1

A multi-dimensional object that is, in shape and movement, part digital glitch and part sea urchin. It’s the color of depth, a massive gloss black. Darker than black, darker than death. It’s the color black that makes a noise like a planet collapsing. Its shape is eating itself and exploding outwards, broiling tumultuously.  You’re a mile above a massive city, sky scrapers reaching to the sky like hope, you’re looking down with no body, watching it roll, seethe, swarm, sky-scraper tall, into the center of the neon night, shanghai future. It’s here-but-not-here, it’s in a layer superimposed over reality, a layer extra to everyone else’s run-of-the-mill 3-dimensions, visible to you, real to you, real to it, but not yet manifested as real to everyone else. This is good because otherwise everyone would be dead.

2

An underground environment lit by fluorescent lighting, Parisian subway tiles on the wall. It’s here, with you, bus sized. This time, manifested, real to everyone. Everyone is not dead yet. That’s because you and your team—you’ve been through it all together, like that one time you barely pulled it off at the last minute, with a plan just crazy enough to work, to stop that one end-of-the-world scenario, that was, what? last month or something?—are here to stop it. All of you, it included, are sharing in the same realities now, so you all have bodies and their associated delicacies. A cavalier end-of-days ambiance pervades.  It’s a liquid-obsidian black, the same color that greed is. A deep, lustrous, beautiful black. Like ballpoint pen ink, but for the pen that writes fate.

The reason for the sudden partialness to the more standard reality currently expressed by all parties is that it came here to fight you: loser dies, winner continues on their merry way—it’s merry way being to consume the city and world and everything you love in a maelstrom of hatred and violations of fundamental laws of physics. Luckily, you’re a goddamn weapon, and you’re carrying one too. Something very futuristic and Japanese, with a sleek dark look, the kind of look that a fancy knife has that indicates that it is definitely for stabbing things. You softly un-sheath the weapon, which, to clarify, is technologically as much like a knife-definitely-for-stabbing as silicon is like silicone, and you unsheathe it with enough style that it’s clear you’re here to fuck shit up, but not so much style so as to be unprofessional. You definitely are not clear on how you got here or why a stand-off show-down, but what is important is that you’re gonna fucking win, because this is what you’re made for. You’re something like the son of a fallen god, and you’re here to get after it.

You’re sorta going through all this in your head as the moment of confrontation draws out, with your teammates ready to lay down their lives and this creature ready to do whatever the fuck it is that it does, and you realize you’re not really sure how to get started. For lack of a better catch phrase as you raise your weapon, you say Okey-dokey.

It pops into a million spikes and then inhales itself into a smooth wave and then breaks into a cubic digital mass and then it freezes as a voluminous scream, a dark-matter Rorschach. Before you have time to move, it booms, deeper than the oceans, deeper than the crushing loneliness of the abyss space, deeper than the tomb of God closing shut

YOU CONTINUE TO JUSTIFY YOUR OWN FLAWS AND POOR CHOICES THROUGH A DESIRE TO BE YOUR OWN ANTIHERO DESPITE KNOWING THAT IT HURTS THOSE WHO CARE FOR YOU

you yell a battle cry and attack with the smooth ease of an athlete

WHAT MEANINGFUL AND POSITIVE IMPACT THAT’S UNIQUE TO YOUR EXISTENCE DO YOU HAVE ON THE WORLD AT LARGE? HOW ARE YOU NOT REPLACEABLE OR EXPENDABLE?

in shock, the world blurring, screams echoing, blood

YOU SAY NEXT TIME EVERY TIME AND WHEN YOU GO NOWHERE YOU LASH OUT AGAINST OTHER FOR YOUR OWN MEDIOCRITY

your teammates die in agony

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE DISPARITY BETWEEN YOUR AMBITION AND YOUR INADEQUACY

you alone stand determined

YOU COULD HAVE BEEN SOMEBODY

you sit down

It is a color of black that is the opposite of glowing in absolute darkness. It is the color of black of a bad goodbye. It is the color of black of hope when there is no hope.

3

A moment later, silence. A jet-black sphere floats, oscillating slightly. You look at your weapon. It was useless. You look up. You realize what’s going on. You put the weapon to your head. You pull the trigger and you kill yourself.