2025-09-26, 03:56 PM
Leaving again
Stark threw his umpteenth name off like an ill-fitting and outdated outfit. It was actually a name he liked. He'd miss it, as well as missing the woman who wrote or uttered that syllable to refer to that which was him. He looked out at the overcast San Francisco sky. It was as cloudy and murky as his soul...or whatever it was that he had that could be thought of as analogous to a "soul".
He had been through this similar scenario before, all of this parting-is-such-sappy-sorrow-shit. In his time on the Earth - three-thousand years or more, about five hundred of which he could "remember" - he'd had at least one host and often many more every hundred years or so. He felt no guilt. Mona, the manic-depressive loner with the most intense synaesthesia he'd played or worked with in a sape's brain in three thousand-plus years - well, she was slowly becoming more occupied with the world. She wanted to be with people - real people, that's how she put it. Stark winced...and imagined her doing all kinds of things with humans that he knew that he could do as a sentient virus in a much more superior mode. But she wasn't having any of this; she obviously had an agenda.
"But, you know about power..." she had told him, nineteen candles and electric lamps flaming in her city room. "You used to talk to me at night after you would do all of those...things...to me..." She managed a half-smile. "About how to Undermine and Overwhelm." She shook out a last cigaret and flared a too-tall Bic flame on it. "I need to mingle with them to ...you know. Plant the seeds. To take over their thinking, pattern by pattern..." Mona got out of bed, her black velvet sheet falling to the floor in folds and ripples. She was taking bites out of a red, shiny apple and crunching it with gusto between her sentences as if for punctuation effect. She walked to her stereo, took out that arousing Nitzer Ebb CD and replaced it with some 4AD music..."This Dead Mortal Dance Can Coil" or something to that effect.
She sighed and got back in her bed. He slid up beside her and rested his head of blonde-streaked hair over her smooth belly and collapsed. She started to feel maudlin, and stroked his hair, his back, his legs and arrow-prong cock.
Stark sighed, as if in unison. His kind weren't born with emotions, but tended to develop them over the hundreds of years that they lived in the minds of the sapes. And this was death - that is what all his brethren in the aethyrs told him. Once the will he had to exist in the dimension that was his plane was undermined by feeling attachments to sapes as anything other than strictly a feeding ground, he would slowly be drawn by the unrelenting forces of gravity down into the very center of the earth...but before he reached it, the buckling and breaking of the tectonics of mantle and crust would snap him, compact him, squeeze him into yet another earthquake, a blip on a seismograph, a newborn of his kind. For that was the life cycle of such creatures - the power-eaters, or the Quakeborn...an adjunct to humankind from the first days that humans walked the earth. They lived with people, side-by-side, in their very brains. Very few minds actually contain only the consciousness of their owners. Almost all sapes carry these viral parasites as well, but very, very few of the humans make contact with their mind-roommates, and those who do almost invariably cry "demonic possession!" and ran for the silly tools of crucifixes and the like to rid themselves of their counterparts.
Mona had been different. When a sape acknowledges the power-eater in a positive fashion, a reward is given to that sape that usually sates them for a lifespan - the parasite becomes instead a symbiont. In exchange for the power that they eat - a power connected with erotic arousal - the entity becomes the sape's lover, and always, always the best they'd ever had...or ever would have. Forever.
They were not vampires, his kind; nor were they ghosts. It was to be expected: the sapes knew the species existed, but how do you artistically and dramatically represent experiences in dimensions you can not even imagine, much less experience yourself? You do a crappy, half-assed job...thus the sapes have their vampires and daemons and the like. His kind had a name but no sape could pronounce or write it. "Power-eater" or "Assimilator" were the closest translations.
Stark could see how she could be lured to the solidness of humans. But the humans - sapes - were terminally unreliable, had a habit of lying about how much power they really possessed, and had, since time immemorial, a penchant for getting tangled up in emotionally sticky spiderwebs of uncertain timelines - for they had none of the time-transcendent qualities of the arguably very advanced race of virii. These qualities, and so many, many more assorted random and sundry powers made Stark, in comparison, much more substantial than any sape could ever be. But he lacked the ability to control matter. By manipulating the sapes he could have anything he wanted. But it was not the kind of control he found himself aching for more and more of the time.
Sometimes he wanted to create objects and symbols all by himself, as opposed to doing it through the hands of Mona Lythik or another host. He wanted to leave his mark on the earth. He always needed to have a host - a lover who would trade his or her hands for his gift of awesome sexuality...and his slow and masterful means of making her - or him - ache with overprolonged desire and then taking over in a single invasive manoevre. But no. It wasn't going to last. Wasn't enough for her, either.
Mona! Oh why...why...? He would have cried had he a body; Mona, however, cried enough for both.
She said goodbye to him. He kissed her goodbye with a final jolt to the spinal cord, and dispersed.
Time slashed. Space flashed.
The eigenvector did something else
Stark threw his umpteenth name off like an ill-fitting and outdated outfit. It was actually a name he liked. He'd miss it, as well as missing the woman who wrote or uttered that syllable to refer to that which was him. He looked out at the overcast San Francisco sky. It was as cloudy and murky as his soul...or whatever it was that he had that could be thought of as analogous to a "soul".
He had been through this similar scenario before, all of this parting-is-such-sappy-sorrow-shit. In his time on the Earth - three-thousand years or more, about five hundred of which he could "remember" - he'd had at least one host and often many more every hundred years or so. He felt no guilt. Mona, the manic-depressive loner with the most intense synaesthesia he'd played or worked with in a sape's brain in three thousand-plus years - well, she was slowly becoming more occupied with the world. She wanted to be with people - real people, that's how she put it. Stark winced...and imagined her doing all kinds of things with humans that he knew that he could do as a sentient virus in a much more superior mode. But she wasn't having any of this; she obviously had an agenda.
"But, you know about power..." she had told him, nineteen candles and electric lamps flaming in her city room. "You used to talk to me at night after you would do all of those...things...to me..." She managed a half-smile. "About how to Undermine and Overwhelm." She shook out a last cigaret and flared a too-tall Bic flame on it. "I need to mingle with them to ...you know. Plant the seeds. To take over their thinking, pattern by pattern..." Mona got out of bed, her black velvet sheet falling to the floor in folds and ripples. She was taking bites out of a red, shiny apple and crunching it with gusto between her sentences as if for punctuation effect. She walked to her stereo, took out that arousing Nitzer Ebb CD and replaced it with some 4AD music..."This Dead Mortal Dance Can Coil" or something to that effect.
She sighed and got back in her bed. He slid up beside her and rested his head of blonde-streaked hair over her smooth belly and collapsed. She started to feel maudlin, and stroked his hair, his back, his legs and arrow-prong cock.
Stark sighed, as if in unison. His kind weren't born with emotions, but tended to develop them over the hundreds of years that they lived in the minds of the sapes. And this was death - that is what all his brethren in the aethyrs told him. Once the will he had to exist in the dimension that was his plane was undermined by feeling attachments to sapes as anything other than strictly a feeding ground, he would slowly be drawn by the unrelenting forces of gravity down into the very center of the earth...but before he reached it, the buckling and breaking of the tectonics of mantle and crust would snap him, compact him, squeeze him into yet another earthquake, a blip on a seismograph, a newborn of his kind. For that was the life cycle of such creatures - the power-eaters, or the Quakeborn...an adjunct to humankind from the first days that humans walked the earth. They lived with people, side-by-side, in their very brains. Very few minds actually contain only the consciousness of their owners. Almost all sapes carry these viral parasites as well, but very, very few of the humans make contact with their mind-roommates, and those who do almost invariably cry "demonic possession!" and ran for the silly tools of crucifixes and the like to rid themselves of their counterparts.
Mona had been different. When a sape acknowledges the power-eater in a positive fashion, a reward is given to that sape that usually sates them for a lifespan - the parasite becomes instead a symbiont. In exchange for the power that they eat - a power connected with erotic arousal - the entity becomes the sape's lover, and always, always the best they'd ever had...or ever would have. Forever.
They were not vampires, his kind; nor were they ghosts. It was to be expected: the sapes knew the species existed, but how do you artistically and dramatically represent experiences in dimensions you can not even imagine, much less experience yourself? You do a crappy, half-assed job...thus the sapes have their vampires and daemons and the like. His kind had a name but no sape could pronounce or write it. "Power-eater" or "Assimilator" were the closest translations.
Stark could see how she could be lured to the solidness of humans. But the humans - sapes - were terminally unreliable, had a habit of lying about how much power they really possessed, and had, since time immemorial, a penchant for getting tangled up in emotionally sticky spiderwebs of uncertain timelines - for they had none of the time-transcendent qualities of the arguably very advanced race of virii. These qualities, and so many, many more assorted random and sundry powers made Stark, in comparison, much more substantial than any sape could ever be. But he lacked the ability to control matter. By manipulating the sapes he could have anything he wanted. But it was not the kind of control he found himself aching for more and more of the time.
Sometimes he wanted to create objects and symbols all by himself, as opposed to doing it through the hands of Mona Lythik or another host. He wanted to leave his mark on the earth. He always needed to have a host - a lover who would trade his or her hands for his gift of awesome sexuality...and his slow and masterful means of making her - or him - ache with overprolonged desire and then taking over in a single invasive manoevre. But no. It wasn't going to last. Wasn't enough for her, either.
Mona! Oh why...why...? He would have cried had he a body; Mona, however, cried enough for both.
She said goodbye to him. He kissed her goodbye with a final jolt to the spinal cord, and dispersed.
Time slashed. Space flashed.
The eigenvector did something else