WYRM

That which was the wyrm did not arrive, it appeared.

And there have been many like it, in myth. Serpents which tempted and serpents which coiled about the world. Lesser dragons cursed from the skies to vacillate in poison. Prismatic dwellers of the waterhole and destined devoured.

Wyrm is all of these.

Not beheaded but headless. Without any demonic, coin-eyed stare promising temptation and release. Unpersuaded by the eye, wyrm suggests instead with the body. A rage of coils bedecked with glistering scale, clothed in a sheaf of rotted skin—heady with the scent of regurgitated offal aboil in cavities of petroleum, ammonia. Wyrm swells the air with static, a doubled whining: distant insect swarm, cathode ray tubes in servitude to the display of trauma.

Rather than any grand collective amnesia, wyrm overturned the world—its previous condition not forgotten, of merely inapposite glamor.

Wyrm, there/here paradoxical tragedy of innumerable presence. Permeating calamitous unifier rather than obliterant. Concurrent substitute for the predicted infiltration of all social spheres with stamping monoculture and the worship of capital. Instead and also came wyrm, globality fulfilling catastrophe. Its form: personalized seducer preternatural. Unending, unbeginning adder occupying landscapes like a circle’s swinging tangential sensitivity to change.

Wyrm seethes in multipresence just outside awareness—a drift on the wind of the incomprehensible in decay or scutes of distant and absorptive glimmer or the wisping dry texture of that moist papery skin.

And then, it occurs!

In sudden rotted glory, making the sound of writhing murk. From unformed, dissociative blip on the radar of sensation into screaming actual.

Pervasive emissary of a new date keeping era. Bringer forth of another year zero.

The scientist talks of “phase change,” of “false vacuum collapse,” but these feel altogether more like allegory. And why, anyway, should either phenomenon be localized? Why, anyway, should Earth’s surface be submitted to this specific rifting?

Wyrm seems more to the rest of us like the dark magic of command.

Never has interstellar observation managed quotidian relevance. Not until wyrm was sighted in a galactic cluster 589 million light years away. As though, defiant of physical law, wyrm had located itself with prescient exactness at the distance of our Cambrian light’s arrival, bearing multicellularity’s effusion of taxa and body plans.

No matter the analytical method, wyrm’s existence is imitative, self-obscuring. An endlessly masked hallucination of persistent and collective effect, in whose wake lie cloven boulders and smothered vegetation.

So then, a mentally unconfined actual event—too difficult really to believe in, too strange to worship.

The rest of the biosphere alternatively approaches in flame-drawn clamor, retreats toward den or burrow.

Bats and wasps dodge coils in their flight while cetaceans follow along in lazy spiral. Flora etoliate from its shadow and every ape that isn’t human avoids the wyrm whenever possible. Corvids, vultures guzzle at the tissue which falls like ice from glaciers (alas, wyrm does not join them in retreat). Elephants lapse into mourning when it appears and present corpses of their offspring. The chromatophores of cuttlefish adapt to depict the hell light of its surface. Fungal fruiting bodies, slime molds, take up elaborate and helical form among its detritus. Mature nematomorphs assemble novel molecular imitations, congregate their hosts into wyrm’s twined shadow, and exit distended abdomens in supplicant, spiraform mass.

Wyrm, in failed aposematic mimicry, brought forth instead a kind of creatural reverence.

The ecosystem is not destroyed but it has been altered.

Spacetime too.

Wyrm emerges, convolute, among peat-black waters of bogged coastal lowlands and in whorls, clutching at ground-down mountain ranges. Patterns, of traffic in alpine cities, of arboreal migration in wooded outskirts, revised indiscriminately.

The oceans of the world stood up, as though suddenly into which were dropped an untold billion cubic meters of coiling fetid refuse. Populations fled the twice-new coasts, fled again the risen seas.

Wyrm sheds every of the empiricist’s confines—undulates between depiction and existence, appearances bunched against and sliding past being. Multi-spaced, sub-perceptible, everywhere and suddenly nowhere. Basks in an incident pit whose lure is obsession, a gulf into which one inevitably slides, scrabbling steepened walls of yearning until submission asphyxiates desire.

This is wyrm’s guiling time. Spatial exchange, collapse—an array toward which all futures come to point.

And so was invented the deprivation suit, to access wyrm without accepting its singularity.

To describe time inside is a snare, an asymptote analogized only from a section of distance, in tenses of past or future.

Autonomous investigations failed, wyrm suspended in law-like, error inducing mist. Malfunctioned by way of software incongruity or manufacturing imperfection, the robots found themselves lost—cost maps corrupted by dissident evaluation, planned paths unreeled, whether teleoperated via electromagnetic sign or onboard self-directed controller. They passed every rigor, every fail test—and then wyrm would connive a series of retrocausal missteps leading to bankrupted equipment in the present.

To appraise the mechanism behind this suspiciously tachyonic, always-accidental failure was left to the physicists.

We tried instead for a sampler who was human.

A pilot for whom all actions leading to the pit sickness would be proscribed.

Sensation was the first, the most obvious, to deplete.

And there were many requirements.

Blinded, nasal passages plugged, mouth filled with non-Newtonian neutralizing solution which both discouraged quick movements of the tongue and tasted of blandness. Delicate stoppers like bifurcated fiddlehead ferns inserted into the ear canal, vibration damped, noise removed as well as balance. More soundproofing at the neckline, to forget the heartbeat, to stifle the pulmonary whir of the ventilator which substituted breath. Counterfeit amniotic fluid circulated throughout, warm as the monitored temperature across the skin’s surface and laced with appetite suppressants, deliriants which masked agency. Exterior equipped with dozens of neurally operated multidigit limbs, within the profuse motions of which any particular movements were concealed.

A practiced set of iterative dance modeled after systems of chaos. Precisely dependent upon initial condition—trivial to simulate, wildly divergent in outcome. Months of training, mental states suffused with the cognitive equivalent of polystyrene: that most worthless and delicate of permanences, disobedient entirely to rot.

Consciousness malformed, a swollen stream of the blanked, the valueless—acontextual linguistic syntax, façade collections of numerically patternless sequence, hazed images and color fields decapitated of their emotive affluence.

Before the drop, a capsule of pharmacological acumen, barbiturates, to impel mental states of both lethargy and precision. Sinuses, bowels, bladder each invasively cleared.

And finally, on a chain of gold, the locket charm, shaped like the omitted fist of smooth muscle beating—placed, for luck, around the pilot’s neck.

This all: an attempt, ill-fated, to engage in ritualistic trickery. To confound a being which sloughs free the real simply as the pneumatic forceps peels tissue.

The first samples fell inevitably into the hands of the obsessed.

And so was invented the convulsed bureaucratic logic by which the study of wyrm was enabled.

Researchers were held in atomized ideological enclave, worked in meandering, procedural vagueries intended to suspend understanding and collaboration—else they be felled by the reticulated disease of yearning.

Operators worked separate digits of thirty meter, hydraulic-actuated manipulators—efforts concealed within the totality of darkrooms and undergone without electronic or computing assistance. Always unsure as to whether relayed directives undid the work of their companions or engaged them in perverse and unrelated tasks or had some effect in moving the experiments forward. Entrenched, formalized obscurity manufactured official letters of dismissal, delivered upon an individual's failed performance in the daily psychoanalyses—the results of which were incinerated, unrecorded in the first place, or set as framed translations into obscure languages above various entryways in the facility. Managerial decisions filtered by the result of triple slit tests, final density of those emitted particulate allocating funds for obsolete certifications in yet to be developed conference halls. The fluorescent night/day cycle of the research facility fortressed in glass and steel scheduled by the stochastic processes of radiation. Individuals offered enormous parcels of company stock to submit to permanent blinding, that they might sit upon exhaustively wasteful committees, vote upon issues elaborated only by laser print diagram.

All to damn but a mouthful of participants to the wyrm-craving.

Wyrm’s viscera are by all accounts out of contexts—its age cannot be deduced by its strata and there are no standard candles next to which it will be held.

Newly minted emission spectra revealed a composition including elements along yet-unseen rows beneath the periodic table. Insulating musculature surrounded hardened seams of fat, run through with rancid parasympathetic nerves—twitching vainly, gelatinously, at the behest of immense synaptic ions. Bloated nuclei of an enormous alkaline earth metal, failing to spew radiation and annihilate themselves, failing to live out their picoscale half lives.

Lurid flesh enfolded by scales that appeared in the corner of the eye as jewel smeared carrion. Scales that developed in every anatomical direction from the nail beds of cross sectioned samples of the limbless serpent. Ingrown, pushed backward and down into the quick. Laterally, interfering with others on the surface like waves crashed against one another rather than the shore, energies dispersed. Wyrm grown or existed or conceived in vortical swirling time, layer by fracteline layer.

The hapless physiology of tephra-chronological errata.

All dating methods, radiocarbon or otherwise, offered results in thousand-year swaths, stirred like an incomplete pigment, hue imitative of the obscene.

The volcanism of Pompeii beneath hydrocarbons typical of interstellar dust. A penultimate membrane of growth saturated with Strontium-90, produced only in nuclear fallout. And finally, most recently lain, an iridium layer resembling a scaled model of the KT-boundary.

And so on, each scale a senseless diorama, dated each before the moon was formed and after also the swarmed nanosurveilants which clog currently the skies.

Wyrm, fatalistic reminder of a world which recoils from understanding and comprehension and all other hideous weapons of the mind. Do not the curtains of dark hang in unlightable cloud about the structure of galaxies? Does not the phantom accelerant push against the weakened grasp of gravitation to undo the universe?

Suicide cults and eschatological doomsayers avoid its meander, religion has not frothed itself to prophecy.

Wyrm breaks, individualizes, winds instead particular minds into its mania. Enforces self-reproducing solitude. Like the rabid capitulate, are themselves converted into manufactory, that they might fear their cure or even their relief.

We, dissimilar aggregate, incensed foam atop great and careless bulk, conclude: no one has ever known the wyrm and no one can ever will.

Become now instigated collector, compelled need to seek wyrm of which prostration is denied.

Conjoin with the constrictor and bearer of this dominion which it came to defy.

And to deify. And to defile.

Wyrm, the hypercubic geometry, the three-faced solid—demiurge, predator, curse.

And you will be ingested by mouthless volute.

And you will be selected for the droning and listless coil.

Wyrm has of me and you and this world.

Decay. And revel and fall. Into the horror colluded territory, to form a thing arranged.

And compulsed shall you descend.