Prohibition (Amended Version): Yperion

By YPERION

A genetically and psychologically engineered man recounts the story of his transformations, his flight for freedom, and the untimely demise of more than one of his bodies. The story is told through the eyes of the main character in a stream-of-consciousness style. Events pass in a flash. He may or may not be an unreliable narrator. In a post-apocalyptic world of dread and uncertainty, he is not alone. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yperion Press
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224490158

Book preview

Prohibition (Amended Version)

YPERION

Published by Yperion Press, 2024.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

PROHIBITION (AMENDED VERSION)

First edition. May 8, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 YPERION.

ISBN: 979-8224490158

Written by YPERION.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Prohibition (Amended Version)

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Further Reading: Kosmokrator

About the Publisher

For the Wolf of Christmas.

the fall of the ancient Sun of the universe inaugurated the modern Western world

—Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable (trans. Michael B. Smith)

This night of June is as dead as any other. A city of winds in which we hear the sights of the dead. Oblivious and insulated, the world of things is more interesting to me than that of people. No, I am not mad. I take shelter in my way of seeing things.

My position as a questioner garners a specific negative reaction from others. Their resistance to compliance with authority is natural. I drift to the edge of the dream they live in. Hearing their cries, as I seek information that is damaging or incriminating. Leverage acquired nearby and far-off despite their ideological resistance.

They run like fugitive lights in a forest. They run after a cause, a belief, and an ideal. If only they knew they were but mere shadows in my dream. Mere phantasms flickering in and out of awareness in a hell of my creation.

I walk the long cavernous halls, lit by dim electric light tubes. No sound but the sound that comes in through the immense clearings in this city of steel and cables. My hurried steps throw the flowing white tunic back, as a gust of wind opposes my storm path.

I look down at my hands without stopping, the stains of blood have not washed away. The gloves are still smeared even after repeated attempts at turning back time. Our industrial chemicals cannot wash away the mark of cruelty.

This is as should be, as expected, and, indeed, desired.

For we feed off the memory when the ritual blade decapitates the lamb. Those brought under the presumption of justice, fated aforehand, no matter their guilt. Accusations and evidence are set down in haste on documents for official procedure. We leave an immaculate paper trail providing historians with evidence of due process. They will remark on the carrying out of justice. The culprit deserved the sentence imparted to them.

As a matter of course, occult procedures do not go into the record. Nor the long pain-extracting sessions. Missing from our documentation are the dungeons and the open clearings. Of the twisted mass of concrete we occupy only a smattering of hints find their way into the literature. This, again, is by design.

The door opens and I enter the archives. Long shelves under a low, claustrophobic ceiling. They preserve meticulous physical copies of curated reports. Others consist of raw data and improvised maps. Here, notes scrawled by the hand of informants arrive at their final resting place.

Intelligence is much more important than the people who provide it. Man is but a means to an end. People interest me insofar as they complete my analysis. Often, they enrich the multitude of details in a poetic sense alone. Like gems encrusted on the great sculpture of my reports, they adorn the heights of my art.

The blind, stunted organic form housed within the robotic encasing verifies my passcode. Our priests have designed the electronic apparatus containing a lobotomized soul interface. He might have been a questioner like myself or even a priest.

Those within our ranks who commit irrevocable transgressions are not executed. Specialized training and resources invested cannot go to waste. The matrix that anchors the damned continues to serve.

It scans the lines of my hands. It informs me the gloves I now wear will not do. A certain article inside the interminable lines of rules and regulations says so. I must procure new gloves before I can go in and handle any of the books, folios, papers, and papyri. I pity the thing, to a certain extent.

It is also the cause of a fear that lives in me. A fear fomented by the controllers and avatars of the governess. They are emanations of her, her very own sephirothic guard.

This, thing, here, was once one of us. And through some transgression so egregious as to merit eternal torture was he thus damned. Hope for exile, not to mention escape, forever taken away. Its free will bent and twisted over the torturer’s wheel, broken into pieces.

Once taken to the operating board, malicious hands operated on him. They drilled into him, not without having ripped limb from socket beforehand. Perpetuating and accentuating pain, encasing whoever he had been in a mechanical contraption. An intact nervous system put to use for organization and direction, allowing a brutalized consciousness within to forever look on.

A fusion of the mechanistic and the organic, it has proven its use. Far superior to mere machines, it integrates mechanics with psychic function. It discerns aesthetic and emotional states. Of the latter, a machine is incapable no matter how advanced.

Its sometimes weeping semblance is out in the open. Its silent screams, formed from seared vocal cords, drown in the light. A mouth open in eternal dismay, neurons at the service of higher directives. The only purpose of such an arrangement—to terrorize the rest of us. Seeding nightmare and, through nightmare, utter compliance in the service of the absolute.

The mass of flesh and bone constricts into that tight space. No specific function in the arrangement, for display and amusement. It houses the remnants of a manipulated consciousness. A mind impaired by designed to fit the needs of the hierarchy like hand in glove. The technicians beat and forced the flesh into the electronic compartment.

I looked upon that semblance, not without a degree of disgust and hollow fear. That fear traversed my body, tempted me, and some part of me became curious about what it would be like to live like that. Dangerous thoughts.

Seals consecrated, inscribed scratches on an otherwise unimportant piece of parchment. They tell me what comes next, where I must go, and when I must make my move. Even within the organization, there is an invisible backbone. Official hierarchy of order aside, an order of intelligence, of spiritual affinity.

I add insult to injury and scratch the seals into deformity. I report the document as suspicious. As a questioner, it falls on me to make the accusations. I report the contents of parchment as untrustworthy. The infringing document declared useless, it is fed to the flames.

I can rarely be intimate with anyone. Sharing feelings has become but an illusion I never engage in anymore. Like a fleeting bird trapped between thick mausoleum walls, I externalize. I make manifest my gathered forces in the field of reality.

The dream is of my making, to my ends, but for the benefit of others. They may often smell something rotten as the sun goes down. But my independence, guilt-free smile, and self-sufficiency lull them back into sleep.

Our actions revolve around acceptable ways to fulfill this grad dream. External, bone-piercing behavior that reveals what it should not. The living skin ripped open.

We, the questioners, understand the real purpose of ritual. It takes place in the less stable area for our minds. We give ourselves to the turbulence, to a suspension of the sense of reality. Our ontology is precise. We choose to enact and perform whatever will bring our visions into reality. All symmetry is an illusion, we are ever-shifting. Ours is the greatest act of nihilistic experimentation.

The stars fade on the horizon behind the monolithic stone building. I ponder on the obvious withdrawal, the self-centered flavor of my disposition. Reading my confessions, you recognize and deal with me as a schizoid. yet this only reflects your incomprehension of the totality of my being.

Written upon the walls of the mausoleum, the universe is but a hologram. Our sacred verses describe it as a string of spheres dangling from a string in a precise sequence. When you look upon any of them, all the others are visible through the reflection. A universal secret lies hidden in this dictate. It applies to humans and other beings. It applies to objects, mundane and stellar alike.

Immense cavernous passages where industrial oppression bows in the service of alien consciousness. They feed the flow of mortal beings. They are the blood rushing through the greater body of a dying empire.

My destination was the landing pad. My duties were many, my talents few. The vehicles descending were cigar-like and came out of nowhere. No one saw the moment of their arrival. Sentinels attempted to determine an originating vector and failed.

And so it came or was here without warning. A large vessel, descended like a great cloud, light as a feather, noiseless. A circular opening, out of which descended a cubic container, all black. There was motion as of invisible wires letting it down, but none were discernible to the naked eye. None were discernible either to the special operations goggles.

The dog-headed masks of the troops on duty turned to look at a man. The wind only blew. The officer caressed his shaven head, tracing the parallel red lines tattooed onto it. Distinct from us, interrogators, he wore black. Distinct also, from the troops, he stood upright and behaved humanlike.

Approaching the black cube with careful steps, he stops. He turns his head to me. I jump from the platform of off-white masonry serving as edges to garden patches. In them gnarling trees of rich and deep colors ache. They are bonsais of ancient giant trees. Their regular size would have housed armies. Thus tortured it sprawled the size of a formidable oak.

As I float down and across on wings unseen, the dog-headed troops cower, fearful darting eyes in the dark. The pale black-clad officer gestures a hint of exasperation at the superstitious reaction. Their superstition keeps me fed.

Our boots click the impeccable floor tiles on our way to the cube. Three meters tall, and so on. No placard to read, no te deum sung for the solemn occasion. I raise a hand to it, black glove. He raises his own, the albino.

The cube's face facing us moves. Slow and with a deep rumble, a warning, it comes down. I dart and roll out of the way. The officer attempts to put pressure on it. Anger flusters his face as he, too, steps aside. His mutations, accelerating chemicals, and cybernetic parts cannot match the divine structure.

Inside the alien container was a large seat, onyx black. Sculpted werewolf motifs adorned the throne. We came close. The material approximated petrified stone. Closer inspection revealed the depictions shown on its surface bore rough symbols. The humanoid forms were exquisite, fine, and accurate. And yet, someone had scratched the symbols with fury.

A horn sounded in the distance. The troops rushed to and fro and stood at attention. The officer and I watched as the floating barge of the governess entered the scene. White, with details of gold, the vehicle was ostentation incarnate. The luxury and the pretension shown betrayed but a fragment of the diamond soul it carried.

To her, we owed our fears and aspirations. So read sacred scripture. So chanted the voices of the devotees at the appointed hour of the day before dawn and after dusk. Their nails bleed and their eyes see the light for the last time. A boy and a girl not yet thirteen carve them out. Afterward, the sacred knives, black and white, return home.

Her tall figure passed us both, her face veiled, several feet above us. A long bony finger stretched and touched the werewolf throne. As it pressed against it, the blue veins of her hands glowed bright, and she laughed a monstrous laugh.

Standing again, hands by her sides, she mouths instructions. No audible sound perturbs the airwaves. Behind the seat of my brain, the predatory rasps and guttural effusions ring clear. Her attendants have also received the message. The dogs have not.

Sweet and deceptive, the female attendants engage the officer. They let fall a little fabric, show some skin, and exert their voluptuous forms. A necklace and a gift he receives. Around his runes the emblems that make him proud.

Great fires burn bright under a starry night. And the throne that has fallen from the sky lies empty, but not for long. Honored, assuming this is the gift of the immortals, an invitation to join their ranks, he weeps.

Hypochondriasis is the general malaise of the population. It leads to a vague, undifferentiated somatic suffering. These are but symptoms of maladjustment.

There is so much we