Serpentine Squiggles

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 cities rooves. Now nearing their destination, they had to descend to the streets, courting the great risk: a mortal spotting them.

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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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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 R-15 walked in. She, a surrogate clad proudly in ceramic carapace, paused at the threshold to the chamber, tugging on her invisible bindings to the rest of the hive as if it would pull her 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 slides closer, her smaller frame scraping against concrete rooftop.

At once the larger, slender drone stiffed, head snapping around (silver hair whirling) and narrowed eyes focused on the worker drone. That smaller one flinches, 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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For a mortal enthralled to a chrylurk’s will, one’s mind is not one’s own. Trivial wisdom, oft quoted. But for all its overpreached banality, few have reckoned with what this truly means. Chrylurk subjugation is no less than a challenge — a refutation, an annihilation — of the human condition. Beyond human! Subjectivity itself ought experience a profound vertigo in the face of the thralls.

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Golden sky hung above as horizon enveloped sun. Gilded like kintsugi, shining between shards of darkling clouds. This twilight might well have been night already — that suited me.

I crawled up the tower, claws of my tarsi hooking into brickwork. Human alchemists loved this plain white stone. What was it that drew such empire-wide devotion — the symbolic purity? As if this tower wasn’t a stain on forest that predated it. Even where it wasn’t garrish white stone, it was angular iron bars flecked with red.

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