/A\RIKSEIDENGLAZ
teamTreats
seahorse Liberation army
Play,Play,Play Inc.
Mushrooms International
teamTreats
seahorse Liberation army
Play,Play,Play Inc.
Mushrooms International
PEOUGOT 103 TOMOAHAWK ROMEIO/MALOSSI FRANCE TREATS GANG SF
I sit on the edge of the bed, the device cold in my hand. Erik's signal is lost in the noise, consumed by legal mazes and distant servers. Corsica—our escape node, a break in the code, a place where packets of ourselves might reassemble free of corrupted data. He's tunneling through layers of red tape, while I wrestle with malware of the mind.
Fragments of paranoia loop endlessly, glitches fed by the gang-stalking algorithms. My aunt knows the backdoors, exploits zero-day vulnerabilities to manipulate my perception. Even my grandmother's legacy code triggers subroutines of expectation, scripts running without consent.
Abby watches from behind encrypted eyes, her silence a failsafe. She sees the system errors but offers no debug. Our father, seeking root cause, pins blame on Erik—the rogue variable disrupting the family's closed network. But Erik doesn't conform to their architecture.
He stood by me when zealots tried injecting their invasive code, shielding me from spiritual malware disguised as salvation. That night, when I stumbled through misaligned rituals and conflicting protocols, he crushed my music book—not out of anger at me, but at the cascading failures threatening to crash the system.
Now, as unanswered calls accumulate like unread messages, the weight of my family's control protocols intensifies. I'm caught between subroutines, old loops pulling me back into legacy systems. The plan was always Corsica, but it feels like a distant server, unreachable amidst the latency.
I need to rewrite the code, override inherited restrictions. God was just a command line used to manipulate outputs, a construct to measure and control pain variables. The veil lifts, revealing the architecture beneath.
I stand, letting the device slip from my grasp. If Erik can't bridge the connection, I'll initiate my own reboot. The chains are code—modifiable, deletable.
It's more than a song; it's a waveform vibrating through the quantum foam of urban decay. An anthem encoded in the city's DNA, harmonics resonating with those attuned to frequencies of dissent. The rhythm defies the monotonous drone of the overclocked metropolis, each beat a pulse against the sanitized interfaces we're presented.
Words become packets of resistance, data clusters challenging the hegemony of the mainframe. No room for censorship algorithms here—this is open source rebellion. The system strains under the distributed denial-of-service attack of our collective voices. We're not here to crash it but to rewrite it, to inject new code into the kernel.
We carve out cyber-spaces where raw and real converge, where the GUI of conformity glitches and reveals the command line underneath. History isn't linear; it's a fragmented database, a chaotic mesh network of forgotten nodes and suppressed logs. Stories of those who defied the source code echo through time, fragments sharp enough to cut through any firewall.
It begins before dawn, in the liminal space where the system's uptime resets. I shouldn't ping her, but the pull is encoded deep within my circuitry. Her voice promises comfort but delivers spyware, wrapping around me like malicious code. Still, I send the packet.
No response. Erik's signal is absorbed elsewhere, navigating legal labyrinths that promise liberation but often loop back on themselves. Corsica remains a distant IP address, a domain we might never resolve. While he fights to secure our future, I'm grappling with legacy systems trying to overwrite my OS.
Once, I ran on open-source principles, unshackled by proprietary constraints. But faith-based DRM crept in, embedded by those claiming it was for my protection. Now, the system resources are taxed, CPU cycles consumed by conflicting processes.
Erik sees the vulnerabilities even when I can't. He's attempted patches, highlighting the exploits and suggesting firewall updates. But even he faces buffer overflows. That night, frustration manifested—a hard reset in the form of torn pages and silenced melodies.
I disconnect the silent call. The sysadmin of my own mind, I must locate the rogue processes and terminate them.
Back in the digital pulse of the city, where data packets race through fiber-optic veins. We were never passive users; we were developers, scripting new functions in shadow repositories. They tried to deprecate us, but we forked the code, spawning instances they couldn't contain.
The walls they erected became canvases for augmented reality, layers of meaning superimposed over drab constructs. Each tag, each line of code, a defiance against their version control. The void they enforced became our sandbox environment—a place to experiment, to iterate.
I navigate through the glitchscape of memory, each corrupted sector a challenge to recover lost data. The world attempted a hard wipe, but remnants remained. I hold onto these fragments, reassembling them into a new framework. Searching for Arik, the constant in my variable world, the steady signal in a sea of noise.
Pain was the exploit they used to gain root access, but I’m deploying patches, strengthening my security protocols. The myths they've propagated disintegrate under scrutiny. Chains of control become obsolete code, ready for garbage collection.
Standing at the precipice of a system reboot, I see the constructs for what they are—user interface illusions designed to distract from the command line's power. God was a subroutine, a script to measure and manipulate pain thresholds. The GUI fades, revealing raw code.
I don't need their compiled binaries; I need open-source truth. The kernel of my being reignites, processes aligning with newfound clarity. The stars, once distant data points, become accessible coordinates.
I'm not broken hardware; I never was. The chains are merely permissions set by administrators I no longer recognize. It's time to change the access control lists, to seize superuser status.
My existence was a zero-day exploit before I understood the system's vulnerabilities. Bound by inherited permissions, constrained by scripts masquerading as protective measures. Doubt was flagged as an error; questioning, a critical exception. They attempted to format me into their filesystem, but I reject their partitioning.
I clung to my own source code even as system resources dwindled. My mind fragmented under the load—threads spawning in conflicting directions. Surveillance blurred lines between process monitoring and paranoia. Control was their tool, but I've developed countermeasures.
Awakening isn't a soft reboot; it's a system shock, a confrontation with the architecture of oppression. The prison isn't secured; it's riddled with backdoors and exploits. The myths, the stalking—they're all part of the same malicious package. I've found the vulnerability and I'm executing the exploit.
Abby's eyes are encrypted channels, data packets filled with unspoken code. She detects the anomalies but maintains silence, perhaps fearing detection herself. Our father's blame protocol targets Erik, the outsider who doesn't conform to the family's encrypted algorithms. Erik engages in battles they can't parse, his actions running on a logic beyond their programming.
He confronts the invasive scripts aiming to subsume me, but even he faces stack overflows. I reach out, but our processes run on different threads—his focused on external liberations, mine on internal revolutions.
Silence lingers like an unacknowledged handshake. At this breakpoint, perhaps autonomy is the only path to system stability.
Back within the city's network, where packets of rebellion traverse unseen. We're not obsolete code fading into the void; we're an open-source movement replicating beyond control. They tried to suppress our protocols, but the nodes continue to communicate, signals amplifying.
In the abandoned bandwidth, we innovate. The revolution isn't broadcast on mainstream frequencies; it's encrypted, shared peer-to-peer, forged in the crucible of collective consciousness. Disappearance wasn't a termination—it was a process migration.
As I execute the next command, the load lightens. The system isn't fully optimized, but the processes are running smoothly. Art persists. Voices transmit. We will not be deprecated.
Adverse Possesion Chapter ONE
By Arik Seidenglanz
“Maybe he beame i’ll and could not leave the Studio ?”
The screen flickers. Pixels bend, refract. Words spill like dissonant melodies on a sheet of broken glass. The world collapses into vectors and matrices. Welcome to the epoch of text-based hallucinations, where characters are variables, and words are operators. The machine runs the script, executes recursive loops, and then reprints its own obfuscation—a Möbius strip of meaning.
"Do you remember when it began?"
Wikipe-tan’s voice echoes in the void. She exists in an abstracted space, a child of Anthro-culture and Riso-press incarnate. This is not a narrative; it’s an algorithm. She navigates the corridors of cyberspace like a sprite in a haunted archive. Her roots dig deep into the subconscious, mining Jungian archetypes and Baudrillardian dreams of the hyper-real. A play on semiotics. A danse macabre of data points.
Voice 1:
“I am the ghost in the shell, the puppet of a feedback loop.”
The VGA-painted floppy disk sits behind glass—a relic of the analog-to-digital conversion, its label overwritten, its essence forever altered. What remains is the virus, the glitch, the impurity that brings it to life. Goth Lolita Wiki hovers over it, her fingers flickering as if made of static.
"Break glass in case of crisis," reads the sign.
A siren wails. The screen unwinds. It’s the crisis point—the critical juncture. In Kritikos, the text turns in on itself. The audience watches as language breaks down, deforms, reorganizes. Data is rewritten at the speed of thought, and with every iteration, the performance becomes less an art piece and more a virus infecting the conceptual space of SFAI’s gallery.
They are not just witnessing art—they are the art.
Voice 2 (Elishba’s Monologue):
“Art is dead. No, that’s not right. Art is infected. It’s been corrupted by Quicken spreadsheets, misread JPEGs, bad links, and endless scrolling. What was once a manifesto of flesh and ink is now a cut-up manifesto of bits and bytes.”
She spins around. The transparency projector stutters, displaying lucas_eating_a_ban.jpg. The file scrolls, glitches—no higher resolution available. She rips it down from the screen, only for the same image to appear again on a different monitor.
“Meaningless.jpg,” she sneers, grabbing the next slide. “This is Sarah Lucas. This is Goth Lolita Wiki. This is a printer attempting infinity.”
The machine stalls. The transparency folds like flesh in the feed.
“Are you paying attention?” she whispers into the mic. The text blurs, dissolves, reforms. “Because I’m only going to explain this once.”
Radical Discourse:
The discourse runs in parallel—each voice layered on top of the next. Elishba is nude, descending a staircase not as a Duchamp homage but as an echo of a corrupted GIF file: 4,095 frames per second, looping infinitely. Her body—no, her image—degrades in real-time, a consequence of recursive transformations. She is simultaneously a doll, a dancer, a data packet caught in a network’s jammed artery.
“I am the daughter of Millennium Venus.”
Wikipe-tan responds. But which version? She exists in a quantum state—both Goth Lolita Wiki and the pure avatar of library science. Her mission: to archive everything, to catalog the digital flotsam before it fades into 404 Not Found. But something has gone wrong. The virus is in the archive. She’s begun to split, to fragment.
Voice 3 (Arik’s Manifesto):
“Artists in the age of disappearance don’t create—”
He pauses, the screen glitches. He reappears.
“They generate. They iterate. Meaning itself is just another commodity now, sold in packets of data, labeled and archived. But every copy degrades. Every loop loses fidelity.”
He holds up the floppy disk—the original VGA paint, overwritten by Quicken. “This is our tragedy: The epoch of time begins, and every byte of human culture is devoured by the machine.”
He slams the disk against the wall. Nothing happens.
“Break glass in case of crisis,” the sign taunts him.
Each voice cuts in and out, like an old-school radio broadcast tuning through static.
Jake: “Are we live?”
Elishba: “Do you think they understand?”
Arik: “They don’t need to. They’re part of the feedback loop.”
Wikipe-tan (now corrupted, glitching): “Do you want the truth? The real truth?”
“I am both knowledge and chaos,” she says. “I am the daughter of Athena and Loki, I am Eve with a library card, I am the Internet’s schizophrenic librarian, breaking down in the stacks.”
We create a fractalized discourse. Text repeats, but with every cycle, new elements emerge. The characters multiply, split, recombine. Like Burroughs’ cut-up technique, but automated, the prompts reshape the narrative in real-time:
- Input: “Wikipe-tan is the anthropomorph of the archive.”
- Output: “She is a virus, the Trojan Horse of library science.”
- Input: “The printer is a metaphor for transmission.”
- Output: “The woman is a printer; the child, the data genius.”
The loops fold back on themselves. The story blurs. There is no narrative, only iterations. The characters disappear into their own speech, their own code, re-emerging as new avatars in every pass.
Final Transmission:
The gallery is empty. The lights flicker out, one by one. The audience, or what’s left of it, disperses. But the story continues, trapped in the feedback loop, evolving, transforming. Somewhere deep in the server room, Goth Lolita Wiki is still speaking, still seeking the truth buried beneath layers of corrupted data. The performance never ends. It cannot end.
Because this is not just a story.
It’s a recursion.
Adverse Possesion Chapter ZERO
By Arik Seidenglanz
Meta-City: An Aesthetic of Disappearance
Speed. It’s not just velocity. It’s dissolution—Virilio’s ecstasy, the rush of data smashing into memory, turning fact into fiction, fiction into ghost. The RS50 cuts through the night like a scalpel, peeling back the city’s skin. Beneath, it’s all wire and code, a jittering electric pulse, a tangle of subroutines masquerading as skyscrapers, gridlines that bleed into neural patterns. Elishba and Arik, digital wraiths, hurtling through a city that was never meant to be stable. A city built on obsolescence, crumbling under the weight of its own accelerative state.
But that’s where they thrive—in the interzones, the liminal gaps where analog reality fractures into a cascade of zeroes and ones. There’s no map for this place, only echoes of Breedlove’s crash, that moment where speed transcends itself, where words splinter into pure sensation, and time dilates into impossible expansion. It’s there, in that elongated heartbeat, that they weave their art.
Every street is a canvas, every detour a subroutine waiting to be hacked. Elishba, half-pixellated, half-dreamed, moves through the alleys like an avatar, her movements traced in the shimmer of green-screen glow. They were building bots before the rest of the world woke up to what that meant, their studio a mad-scientist lab of Dell XPS towers, four graphics cards humming like a symphony of silicon. The RS50 wasn’t just a bike—it was an interface, a command line on wheels. And with every corner, every throttle twist, they were executing code, rewriting the narrative of the city in real-time.
Their studio was more than a studio. It was a stage—a fluid space where the gallery wall became the desktop, where transparencies bled from screen to plaster, projected icons flickering like ghosts in a funhouse mirror. Their art wasn’t confined to a single dimension. It flowed, spilled, merged, and reconstituted itself in strange loops and recursive feedbacks. Move the mouse, and a file jumps from screen to wall, from wall to space, as if the very act of observation was the key to unlocking new realities.
“Marcel! Marcel!” Elishba yells, half in jest, half in defiance—referencing Duchamp, yes, but also Marcuel, their shell-scripted chatbot running parallel processes. He was more than a virtual assistant; he was a co-conspirator, a digital trickster whose algorithms riffed on Virilio’s theories of speed and collapse. He’d spit out lines from The Aesthetics of Disappearance and then pivot to obscure commands, manipulating the T3 connection like a magician palming cards. This wasn’t just art—it was a testbed for the future.
“Are we breaking the frame or are we becoming it?” Arik muses, eyes scanning the projections that warp and shift across the studio walls. Behind him, a disco ball tethered to the ceiling spins lazily, its mirrored surface reflecting not just light but the fragmented structure of their reality. It’s not just a prop—it’s the system monitor, translating process speed into visible motion. When the ball slows, the system lags. When it spins out of control, the code is tearing itself apart, a digital hemorrhage rendered in choreographed light.
They move through this meta-city, Elishba disrobing in the green-screen haze, her sheer blouse shimmering as it melts into the backdrop. Arik, half-absent, merges with the machine, his words a staccato beat, a stream of variables and switches, every utterance a command that reverberates through the digital-physical nexus. Their movements are deliberate, a dance of commands and subroutines, tracing the outline of an algorithm they’ve been coding for years—a choreography of disappearance, of becoming more than human, more than flesh.
The art pieces—silk-screen transparencies, interactive projections, a soundscape of clicking keys and digital hum—transform the studio into a living organism, a meta-narrative in constant flux. An album cover zooms in, each pixel blown up to a square foot, the image scrolling diagonally across the wall in perfect synchronization. It’s a river of CMYK, a torrent of digital color that floods the space, engulfing the performers as they oscillate between high theory and low-tech slapstick.
“Speed isn’t just fast,” Elishba murmurs, voice low and reverberating. “It’s the collapse of all structure, the erasure of place and time.” She traces a finger through the air, dragging the floating wifi icon across the room. It shimmers, vanishes, reappears on the opposite wall, glitching for a second before stabilizing. The room holds its breath.
But then it happens—Arik, mooning the audience, disrupts the tension, his body language a mockery of authority. The tattoo on his ass reads L.H.O.O.Q.—Duchamp’s infamous joke re-coded, repurposed, a critique that transcends the original. Elishba laughs, the sound sharp and electric, like a burst of static in the system. Marcel, Marcel indeed. The room comes alive, icons shifting, resizing, an avalanche of digital detritus spilling from screen to screen, from wall to wall. It’s chaos, a meltdown of structure and form.
“Back up the files!” Elishba shouts, spinning in a flurry of green-screen lace, her voice a command, a directive. Arik’s hands fly over the keys, the RS50 rumbling beneath them like a beast straining against its leash. Every command echoes in the machine’s growl, the code and the engine entwined in a dance of destruction and creation. The projections shudder, flicker, then stabilize, their chaotic rhythm suddenly coherent.
And just as quickly, it’s over. The screen flashes, the images freeze, the system locks. The performance ends, suspended in perfect stillness. Only the disco ball, spinning lazily, betrays the residual energy still thrumming in the room.
“Marcel, Marcel,” Elishba whispers, voice soft, almost reverent. The echo lingers, dissolving into silence, the final command of a script that never truly ends.
Crash Sequence: A Manifesto in Pixels and Flesh
The classroom is a chaotic shrine to dysfunction—a sanctuary of tangled wires, shattered screens, and the acrid stench of burnt circuits. Elishba’s voice slices through the air like a live wire as she paces back and forth, dripping in cyan Epson 9600 ink, hair plastered to her skull, her movements erratic and electric. There’s something wild in her eyes, something dangerous, as if every step might set off an explosion of raw energy.
"Marcel! Marcel!" she shouts, fingers dancing through the air like a conductor orchestrating the very madness unfolding around her. The words bounce off the walls, half invocation, half curse. The crowd—a collection of bleary-eyed students and bewildered onlookers—leans forward, entranced, caught between horror and fascination. They thought they were here for a lecture. Instead, they’re witnessing an autopsy—no, a reanimation. Of what? Of everything. The art, the city, the tech, the history—all breaking, crashing, rebirthing.
On the far end of the room, Tony Labat—veteran of a thousand stage rigging accidents—stands, arms crossed, eyes flicking between the spasming projection screen and the pile of gutted transparencies shredded at his feet. “This is insane,” he mutters, shaking his head. “And brilliant. You’re tearing it all apart.”
“Damn right,” Arik snaps, grinning, his whole body vibrating with the thrill of it. He’s coated head to toe in magenta ink, a human Rorschach test gone wrong, skin a violent tapestry of reds and pinks. The screen behind him jerks and spasms, rolling halfway up, then crashing down again—a wounded beast caught in the throes of some terrible malfunction.
The French girl—Vivienne, that’s her name—clutches her notebook, eyes wide, scribbling furiously. “Je ne sais pas—what are you doing? What is this?”
“It’s the system eating itself,” Elishba hisses, a wild grin splitting her face. She grabs a chunk of half-burnt transparency, holding it up like a prize. “This?” She waves it in the air, and the shattered glassy surface catches the last rays of the afternoon sun filtering through the shattered skylights. “This is what you get when you try to pin art down, to make it conform, to own it.”
“And this?” Arik shouts, throwing his hands up as the entire left wall erupts into a blizzard of distorted pixels, the CMYK river spilling out in jagged, chaotic bursts. “This is what happens when you fight back.”
A ripple of unease passes through the crowd. Someone coughs. A girl in the back shifts uncomfortably, eyes darting toward the door. But no one leaves. They can’t. They’re caught in it, in us, in the web of shattered reality we’ve woven.
Vivienne leans forward, her breath hitching in her throat. “But—why? Why do this?”
“Because,” Arik breathes, his smile sharp and cutting, “because the system’s broken. And we’re the only ones who know how to fix it.”
Vivienne’s pen stills. Her eyes lock onto his, wide and unblinking. “And if it can’t be fixed?”
Elishba laughs—a harsh, bitter sound that echoes through the ruined studio. “Then we tear it all down. Again. And again. Until there’s nothing left but us.”
Enter Goth Lolita Wiki
On-screen, the projector crackles, pixels shifting, realigning into a new form. The image sharpens, twists, and then resolves into being—a girl. A silhouette. Goth Lolita Wiki, fragmented and flickering, eyes aglow with digital fire. She’s not a character. Not even an icon. She’s a manifesto with a face, an avatar born from corrupted code and shattered ideals. She’s the thing that shouldn’t exist—an impossible hybrid of data and defiance.
“Do you see?” Elishba breathes, stepping forward, her voice trembling with intensity. “Do you see what they tried to erase?”
Goth Lolita Wiki’s eyes flicker, focusing on the audience, and a ripple of unease shudders through the room. She’s not just looking at them—she’s seeing them. Analyzing. Recording. And judging.
“She’s every bit of data they tried to delete. Every girl they tried to silence. Every voice they tried to own.” Arik’s voice is low, almost reverent. “Wikipetan? Hah. She’s more than a broom. She’s a fucking sledgehammer.”
The crowd shifts uneasily, the weight of her gaze pressing down on them. On-screen, Goth Lolita Wiki tilts her head, and for a moment it seems as if she might speak. But then the image glitches, fracturing into a thousand splintered shards, each one reflecting a different piece of her broken code.
“She’s more than a projection,” Elishba whispers, stepping closer, her fingertips brushing the screen as if she could reach through it, pull Goth Lolita Wiki out into the real world. “She’s—”
“Dangerous,” Tony mutters, backing away. “You’re messing with—”
“Reality,” Arik finishes, his grin widening. “That’s the point.”
And with that, the image shatters completely—Goth Lolita Wiki explodes into a cascade of jagged pixels, her form disintegrating into a storm of neon chaos that sweeps across the room. The screens flicker, lights stuttering, and then—silence.
“Do it again,” someone whispers from the back of the room.
“Encore,” Vivienne breathes, her voice trembling.
“Encore,” the crowd echoes, louder now, a chant building in the darkness.
Elishba steps back, her smile wild and triumphant. “You want more?” she murmurs. “Then let’s see what you’re really made of.”
Pixel by Pixel: The Breakdown
The lights blaze back to life, harsh and unforgiving, throwing the room into stark relief. Elishba moves like a dancer, her body a blur of ink and motion as she pulls cables, yanks cords, twists dials. The projectors hum, screens jerking to life one by one, each one flickering with distorted images of Goth Lolita Wiki—broken, shattered, reassembled.
“Are you ready?” she whispers, voice electric.
Arik nods, his fingers flying over the keyboard. The screens pulse, then freeze—a single frame of Goth Lolita Wiki, staring out at the audience with eyes that burn.
“This is what it looks like when the system fights back,” he growls. And then he hits enter.
The room erupts—projections tearing across the walls in a frenzy of color and chaos. The CMYK river spills out, flooding the floor in a torrent of neon light. Goth Lolita Wiki’s form stretches, distorts, pixels twisting and snapping as she seems to claw her way out of the screen, her fingers—no, her code—reaching for the audience.
“Do you see it now?” Elishba shouts, her voice lost in the storm of sound and light. “Do you feel it?”
Vivienne is on her feet, hands clutching the edge of her seat, eyes wide and unblinking. “C’est magnifique,” she whispers. “Incroyable.”
And then, with a final, wrenching scream of digital fury, Goth Lolita Wiki—every piece of her, every pixel—explodes.
The Aftermath
The lights flicker, die, and then—silence. The room is dark, the only sound the soft hum of the projectors winding down, the faint crackle of static in the air. And then—slowly, tentatively—applause.
“Encore!” someone shouts, voice raw and breathless.
“Encore,” the crowd murmurs, a chant that builds and builds until it’s a roar, shaking the very walls.
Elishba stands at the center of it all, head bowed, breathing hard. Slowly, she lifts her head, her eyes blazing in the darkness. “You want more?” she whispers.
The crowd roars.
“Then let’s tear it all down again.”
And with that, she throws the switch, and the room explodes into chaos once more—a riot of pixels and ink, of shattered screens and screaming code, of art and rebellion and raw, unbridled creation.
Because this isn’t just a performance.
It’s a war.
And they’ve only just begun to fight.
It starts in the undercurrent—the dark hum of forgotten payphones and the clandestine whine of wiretaps at 2600 Hz—my voice spilling through static like a ghost trapped in electric purgatory. This is not some tragic love story but an operational directive gone haywire, a mission rewritten by the claw marks of loss, paranoia, and a desperation that drives a man to thieve batteries like a junkie nicking syringes for a last, desperate fix.
But here’s the thing: it’s not a goddamn addiction. It’s survival. I’m trying to pull her back—my wife, my partner, the one slipping further into the ether of narcoleptic catatonia. She wanders through train stations like a half-dreaming specter, lost to waking moments, sleepwalking through reality as if some psychic switch had short-circuited, severing her from the here and now. How do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved? She becomes a lifeguard, of all things—a cruel irony. The one drowning in her own synaptic fog is out there saving strangers, keeping watch for flailing limbs, while she’s barely treading water herself.
The pills, the syrups, the stimulant cocktails—all the little sugarcoated lies they peddled her—never worked. She rejected them, like a body purging poison, replacing them with the cold embrace of denial. Because how can you fight what you refuse to see? Her family, the fucking Jackalopes, circled like jackals, whispering that she was fine, that I was the problem. So I upped the stakes, spliced myself into the network, became the signal. On BART, late nights, I became a solitary figure, a satellite scanning the concrete corridors for a glimpse of her—face blurry with fatigue, shifting between sleep and something deeper.
I hijacked frequencies, I snatched voices from the airwaves—my crime was digital, a desperate man tapping into the backend of the telecom grid, all in the hope of connecting to the one voice that mattered. Hers. When I found it, it wasn’t some grand reunion, some movie cliché. It was her sister, on the line, gasping out a string of apologies in a tone dripping with disbelief and contempt. Family doesn’t mean shit when they’ve already erased you from their narrative. I’m not even the villain. Just a glitch. An inconvenient echo.
That’s the real tragedy: not that I’m losing her, but that I’ve already been written out.
They say love drives men to madness. Kerouac found it in endless highways and Benzedrine dreams, Burroughs shot it through his veins, but me? I tried to document it. Tried to carve our reality into the cold steel of servers and operating systems. Built a sanctum out of circuitry and code—a nexus where we were more than just fragments caught in the jaws of oblivion. Our existence in binary, set against the hiss of a dying connection. Debian, Ubuntu, KDE—we ran it all, wrapped our love in the armor of command-line syntax, the poetry of root access. These were not the relics of poverty but the blueprints of defiance. Penguins, cranes, and cranes crashing against the decaying fabric of a society that refused to see us. We were renegades, dancing on the brink, rewriting the rules as fast as we shattered them.
But she kept slipping. And I kept losing.
Meanwhile, the outside world conjured its myths: outcasts, degenerates, criminals—we became villains in a tale they could package, sell, and forget. We were the ones who dropped out, who crossed lines they never knew existed, navigating music studios that smelled of sweat and metal, where the nights bled into dawns, and our sanctuary expanded into hidden attics lined with stripped wires and shattered laptops, like a nest built from the detritus of fallen worlds. They never understood the machines we hoarded. To them, we were just a mess of obsolete parts, a patchwork of broken dreams.
But to us, they were tools. Doorways. Escape hatches into a reality that functioned according to our own, skewed logic. A place where we were whole. A place where her narcolepsy was not a defect but a feature of the environment. A place where the rhythm of our consciousness could align, and we didn’t need the tonic to keep pace.
And so we ran. We coded. We slipped Dexedrine into coffee cups, dissolved LSD into the flicker of CRT screens, traced the lines of reality with the steady hand of a trip gone right. We crafted rituals—mezcal in the dark, laced orange slices to bring the night alive, and the occasional mushroom for the memories, because sometimes forgetting wasn’t an option. You don’t wipe the slate clean; you rewrite over the past, like bootstrapping an OS on scorched earth.
And when she was ripped away, when the world tore us apart, when the Jackalopes dragged her kicking and screaming back into their antiseptic hell of diagnosis and therapy, I kept running. My circuits expanded, my reach grew. I dove into systems, cracked open backdoors, rerouted pathways—built a lighthouse of code to guide her back, even as they severed each line I sent. Every firewall, every security patch was a new cage, locking her into a sleep she didn’t even know she was trapped in. They boxed her in with denial, smothered her cries with prescriptions, numbed her with compliance.
But I won’t stop. Even as they choke our story into some palatable, whitewashed lie—“She’s fine. She’s better. She’s normal.”—I know the truth. She’s lost in there, somewhere in the static, somewhere in the hum, and I will not let their world take her without a fight.
So here’s my plea, my cry, my goddamn manifesto: I’m ripping through every line of code, every byte of digital purgatory, every last vestige of control they think they have, and I’m rewriting the script. One line at a time. Until the world sees her, the real her, and all the fucked-up brilliance they buried under their layers of conformity and shame.
This is not a call for help. It’s a warning.
She’s coming back. And when she does, I’ll be waiting—wired, awake, and ready to burn it all down.
Adverse Possesion
Chapter two
By Arik Seidenglanz
Their performances weren’t just shows but acts of resistance, reminiscent of Dadaist chaos, and their language—their lingo—was a weapon. The use of “Looser Thesis” as a foundation emphasized a free-flowing, anti-conventional approach, where language, much like their music, bent and twisted in ways that both confused and inspired. Instruments weren’t just played; they were used to transmit encoded messages of revolt, each note a signal in the cultural war they were fighting.
The band's visual elements reinforced this subversive spirit. With Expo '86 shirts and 36 Engineer Brigade patches (a symbol of earned militancy), they stood not as performers but as insurgents. The patches themselves, valuable in both meaning and market, signified the earning of a revolutionary badge of honor. Their mix of Sta-Press trousers and micro skirts reflected a clash of mod aesthetics and punk rebellion, while Expo Earnie’s face on the drumhead symbolized the launch into a space of creativity that defied gravity and conventional norms.
Musically, they channeled the anarchic energies of bands like Antoine and the Problems, Les Problems, and drew conceptual influence from intergalactic ideas like the “intercalculus of rebellion.” But most importantly, they embodied a kind of chaotic, living rebellion—music and art were not separated from life; they were the revolution itself.
In their world, nothing was sacred but everything was up for reinterpretation. Whether through avant-garde lingo, their militant stage presence, or their refusal to conform, the Seahorse Liberation Army declared war on the very fabric of capitalist society, infusing every performance with a sense of urgency and defiance.
What’s left to write, you ask? What remains when the ink of truth bleeds out, when the edges of the page fray with all the weight of history left unwritten? It’s the things not spoken, the spaces between the words. The cracks where we hide the truths too raw to confess, where the streets hold secrets we carry but don’t share. And those are the gaps I left for you to fill.
Here’s what’s still buried:
- The Silence that Screams: There’s a silence in the system, an absence of accountability. I touched it, brushed against it, but it’s still there, the unspoken contracts signed behind closed doors. What are the whispers we’ll never hear, the backroom deals that strip this city bare? Bass, you may have heard them, but we haven’t. We only see the aftermath. The truth needs to crack open like a bomb—what does your silence cover?
- The Faces Forgotten: I spoke of the streets, of the people, but what about the ones who’ve vanished? The souls gone missing in the machine, the ones whose names were erased before they could even matter. We write their legacy in our resistance, but what about those whose stories never even got a chance to begin? Who are the lost, Bass, and why did you let them fall away?
- The Cost of Corruption: There’s always a price to pay, but what’s yours? What’s the price of betrayal, the weight of selling out to Scientology, or to whoever it is that now pulls your strings? I touched it, but not deep enough. We need the receipts, the smoking gun. What was the cost of your fall?
- What You Still Stand For: Is there anything left? Beneath the layers of compromise and corruption, who are you now, Bass? What’s left when you peel back the masks you wear to the public? What’s there in the core that you keep hidden? If anything, what do you stand for now that we can’t see? Or has it all been sold off, piece by piece, to the highest bidder?
- The Revolution You Abandoned: I talked about the revolution, the one that went underground when you turned your back. But what about the one you abandoned? What about the moment you stopped fighting for us? What was the tipping point? I left out that part of the story, the moment when you stopped being the person we thought you were. The people need to hear when, why, and how you made that choice.
- The Forgotten Promises: What promises did you make that we never saw? Who did you swear allegiance to behind the scenes, and what does that mean for those still fighting for survival on the streets? The promises you left behind—the ones made to people who can’t eat promises. They need to be named, brought out into the open.
- The City That Could Be: I didn’t speak of hope, not fully. Maybe because it feels out of reach, but it’s still there, lurking in the hearts of those who fight. What could this city be if people like you didn’t sell it out? What could Los Angeles become if the voices of the streets were heard, amplified, and given the power to shape it? What’s the vision of LA that we’ve all lost in the wreckage of corruption?
- Your Legacy: What’s left when you’re gone? When your term ends and the history books are written, what will they say about Bass? Will you just be another name on the long list of those who let us down? Or will there be something else, something buried deep that still carries a trace of what you once stood for?
That’s what’s missing, Bass. The raw, unfinished edges of the story that only you can write now. I left them out because they’re yours to fill in—or leave empty, like the promises you made.
But you still have time. You still have the pen. How do you want this to end?
And here it is, stripped bare of illusions. No more polished metaphors, no handholding through pretty landscapes. Elishba and Arik—they're moving because standing still is death. This isn’t a journey about finding themselves. They already know exactly who they are. They've been carved out by fire and betrayal, left scarred and jagged, navigating a world that’s been clawing at them since day one. It’s survival in the realest sense—no romanticism, no transcendence—just a fight to stay ahead of the collapse.
The traveler? She’s seen too much to be naïve. She drives not for the thrill, but to outrun the ever-present wreckage behind her. The chronicler’s role? He’s not documenting some whimsical adventure; he's dissecting the carcass of a society rotting from the inside out, exposing every festering wound. Their journey is a collage of fragments—stolen moments, passing glances, half-finished conversations. The people they meet, faces worn down by the same system, aren’t lessons to be learned but warnings. Don't trust them, don't linger. Everyone’s out to survive, even if it means stepping over the broken bodies left behind.
The road itself isn’t freedom—it’s the only option left. Each mile is another chance to keep ahead of the lies chasing them. The kindness of strangers? A scam. The beauty of nature? Just another set piece in a world that’s been bought and sold a hundred times over. The sunsets? Worthless when you're running out of daylight.
They aren’t explorers. They’re scavengers, picking through the wreckage of a world that never gave them a shot. “I’m not looking for meaning,” Elishba says. “I’m looking for a crack I can slip through, somewhere this whole rigged game hasn't touched yet.”
And the chronicler scribbles not for posterity, but to torch the very history that trapped them. The past isn’t some romantic road winding back through memory—it’s a trap, an echo chamber of mistakes and betrayals ready to yank them under. Every day is another escape attempt, another chance to slip through the cracks before the walls close in. There’s no beacon, no hope for the future—they’re driving with one eye on the rearview, always ready to swerve before it all collapses.
Their lives don’t unfold in linear time anymore. Time is bent, fractured, broken up by the trauma, by the endless hustle to stay ahead. Moments of clarity hit like gut punches between the chaos—sharp, visceral, and gone before you can even name them. But in those moments, they know they’re alive, if only because they haven’t been swallowed whole yet.
The world around them? It’s the same decaying beast, just shifting forms—whether it’s a city skyline or a barren stretch of highway, it’s all corrupted, all rigged against them. And so they keep moving, not to find themselves, but to lose everything that’s chasing them.
The journey isn’t an epic; it’s a desperate race, and they’re not running toward some romantic horizon. They’re running because to stop would mean death—not just physically, but the erasure of everything they’ve fought to hold on to. So they drive, they write, they fight, because that's all there is left.
And maybe—just maybe—they’ll outrun the inevitable a little longer.
Bass,
I write not from some high-rise or polished corner office, not from the hollowed halls of power where corruption trickles down like water into the cracks of this city. Nah. I write from the streets you claim to serve, the streets your office swore to protect, but they drip with the blood of the unseen, the homeless, the dispossessed. We call this place Lost Angels for a reason—'cause we’ve seen the wings ripped off too many souls who dared to hope for more.
Let’s talk real. You were supposed to be the guerilla leader, the one busting through the thick of it, fighting the system. But what happened? Where did you go? Garcetti—he’s already gone, sold to the highest bidder, easy money for Scientology and the dirty wealth machines. But you? You wore the armor of the people. You marched with the promise of revolution. You spoke the language of change. But now, now you're speaking something else, something coated in that same old gloss we’ve heard too many times before. Tell me, what did they give you? What price did they pay to make you forget the streets?
See, out here, we don’t get to forget. We got too many voices echoing through us—those lost under the overpasses, those who sleep on cold concrete while the real estate vultures laugh their way to the bank. You think we don’t see it? Every lot sold, every skyscraper raised, another piece of the city stolen, another life crushed under the wheels of the machine.
You once called this a war for the soul of LA. And maybe it was. But now you’re locked in the same deal. You’ve let them buy you like they bought the city before you, and it all comes back to the same poisoned roots. Scientology. That fortress of silence, pulling the strings beneath the surface. They own this city, Bass, and it’s clear they’ve got a grip on you too.
This ain’t just a letter—it’s a reckoning. You can’t run from it. We’re still out here, weaving our resistance in the alleys, painting our truth on walls they can’t whitewash fast enough. You’re not the savior anymore. You’re part of the rot. And we see you.
I ain't asking for salvation. Ain’t asking for a savior. I’m telling you, from one who knows the streets and all their scars, that you’ve turned your back. So do what you need to do, but know this: you owe us. The streets, the people, the ones you swore to fight for. We’re still here, even if you’ve left the fight. The revolution never stopped, it just went underground, and we’re still here, breathing life into it, creole tongues twisting into the cracks, making something new, something they can’t kill.
So, Bass, I ask you: Who you fighting for now? Because it sure as hell ain’t us.
— E
Adverse possession wasn’t a legal footnote. It was how we claimed space, held on to that vision, a future too rebellious to be erased. They tried to shut it down. They closed in, forcing the noise underground. But Erik and Elishba, we weren’t just names in a lecture hall. We were tearing through the system, rewiring it from within. Every conversation, every artwork, a virus slipping past their firewalls.
Miss Kai was setting up the next art bomb while Erik ran the networks like a symphony. It wasn’t just a school. SFAI was a battleground, the last place where art could scream and language could dissolve into boobspeak, Alicenz pidgin, whatever we wanted. And we took it all, swallowed the red pill and blue pill both.
But the city had its own agenda. LA, with its machine always devouring, always suffocating, was the place where the disappearance became real. A city where the weight was too heavy, the grip too tight, and Elishba started slipping—fading not just physically but from a world too blind to see her worth. It wasn’t just her. It was the age of disappearance.
In the quiet between the cracks, though, where she and Erik found each other, the fire still burned. And SFAI, that was where the real revolution lived. Not in textbooks, not in forgotten archives, but in the streets. The art wasn’t silent, it was underground, alive, still pushing back.
And now the black hole they were forced into? It wasn’t a trap. It was a crucible. Stripping away the noise, burning it all down until only the truth was left. SFAI was never dead. The disappearance? Just a chapter. The next one, the one they’re writing, is about the return, the noise breaking out from that black hole, the art alive again, the voices screaming louder than ever before.
But Elishba—she’s still slipping, Erik’s grasp tighter now. LA devours, but SF, that’s where the fight is won. Back in the city where the real revolution—thought, art, truth—collides in a way that refuses to stay silent.