Vicious Aliens (continued)

Cycle 17

CYCLE 17

“All space is already occupied by the enemy, which has even reshaped its basic laws, its geometry, to its own purposes.”

—Raoul Vaneigem and Attila Kotányi, Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism (surviving fragments)

The terrain we were mapping was entirely new, going further than any ‘scavenger regiment’ had gone on recent runs. Our re-supply mission already complete, we kept on moving toward the last known location of Nathan Cohen and his crew of channel changers. Our unlikely and flamboyant group of artists and flaneurs were testing our mettle against gravity which often took the form of abstract geometries and atmospherics. Light penetrated the transparent structures that surrounded us like bullet holes riddling a character in a film noir. As we ascended The Stack, brilliant reflections of sunlight created pockets of sudden warmth amid the frigid climate eighty stories above street-level. The Television Monitoring Agency’s last communication was sent from deep within Nazi-affiliated territory, a place they called “Amerika,” in the upper abandoned regions of The Stack. Nathan’s tracker beacon pinged three distinct times over the course of three separate days as if he was sending out an SOS signal.

It occurred to me that everything around me was suspended in some way, held in suspension; floating, transparent, weightless, seamlessly held up by my perception. It was ideas that held these structures up—light as air, light as the words we spoke, or the breaths we took.