithium injected into their blood,
but one the boy & girl reHumans were used to
like the used songs they had in the
ship’s CPU jukebox: Press Play:
“She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak
I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box
for weeks...”
The old song begins, again...

They are in utero, in silico, in situ, in vitro...

5. EXODUS

In líquido VR dreams: infinity, almost
umbilicalled to their Felidae-ship’s wetware
like a second skin. They will sleep now
and wake in another thousand years,
still as young as they are... the Felidae-ship is
programmed to find a velvet
Vegas Elvis painting reported to be
in the Valkyrie system
some thousand light-years away...

[reportedly no true value to humanity;
worthless as wasteland bowling alleys...]

("No..." the girl reHuman tried screaming
as the chemicals pushed their way into her
bloodstream and darkness followed.)

“Hey! wait!
I’ve got a new complaint...” repeats
over and over and over into a slow curling
numerical curve as numbers
drip behind their wired & closed eyes...
the boy reHuman was yelling these
words in echo
to the jukebox song
before he
went under.

"Very well, then. I wll bid you farewell, and until
the next path!" The CAT shut down it's IR-Eyes
and the Felidae-ship went into hyperSleep...

...the music changed: "Bright light city gonna set my soul
Gonna set my soul on fire
Got a whole lot of money thats ready to burn..."

...static/white noise...

"...Viva las vegas, viva las vegas
Viva las vegas with your neon flashing..."

...echoes and fades into the silent space.

~fini

*lyrics from the song "Heart-Shaped Box"
written by Kurt Cobain; music by Nirvana. And
"Viva Las Vegas" from Elvis Presley, "Stay (Faraway, So Close)" from U2,
and "Karn Evil Nine..." by ELP:
"obviously!"

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