Obsidian Waste

By Rudolfo A Serna

Obsidian Waste is a psychedelic dark fantasy space odyssey born out of a mysterious technology transmitted from a universal mind that takes root and grows as the Earth is reseeded by the new technology. Growing and inhabiting all those receiving the message of Peace and Love as remnants of their mother world disappear in budding forests and fields, resisting the plagues and radiation that finished off what once was once under control of Earth' s tyrants and their governments. A poetic journey grounded in the harsh echoes of modern society, seeking hope, a utopia that could not exist without its reflection, as bodies are split and joined in the psi-tronic mixing boards of the seers. What was once called “ human” seeking eternity in the heart/mind of giant animal ships filled with biomechanical hybrids striving to survive without the anger that destroyed Earth' s dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RIZE
• Release date: Jan 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781955062916

Book preview

PART I

SCROLL OF OBSIDIAN WASTE

CHAPTER ONE

In the twin’s tent was a small shrine, a lit candle, a hand-painted image of a sculptured clay skeleton decorated with pieces of scavenged material used for the effigy’s death shroud, used for a headdress of imitation feathers stitched by hand in the smoke of burning incense in a seashell. They poured precious distilled liquor into a tin cup from a clay bottle and left it beside the table shrine, capping the container and placing it in a satchel before strapping it to their back, and placing their harvesting tools in a cart. Taking their staffs, they walked out to the filthy paths between the tents pulling a cart with them.

Scarves over the scrappers’ faces protect against the rancid smells of sewage and infected bodies.

The twins wore dark goggles and wide-brimmed hats

to protect their skin from the sun,

setting out,

carrying the gear needed to cut away at the bones of the leviathans,

ships recalled from deep space.

Children in sand dunes covered with flies.

Dimensions of space goliaths being stripped of the black metal. Meta-scrappers in ragged work clothes climbing the ships’ skeletal frames, the hulls of the leviathans towed by giant sand-tredders inland from the sea after falling to Tierra. The sand-treaders were fifty meters tall, forged from scavenged metal, creeping along with cables hooked to the onyx skin of the fallen spacecraft being towed in from the sea, dragging the leviathans across the beaches, further crushing any remnants of the ruins of resort towns. Leaving deep gouges in the sand after being dragged across the island, filled in and populated with meta-scrappers waiting to start work on the ships with blow torches, cutting blades, and pry bars.

Meta-scrappers follow the leviathans across the desert isle, pitching their tattered tents, stringing their glittering trinkets of worship, and surviving off meager rations from the company store.

Sand-treaders running off old-fashioned fusion, emitting steam from exhaust portals sticking up from their mechanical backs —

towering machines maintained by mechanics with goggles in the meta-guild garages

who welded plates, and refurbished engines with re-tooled parts.

In the main accounting offices of the meta-guild, accountants charted the types of black metal arriving at the scrapyards, giving credit to the scrappers in the tent cities set up around the hulls of the fallen fleet.

Incense and unwashed bodies in the street.

Prayers from poets of a new order,

their haggard robes,

red sashes around their foreheads,

ringing handbells.

Tents held flapping streamers and flags indicating different professions — soothsayers, prostitutes, healers, and the soup makers who grilled sea rats seasoned with salt harvested from the other side of the island. Calls to prayer rose with the dust and foul smoke of the tents, the sounds of tools and pots clanging in the streets, the voices of the workers speaking an indistinguishable clamor in the makeshift temple set up in the center of a temporary plaza eager to leave behind some blood on a rock altar stained by followers of lady death,

smelling of rot

and the buzzing of obsidian flies in the temple,

primal programming kicking in with the smell of animal filth.

Resort towns had long since been destroyed by earthquakes, global collapse, rising tides, and hurricanes.

Washing up on the beach were floating pieces of boardwalks, sunken were pillars black and jagged just under the surface of an algae- infested sea.

Miadro led with a staff in one hand, pulling the cart while Taso followed, pushing the cart when it would get stuck in the sand, budging it free,and heaving at it until the wheels were released. Neither brother spoke as they navigated the paths through the tent city. Carrying faded postcards of palm trees and cabanas collected in a small tin box, images of tourists on their way to holiday, wading out to the lapping sea. It would impress upon the twins of a time before when life was still bearable for some, a printed picture on frayed cardboard preserved in a tin box, a small shrine to the dead.

Hulls of the fallen ships were swarmed by the meta-scrappers with their blowtorches sparking, cutting the black metal, and lowering it to the ground using cables and pulleys. Metal taken and stacked, cataloged by accountants tallying their yield. Meta-guild clerks marked down in ledgers, keeping track of meager credit that the meta-scrappers would later spend at a company store in exchange for sustenance wafers and water partially scrubbed clean of poisons and radiation from the atmosphere.

Pulling their cart with tools,

passing the decimated remains of the tenth ship once called Torreón.

Most of its shell is already carried away.

The last rib-sticking up like a narrow tower or extinct forest tree

with fountains of molten slag falling from the blowtorches of the meta-scrappers

strapped at the top.

Passing the leviathans in different stages of disassembly, approaching the bones of the eleventh ship once called Fuerte. Meta-scrappers tethered to the leviathan’s skeleton, hanging on in poisonous winds, digging further into the marrow of the leviathan’s spine, scrappers tied by frayed ropes, securing them by their waists, scrambling from bone to bone. The scrappers’ metal grinders spew out curtains of red sparks and golden petals of ground metal, blowing in long arcs over white sand. Sounds of pounding hammers drowning out the grunts of those wrestling with the scales being pulled from the leviathan’s hull. Passing through an immense rib cage hiding the meta-scrappers in the shadows of the ship sifting through piles of scrap.

Caravans of dirty hordes; hands wrapped in rags protected from sharp, cleaved edges, covering the chemical lesions that marked their arms and faces exposed to the atmosphere — carrying their harvest to the metal yards to be weighed. Speaking garbled dialects over pots of brewed tea on portable methane stoves, smoking harsh tobacco, high on hyper-intoxicants either homemade or shipped in and sold at the company store, causing hallucinations, seizures, death, taken with subpar life-enhancers advertised to incrementally increase life spans in the poisoned atmosphere of Tierra. Many could not bear the pain of living and some had the courage to fall from the heights of the leviathan ships by untying the knots that secured them to the frame,

letting themselves go,

cratering in the sand.

Drifting farther into the interior of the island, the brothers were already high on the soma-lite doses intended to keep them from falling sick to the toxic storms blowing across the planet, leaving the Fuerte behind them to be cannibalized by their fellow meta-scrappers — a culture formed from their common need to survive despite the extreme conditions of living anymore.

Hearing the hissing of torches and the grinding metal being carried behind them on the blowing wind, already seeing the twelfth ship on the horizon like a black mountain, born in the sea and transformed by Norte Corp. technicians, ascending a hundred years before and powered with Psi-fusion.

Thirteen ships traveled into deep space on a trajectory to Ohm, following the voice. Twelve returned against their will — called back from their journey by earthly politics, greed, and desperation, falling back into the hands of the last of humanity and the lowly meta-scrappers to be taken apart for the underwater city of Tanis. The last of humanity, the hominin, in its last stage relying on the meta guild as the last source of food and water provided by the company stores bought with credit from the metal farmed from the backs of creatures born out of worm-tech.

The meta-guild was created to supply Tanis with black metal, needed material for the continuation of humanity as proclaimed by Tanis' authoritarian tyrant ruling the last world government. The natural state for what remained of the species

conditioned for millennia in the dream of ultimate wealth and glory,

remaining as an unwavering drive in their programming and development,

driving them into the age of extinction.

The obsidian locusts that inhabited the island were one of the few things surviving in nature. A byproduct of worm-flower technology, adapting to the poisonous winds carried by storms from across the ocean, the insects nestled in the crumbled foundations of desert villages, found in rotting space metal, transformed by the worm flower that blew in the atmosphere, forming from their cocoons of obsidian skin.

The twin’s adoptive mother, Nico, had wrestled the locusts from the rocks without breaking the insects’ segments in half, taking them while still alive back with her to her tent, mixing them with alchemical element found in the Port of Torero with the poets that practice and serve the ziggurat. The insects dried and ground up, mixed into tinctures on Nico’s worktable, as her adopted children recited their lessons. And then they were given over to the visions conjured by the locust sacrament fed to them by her in careful doses.

The soma-lite ringing mixing with the sounds of the scrappers’ tools, grinding motors turned by invisible hands, a symphony of clanging and banging, the wind blowing through the carcasses of giants where excess humanity crawled in and out of their obsidian husks, carrying the black metal away for compensation by those dependent on the company store for meager rations bought with harvested metalline from the island graveyard. Credit given based on the type and quality of steel wrenched free from the giant corpses that fell from space — pulled from the sea. Different parts of the ships credited according to various qualities and levels of galvanic saturation from distant stars determining value.

Excess population earnings for an ancient system of slave labor based on the pure-humanistic ideals of Tanis,

adopted from the old masters,

the aristocrats and industrialists,

and policies of slavery and genocide

persisting for the excess population left over from industry.

Following the trail gouged from the sand and dunes, compressed by the weight of the ship being towed by the sand-treader, the compacted ground made easier for the twins to pull their tool cart farther into the island’s interior, to the twelfth ship, the Huracán,

yet to be swarmed over and cannibalized

by the meta-scrappers setting up their wandering camps,

brandishing their hand tools,

banging away at the hull as if in rhythmic ceremony.

The Huracán had reentered Tierra’s atmosphere only a few days before and had been towed further in than any of the other ships to come ashore, drawing it as close as they could to Tanis, to Neo-Aztlan, to the mainland.

And there would be no more ships to fall, and the excess population would be left to find another source of food and water with further desperation setting in and the only place left to go was Death. The last ship to fall would be disassembled after being sent with the fleet of thirteen a century earlier to find the voice of Ohm,

to be recalled with only twelve of the ships returning,

the thirteenth ship still waiting in Ohm’s orbit to receive the final transmission

continuing with its cosmic journey as soon as they received the transmission

from hundreds of lightyears away.

The Huracán’s hump barely visible rising out of the sand,

the twins followed the freshly plowed path several hundred meters wide

as if the leviathan had crawled in from the sea

and started across the island on a massive belly,

a slow bulbous beast taking some pyramidal form

as it dried out in the sun.

Gargantuan sand-treaders pulled the ships in from shore with long cables reaching a kilometer out to sea and attached by boatswains with hooks and chains that tethered the beasts that had touched down and dragged to the beaches where the prayers of the meta-scrappers’ chants could be heard on the waves and in the winds sadly welcoming the fleet back home. As if their salvation had been murdered along with all hope of ever curing the disease of being human.

Voices in the dunes, calling out to the geminum,

ghosts of the levianauts,

astral-trippers,

ghosts of the pilots,

astronomers, and navigators.

The twins tried not to look at them swaying in and out of the dunes at a distance, gathering, fading, then reappearing, bits of their voices sounding like chimes playing on gossamer of early morning sunlight, cutting in and out as if being distorted by the dark gray-green poisonous clouds from across the ocean. The ghosts would not harm them, the twins were used to the visions and had seen them before with each carcass of each ship that they had walked through, searching for specific elements, components, and material, marrow for her experiments. They felt the residual energy of the levianauts that had steered the fleet to the red Goat Star, and the thirteen planets that awaited them in its star system, invited by a voice coming from a void, needing the animal to save them.

The soma-lite preserved the geminum, keeping them from rotting away prematurely in the poisoned winds among the feral ghosts in the dunes chanting program music, drifting slowly, growing louder as they headed towards the pyramidion figure of the twelfth ship.

Derivatives of the worm flower, by-products of worm-technology created in the labs of Norte Corp., the Templo de Gultos Galaximum, carried on the air, bonding with stone, dirt, and water.

On the horizon, they saw the great long hull of the Huracán reaching up from the dunes like a mountain recently grown at the end of creation.

Ghosts chanting their programs, meditating on their course through the cosmos, sacrament in the blood surging, the distilled derivatives that had been processed and put into a capsule by their mother, Nico.

Lifting the lid of the third eye deep inside — the eye that usually only opened at the moment of death, finding the trail on a parallax plane to the last leviathan to have fallen. This time would be different, they were sent to retrieve the ship’s Burzum. The only one to be remaining on board despite the Burzum’s sibling, the heart/minds of the leviathans abandoned in orbit around Tierra, left to float in the arms of a dead levianaut evacuated from a ship’s airlock waiting for the signal, to release its contents to the thirteenth ship remaining in the Goat Star system of Al Giedi.

The twins had consumed worm-flower ingrained in locust dust from bugs that had become infused with pollen created from Norte Corp. tech, making its way across the continent, forming the leviathans, transforming the remaining creatures left roaming regardless of their environment being destroyed, their habitats unsustainable, keeping them alive. The locusts were collected and pulverized by Nico who took the material and processed it, cooked, and prepared the elements for the capsules’ contents.

Following the wide trail already being filled with blowing sand instead of the race of meta-scrappers chasing the black metal,

to mine the leviathan’s flesh that would be traded for water and food.

Their caravans would be arriving in the morning,

preparing to take apart the last miracle of worm-tech,

and the mysterious science of the Cultos de Galaxium.

Obsidian ghosts dancing and singing at the periphery of the twins’ vision. Knowing what it was they were feeling. We’ll be with them soon enough, realities intersecting over the island sand — they had been there before and would be there again, and again after that. Born for the purpose of this moment, following the path to the twelfth ship. They had learned to accept the visions brought on by the soma-lite, to listen to the messages being whispered. Black specters twisting on the wind, approaching the last starship to have fallen. Inside were the dead who were suicided by ceremonial knives. The twelfth ship where the astral trippers had once lived and still remained, their aether impregnated in the chamber walls.

Pulling the cart, carrying the tools to bring out the heart/mind from its cradle. But before entering, they would rest in the shadow of the twelfth ship towering over them, laying at the bottom of the trench plowed by its massive hull.

The geminum hearing obsidian locusts —

Fluttering.

Worm-flower grown in Templo labs, raised in vats of putrid medium, grown and transported in chrome boxes stuffed in the cloaks of the magi wandering the mainland among the purple grass and onyx woods. The twins were having a dream, existing somewhere on the timeline of sister reality, a recurring dream in which they were killing one another. Hands around each brother’s neck, being squeezed, their own faces looking at them — the geminum woke. It was night with a veil of green toxic clouds billowing over the sea. Reaching for their headlamps, the twins gazed up at the twelfth ship under a green moon, its cone towering over them in the desert sky.

It’s time, Miadro said.

He took a capsule, and despite the green darkness, the moon provided enough light for Miadro to see his own face staring at him, pressing the capsule to his forehead, Cozmica, Taso muttered, placing the capsule onto his brother’s tongue.

The black mountain of space metal waiting, as did the ghosts that had followed the ship down into the sea after coming across the cosmos and towed across the sand into the hands of the meta-scrappers. The residual dreams of the astral-trippers, transmissions moving beyond the machine — the greatest science ever known.

The sand-treader remained silent as the twins approached the hulking vehicle that had gone still and dark, as if abandoned in place with no sign of life inside.

The Huracán consumed the dimensions in front of them, the green moon barely escaping its hunger for space, hanging at the edge of the leviathan’s horizon.

Their heads bent back trying to see the top of the ship, its growing shadow consuming the dunes, feeling the vibrations, feeling the energy that had been collected in space.

Obsidian edges slicing night sky.

Passing the silent sand-treader, the twins looked out over the dunes for the lights of the scrappers and their caravans that would be following the trail left by the giant’s towed body. Scrappers would be setting up their tents in the leviathan’s trail, starting their methane burners, and soon they would be stabbing and prodding at the ship’s surface with flat bars, cutting it open with plasma torches,

ripping away pieces of black metal shell, reaching the bones underneath.

Scrappers working to procure food and shelter along with scrubbed water brought over on barges transporting excess humanity

over the Strait of Cortez,

taking black metal back to the mainland to be caravanned on foot

by other laborers indentured to carry the pieces to Tanis

to be used in fortifying the underwater city.

They removed a set of the Huracán’s blueprints from the satchel on their back, pulling out and unrolling the rubberized paper, looking at the specs of its design provided to them by Nico, the map of the twelfth ship, a downloaded transmission sent from the mainland, from the ship’s creators. Printed out from a device she had created with salvaged parts of living altar harvested from the fallen ships, with thin cheap metal dug out of the ruins the meta-scrappers camped on. Metal often used in building devices that served its creators in some domestic capacity. The twins never knowing for certain the source of the information that would appear to Nico, a secret she had discussed little about, receiving transmissions from the mainland and the capital of Neo-Aztlan, seemingly only in visions as she meditated in the corner of a large tent on a weaved threadbare blanket wearing a type of headband made of leviathan marrow, obsidian in nature, attached to her head as she sat in a lotus pose, communing with what she had only revealed to be as messages coming from the Templo.

The twins lifted their heads to witness the immensity of the ship’s design sucking them into its endless starless void. Somewhere inside was the ship’s Burzum,

a hexahedron still in its cradle —

the heart/mind of the leviathan.

They searched for an airlock that they knew was somewhere there, standing before it, reciting code from the blueprint, waiting for the shell to give way.

Facing where the portal was supposed to appear with the code being recited, making the connection in meditation. They were not sure if it would open and could only have faith, bringing along the heavy equipment just in case, concentrating on the black mass rising, grabbing at the green moon, and hiding it away in its folds. Chanting the mantra, the esoteric words from the Cultos Galaxium mouths, programmed, and the heart/mind would hear them.

The Burzum opened the portal for them.

Stepping from the white sand glittering when the beams from their headlamps flashed across the dunes until they were absorbed into the void of the leviathan’s interior, disappearing into the open airlock where the wind, sand, and poisonous rain would follow in after them with the meta-scrappers following not far behind, infiltrating its halls, going to work tearing out the black metal saturated with cosmic orgonic energy. The code of the astral-trippers drifting within the heart/mind, smoldering with the life force of the levianaut navigators.

Excess humanity with nothing left for them except for the vague memories of what may come as the voice from the mainland starting to make its way across the desert island, and soon they would be arriving in droves, hungry and sick, deteriorating, organs failing, the body rotting while still alive. The twins studied Nico’s harvester map through the feeble blue light of their headlamps that could not pierce the dark cavernous halls as the light was being eaten by the twelfth ship, absorbing any energy that came into contact with it, drawing hungrily, still needing to feed.

It lives, Miadro said. It’s still connected.

It won’t last long. It needs us.

The ship’s heart/mind in the cradle of its once living altar. The clanging sounds of the tools strapped to their backs being consumed by the ship’s obsidian walls, the sound did not echo far, drawn into its surface. In the dim light of their headlamps, they could see markings in the corridors indicating where they were in the body of the ship, checking with the harvesting map. A hum oscillating around them, yet it was not clear whether the sound was coming from the walls or if it were auditory hallucinations caused by the soma-lite, sounding like birthing locusts getting ready to burst from their heads carrying dreams of budding worm-flowers, escaping into nature to replicate.

The twins continued through the corridors, their lights shining into dark hollow halls, sensing that the ship was still alive, they had to find the meditation chamber with the heart/mind set inside, holding the collected thoughts of the levianauts that had died.

The Burzum waiting on the altar,

an interface that would read the psychic commands of the navigators.

"The navigators’ chamber,'' Miadro's voice deadened like the lights, continuously fading no matter how much they turned the brightness up. The sound of their voices being soaked up by the black metal transmorphed from the leviathan’s living flesh, forming the halls, the chambers, and shafts that twisted through the ship’s interior, stretching vertically, horizontally, angled, spiraling into the upper and lower levels. The leviathan altered after rising from the murky depths of the Strait of Cortez made to rise silently from the planet with its cargo.

The ghosts, Miadro said.

We can hear them.

We left them out there.

The sounds of the twins’ voices started to fade, sound waves being absorbed, but the humming of the locusts remained. They had ingested the same technology that made up the ship; connected to its same matter.

Aether leaked out onto the sand, settling out in the dunes. Taso shifted the weight of the tools on his back. There was no sound, no wind, no light in the void they stepped farther into, traveling deep inside, becoming disoriented, lost looking for the passage to the navigators’ chamber; the altar room of the Burzum — the onyx box that recorded the memories of the ship’s journey, uploading the dead astral-trippers after being forced to return to Tierra.

They could only hear their breathing left in the dark, the light struggling. The ghosts had gone silent, as if releasing a final gasp before leaving as aether off-gassing from the ship’s corpse, releasing into the island wind.

Their headlamps crisscrossed the corridor, looking for marks on the walls that would lead them past the observatory and control rooms, until finding the navigators’ chamber with a circle drawn in white pigment on the door, and the symbols of ancient rites indicating the universal elements of nature and harmony.

The portal to the navigation chamber had been sealed, marked with symbols still dripping from the door. Taso raised a hand to the symbol and smeared it.

It’s wet, he said.

Miadro ran the tips of his fingers across the door, lifting pigment from the surface.

It will stay wet as long as it lives. Recite the code, Miadro said.

Taso unfurled the harvest map again and shined the light over it, the light struggling to remain as its illuminance was being drained, but the portal to the navigators’ chamber opened for them without having to recite any code or command sung to the living altar on the other side that could only otherwise be accessed by pry bars and plasma cutters to bite into the skin of the leviathans that had splashed in the sea without a heart/mind on its altar to listen.

The Burzums of the leviathan in the arms of the last levianaut stepping out into space before the ship crashed back into the sea.

The chamber walls were smooth and circular with an obsidian gleam and the living altar stood alone, its black surface with the Burzum in its center, rotating slowly at its four corners, the green light shining down through a tubular port hole drawing in the moon captured in the dimensional grasp of the large body laying out on the island dunes. The geminum recognized the mystical images of a goat headed winged father/mother, a baphometic creature found in the cosmology of the Galaxium traced in white pigment on the chamber walls, representing order from chaos found in the natural world. A goat head as recorded in history, as there were no goats that existed anymore, its feet, cloven hooves, a torso that was both man and woman, left and right — up and down — equal dimension and direction.

The pigment melting is used to create the symbol of the father/mother —

animal/human,

small wisps of smoke rising from the foot of the wall mixing with illusion of solidity.

Cozmica, said the geminum, the brothers with one mind. Duality, nature . . .

There were other forms, blue cherubic; malformed faces of something infantile as if staring at them from behind the surface of the chamber walls, the murals were highly detailed, and the pigment that