Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: fiction

The Big Crunch

As the universe shrinks, the sky lights up, and night is erased by the cold light from dead stars far away. All our probes and lonely radio transmissions start bouncing back on us, faster and faster in accordance with the speed of the shrinking. Everybody wears a wide-brimmed hat and dark shades. Our crops die, our insects too, and then there is too much death to enumerate properly. Our own sun seems unaware of it all, shining on like ever before. Our cities are blanched out, we flee underground, and we’re just waiting for the crumbling sound of everything dying.

Ventriloquism

“How do you define an out-of-body experience? I think I’m having one.”

“Most people who who claim to have them don’t speak or move, or aren’t able to speak or move, during the experience. It is when you are outside your own body.”

“I was catatonic until I was four, when suddenly I spoke like there was never anything wrong with me. I think I was never inside my own body, I just learned to puppet it.”

The doctor held his hands behind his back. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

The patient got it right every time.

It’s Like a Party in My Pants

It’s like a party in my pants and, like, all the cool kids will be there, but you’ll mostly be hanging around in the kitchen awkwardly drinking from the same one glass of champagne all evening by the fridge, whilst everybody else will be having fun. It’s not your fault, but still. People will try to talk to you from time to time but you won’t have any of that, your face goes red as if to warn other people to stay the heck away. And they will. What I’m saying is, like, kiss me or something. You fucking dork.

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They Strike Root in You

They strike root in you. They reach for you from dead leaves on lonely trees and a brave few jump, if they think they can make it. You become more sociable, immediately. More reckless. You might feel as though you’ve had an epiphany, or three. You will start eating dirt, as the tendrilous roots nest in your bloodstream. Soon you will eat nothing but dirt, you will become a recluse. You will speak to no-one. You will find specific dirt from specific places and it will replace food for you. You will act like this until you burst with saplings.

Provided I Keep Myself to the Script

“Provided I keep myself to the script, Mr. Kolss, the script I’m holding in my very hands, which you are not allowed to see, you will react exactly according to it.” The woman smiled at me. Before I could settle on a strategy, she continued: “the script has been carefully modelled by our superpsychologists to keep you docile and harmless. You will not, for labouringly selected example, slit my throat with that bottle.” I looked where she indicated– “nor your own, might I add. Now,” she unbuttoned her blouse like I wasn’t even there, “would you like to touch me?”

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They Uploaded her Consciousness to the Machines

They uploaded her consciousness to the machines and treated her there for a few hours. The consciousness felt it as years and years.

Each time an error occurred, they rewound the digital brain a little. Sometimes, they detected mistakes made many months ago, and months of progress had to be deleted.

Finally, they claimed this facsimile cured. There is no way to download consciousnesses, only uploads. It would take around two years realtime to cure her with 87% certainty, as long as they do not deviate from the schedule, as long as they never let her glance at the ending.

The Sun Found its Goal

On the 7th of May 2012, the sun found its goal. Ever since birth the sun had been searching, looking for her all along, and it burned with twenty million furnaces just for a chance to see her. As it did, scrutinising the planet suddenly storming in joy, it stopped exerting its energy, and focused solely on her. So it came to be that from that moment until the next time she was under a roof or under a cloud, no-one else got sun. When it lost her again, it could not express its sorrow, but it continued searching, fiercer.

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The Cloud Thickens and Darkens and Broods

The cloud thickens and darkens and broods and no rain can ever come out of it now, no matter how hard you try. From a distance, you can see the sparks fly, and if you stand under it, all your hair will stand on edge, pointing upwards, it will crawl like insects over your naked body, and jump up like fleas that never come down, but the lightning never comes. The cloud will never emit a sound, much less thunder. Rivers will dry up like tear ducts, and the elegant beasts that swam there once will migrate away or die.

I Am the World’s Tallest Man

I am the world’s tallest man and I want to paint paintings. They will always carry the epithet ‘by the world’s tallest man’ but I want to try. Maybe it will be easier for me to get acknowledged for this, like other celebrities and their goofy hobbies. However, I’m going to be dead serious about my art. My paintings will come from within my soul. I will try to capture the spirit of the human conditions and its consequences in simple images and I hope you will like them, and that maybe one day you will forget who made them.

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Fragments of a Work in Progress

Thoughts stretched like shadows elongating; like you’re on a painstakingly slow-revolving ship made of glass heading outwards from your sun, awaywards, deepspacewards. Your thoughts (the shadows) are then everywhere because the sun is underneath you – and you ascend, unless your mammal mind has already adapted to the rotation.

Grahm found that difficult. Everything he believed in space was new; the cogging went in spirals inward. For a few amorphous months Grahm had gone through every holy book he had ever been taught about, and delved into the library for more. He used them up, quicker than he shed his skin and replaced himself (which for regular humans was the luxurious length of 7½ years).

When he had first been shot out into space there had been food with him, to trick him into thinking he had a supply. In fact, all those paperbags were one and the same bag, and when he opened the first one he collapsed them. Grahm, though advanced enough to eat the starlight shining in through all the windows, had requested this specific food to carry with them into the cold of space and now the bag had gone stale and the smell of Americana was faint enough that it could have been anything.

On a similar trajectory as he was his Chanceone, his choice one, Decarulin, who he was told was beautiful. He did not really care; they were going to fuck. That was the one thought that came back, though it too in different shapes. It was on the list. Some parts of him liked her, others hated her, but his whole being wanted her. That was sensor-proof.

Grahm started making up his own gods, but they lacked in weight and symbolism compared to the old gods and he used them up too quickly. He could spend a month in the intermediary state spoke of in the Bardo Thödol, or six weeks digesting [the footnotes of [the footnotes of [the footnotes of a typo]]] in the Torah scrolls but when worshipping the Eternal Lobster all he could do was shed and empty, all his skin cells aligning to attention. Days flew by, Grahm felt motion sickness from it – or was it the rotation? – and his pantheon thinned to just him, the devil, and the Alien.

“I am chock full of clockwork chemicals,” he said to space which did not reply, but rather looked scornfully back at him, malice in its million eyes. Looked back at them. He tried for a moment to repeat the declaration but started rhyming and embarrassed himself.