Serpentine Squiggles

This is a blog post about technical considerations of markup languages — and I’m writing it on a site I built myself. If there’s an impulse more codified and vacuous than artists waxing poetic about the power of creativity, it’s programmers blogging about how their blogs work. In the years I’ve been erecting this monolith I’ve resisted that siren, but for once, I’ll indulge.

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A novelist sets foot inside a poet’s house and is at once jealous of the furniture. Rhyme schemes, meter, stanza form — and what do we have? Word count? 

Let’s go shopping.

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Two chrylurks, Gloom and Adversity, crawled through tunnels of limestone. Shimmerbugs aglow were the only illumination, glinting off pools and streams. Water trickled through, carving these caverns deeper, but its work has largely been outpaced by the hive’s excavation. Behind them, the floor bore a layer of crushed chitin and exoderm, and the walls a tracework of woven lines. Both grew scarce as they went on.

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Chitinous tarsi lighted down on cold stone, lost in the enveloping patter of the rain rushing down sloped roofs. Droplets of water beaded ineffectually on waxy exoderm, repelled by both bodies. Only their setae-furred antennae and locks of silken hair needed any cover.

Darkling sky over chilled air over empty streets. The two chrylurks had stealth so far, gliding and bounding over the city’s rooves. Now nearing their destination, they had to descend to the streets, courting the great risk: a mortal spotting them.

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Shell-sculptors had the sharpest claws of the chrylurk castes, and this one had a whetstone upon the table, honing the edge further, even as you walked in. You, a surrogate clad proudly in ceramic carapace, paused at the threshold to the chamber, tugging on your invisible bindings to the rest of the hive as if it would pull you from some terrible drop.

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From a dark sky that nursed only faint embers of the setting sun, snow descended on two drones. In the deepening chill, one of them slid closer, her smaller frame scraping against concrete rooftop.

At once the larger, slender drone stiffened, head snapping around (silver hair whirling) and narrowed eyes focused on the worker drone. That smaller one flinched, purple eyes hollowing in a blink, and her lips stuttered through some words, “I was just — it’s not — don’t act like —”

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Short answer: No, I don’t use “AI” and don’t want to. The long answer is about what you’d expect; I do not offer a novel perspective. Nevertheless, humanity delenda est.

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One night, a poet encounters a chrylurk. These twelve verses trace the curve of that moth’s spiral-flight. O curiosity, why in mirrors do you see bloodlust?

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By far my favorite plotline, and something I so desperately want to see executed better, is the parasitoid singularity.

This can take a lot of forms. Probably the most recognizable is when it leans mostly to the “singularity” side. This is the hard takeoff of misaligned artificial intelligence. Skynet, universal paperclips, and so forth. AI spreading itself across every medium it has access to, replicating and infecting computers, then leveraging its newly gathered swarm to expand its access further to gather even more resources, loop while true, break only when the planet’s devoured.

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Meanings for the terminology used in various writings in the dark fantasy series, Vermin Cathexis.

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