[A slightly edited transcription of a resurfaced page typed in 1985. Some decent ideas but perhaps reading too much J.G. Ballard, which leaves me wondering what if I'd discovered Barrington Bayley or M. John Harrison back then? Still like the radio-borne virus, as there have been recent science papers about quarantining received SETI messages to prevent contagion by xeno-software viruses. Also, I still prefer the term CETI over SETI].
BLOODFAST
No one noticed when the remaining TV stations went over to continuous reruns and looping public announcements. Surely at this late date, appetite had triumphed over reason, or simply overwhelmed any pretense of logic. And yet, there was a logic still working, and not so alien as it might first appear. It was a half-forgotten logic, infantile, claiming itself as personal history. Too authentic to be denied, too thirsty for identify.
By the late Eighties, the sophisticates had reestablished their complacency, so thoroughly shook by the events of the mid-decade. To the few who still nurtured a need to know, the sophisticates this time had gone the championship distance to prove to be a sophisticated, cultured thinker was to be a domestic creature… It wasn’t the door kicked open at Trinity that spilled the slop. The door was pried open by Mr. Marconi, although the meat was already well tenderized by Herr Gutenberg.
Gutenberg, Marconi, and Oppenheimer, and all the Edisons and Fords, they laid the path to CETI...
Communication, with or without purpose, driven by the nightmare of ultimate destruction, diluting, then sweeping away all transmission of the evolution of good and evil. Now there was only good and not so good. Maybe bad, or least desirable. But where was the Evil? How nature abhors a vacuum!
The theory of radio-borne virus was novel, but not without some theoretical underpinnings. There was no research on the subject at Arecibo earth station. The most able mathematicians and exo-biologists were the first to go.
The pulse of the galaxy was interrupted by a infinitely sharp lance, a dagger shaped signal, a scalpel driven at the speed of light, a precision thrust to the stem of the brain, wielded over cold dark light years, piercing a soft pulpy vestigial gland. Radio-borne, then airborne and ear-borne.
The body was replaced by a wound. A wound with a mouth, and eyes and ears and intestines, ass, cock and cunt.
A new birth perhaps, actualized on a fully traumatized population so eager to be entertained, enthralled by a message from space. Yes, space! Out there! Space indeed, not this oozing pulp we inhabit in our isolation. The loneliness of a sterile earth-bound life, made personal, millions and millions of times over and over.
In the cities sodomic zombies ride out their flesh play, dimmed character of reproduction, coming in pools of pus and bile, torn by competing orifices permanently pried open by a ferocious hunger beamed from beyond. The highest species of the blue green planet pimped to the heavens.
In the fitness of our wounds we find vision.
[Written sometime in 1985]
