Trapped.

If there was one word that described the hand at my throat, the thought banging against our skull every waking hour, the sensation hanging in the air all around us like a noxious gas with nowhere to dissipate, it was –

it is only

TRAPPED.

Nowhere is safe. There is no way out and nowhere to go.

No foodsafe produce to fill us, no clean water to slake our thirst. No friend, governing body, or person in power to offer sanctuary. No crumb of comfort to sooth us or kinship to occupy our days. No understanding of the depths we have fallen from those still spinning in service to the machine – however non-compliant. No band to join in rebellion. No third place, no second place, no first house. No community. No stage or pulpit to offload the ever growing sense of dread and rage.

No honest trade of skill for coin that will pay for home or hearth to guard from the raging of this storm that had so long ago began, but cannot be named. Because naming it would require a solution to be presented and each day that passes there are less and less that dare to seek to carry the weight of the knowing.

It is only – trapped.
Trapped.
Trapped.

We are all trapped.

Every day a new psyche-breaking solution-less equation to add to the stack of ever growing unsolvable problems without end. Oh, Pythagoras, how simple it had been. Good world fallacy they once called it. Oh, how foolish we were.

Even those who had witnessed it with their own eyes would not dare speak the truth of the scars they saw writ upon our body. Those lives that ran parallel to the memory had the concept of truth and justice beaten out of them long ago.
No one to listen. There was no longer any point to struggling – to seeking.

“Handle it internally,” the oath breaker had said to the pigs on the last day we reached out for sympathy in the land of so-called progress.

No ones or wheres to turn except the screaming pockets of our own cursed dread hole of a mind. Just senseless, heaping wells of grief, spurting out in every direction with no means of stopping. No way of righting the ship, no sea left to sail. The machines and their masters had already won – there was no point in humanity. No point in pretending otherwise. It would always and be isolation. A mask forever sown over the rotting flesh of what could have been. We were truly foolish to think there would be a single soul that would come to our aid after our own blood had sold us out so thoroughly and gleefully from the start. “Love” and “hope” were truly the worst thing that ever happened to us.

The only solution was death or demanolotry. To build an inversion of their god. A beast capable of pouring the ceaseless primal scream into the ever widening, deepening flowing crevice of unhope.

There was no successful means of continuing we could see to replicate in the waking world, outside the dissociation of sleep or the most dire methods of numbing.

Our hands had long ago stopped connecting to our third eye and the walls of sound we had once pounded against the inside of our skulls to drowned out the screaming offered no solace now. Even if we could find safe harbor to power the tiny devices, which grew ever fewer in the increasingly hostile liminal landscape that sprawled before us. The sound baths no longer worked as they once had. The flock and the so-called Children of God had taken everything. Our housing, our companion animal, our hands, our ears, our vision, our mind’s eye, our privacy, the comfort of our own skin. Everything we were and could ever hope to be.

None had the courage or the coin to shatter the walls that squeezed us ever tighter. Choked us, like the gas that crippled us years ago – too expired for use upon foreign adversaries. The type of hell only reserved for your own disobedient flesh and blood. No safe harbor for the countrymen who dare struggle against the godking. The airwaves rang out the poison of the demiurge anew each hour – easily provable lies with no clear objector. Repeated over and over again until they made them true. Or worse yet – a joke for the elite on the other side of the same coin to smugly guffaw at. Ensuring that the machine both sides were invested in continued to run at a pace to quickly for the masses to comprehend.

Someone once said, “it is only when the boot is upon your own neck that you will truly begin to struggle.” We lost count, as surely many before us had done, of the days we wondered: how many more boots? How many more necks?

Each new day another fresh hell of twenty four meaningly eternities to scrape what used to be our bones across the sun. Trapped in status, like the voices in the boxes we once clung to. Oh, how we once wished that we could separate our vibrating mind from the rotting corpse we could feel decaying around us to join those voices. We imagined that life would be simpler if we could rend our soul asunder and flee our fleshy prison. To exist as waves of sound like the talking heads inside those tiny boxes, on the other side of those colorful screens.

But, as it stands there was no escape. No way to go back and no way to imagine a forward. No plan for anything outside survival of the shell. Now and forever – trapped. Falling without end in the great experiment, which none had the means, the spine, or spirit to stop. How would we find an exit from this maze if we could not even acknowledge the walls that were closing in around us? I hope my end comes swiftly, as I do not possess the heart to continue waiting for the beginning.

The world had broken open the pandora’s box, the chaos gate, without a thought for the consciousnesses that it may shatter. How many souls must they feed into the wretched machines? How many must we watch fall? What value was placed on the silencing of the horde that all at the top would fall in line so easily? A panopticon of surveillance, trauma porn, and boring, unfeeling corporate flattening. The twenty first century alchemist stone. For what?

Trapped. Trapped Trapped.

The past called to the complex and there we were spun as we diminished. Sleepless, drowning, endlessly falling down the spiraling pathways of what used to be our own minds. Chopped up into eight second sound bites. We searched for the comfort of nostalgia – a grain of truth in the flowing sand of the hourglass that drained ever down, down, down. Where is rock bottom in this ceaseless pit? Each time we thought we reached the end the great well spun us up and spit us back down a new tunnel. A joke making mockery of itself. Thrust up, down, sideways – down another twisting, shifting, wormhole of unlogic. With no way to even point to the most minuscule of shared truths or lights for the tunneling.

Where would it end? When would it end? How could it end?

The lucky ones let themselves be taken by the flux of it. Lulling into eternal sleep, endless intoxication, and frivolous wastes of time. Perhaps they had reasoned someone else would solve the puzzle. Do the work they could no longer wrap their senses around after the breaking of everything there once was – that would ever be. Perhaps they had simply given up. Holding on to logic was too painful. We could not fault them for that. We wish only for the end, so we no longer have to witness it. Sitting idly by, hiding for safety feels worse. Bring us the end. Please let it end.

When we had a spine we took to struggling – only to be dashed again and again into the sharpest of stones. Alone. Finding every port closed. Every agency once touted as sanctuary or safe passage is already gone. There is nowhere to tether. None to call upon – none to process with or even to speak to for a moments’ comfort. Again and again we flung our tired bones upon the rocky shore until it was seen that we could never get up again.

There was a time where those who were not yet taken by the primal scream took to whispering tales of revolt. Hidden warriors and wizards that had somehow found purchase at the edges of space and time. We imagined cracks in the walls of the pit where small bands could take to hiding from the ever watching eyes of the machines. Though, we knew they were and always had been a lie. Existing only in our own pockmarked cortexes. Your best friend and your truest love will abandon you to save their own skin. Promises are just words at the end of the day.

Once we drew with our third eye a great cthonic cepholopod, a god of our own we took to feeding, for the few of us left weaving. It was called Pain Eater. We imagined this ageless beast shielded us from all pain, as the demons of our youth had seen to shielding us in the early years of the cult. A siphonophoric beast of our own infernal legend, who took to swallowing the pain and chaos deep inside itself. It was to birth hope anew after the great unraveling we could not bare to hold within ourselves had ended. The cult stole it from us, and so we released it. Tainted its’ power, to curse those who stole it, so that it could not be used against us. For any serious notion of belief that was not approved of by the machines was surely a one way ticket to the stocks once more or another hasty dashing upon those sharp rocks where the cult and its’ wealthy godkings threw those that dare possess a thought that did not mirror their own.

There are few thoughts left among the conscious now. For we count even the name of that great beast – a horror meant to contain the flood – as one of the fallen now. It’s hulking form shifted, made sick with the unshakable grief of the sheer number of evidence tallied and advocates brought low. The case was cut and dry. Dry as the dead weeds that had once tumbled themselves unto the wire fences round the stables of our upbringing.

To hope has become itself a new blasphemy. There is no way out and the sooner we all accepted it – the death of that dream once promised, what once was and what could have been – the sooner we will emerge from the other side of the pit as something able to contain the flood ourselves.

There is no more point in struggling. No more purpose in imaging an end to the pain so orchestrated, so systemic, so profitable. Only acceptance that nothing and no one would save us will do. Only in complete and utter surrender would we find an end. Not an end to suffering, but an end to the folly of hope. We must make ourselves a new unbeing. Become the void untethered. To absorb the pain as the eater once had.

The gods are dead – if they ever existed at all. All those who do not take to serving the machines will be made example of. Rolling, rolling, rolling, like those dead weeds upon the fences. We have as much agency as the wind grants us, which is to say – none at all. Just another glitch in the machine the elite had built to house their new, unfeeling everything and nothing. Gobbling up every resource in the world at the expense of our country, our planet, our species, our timeline. The entirety of humanity past, present, and future rendered utterly meaningless with the stroke of a key, for the profit of the dwindling few.

Someday the hum will come for me, for us, and from the reverberating dark a new nightmare will emerge. To the aversion of all. My only hope is that one day I could be rendered so disgusting as to stop their prying eyes from turning towards my wretched form. For when it began they told me the torture was too entertaining, to profitable, to stop.

Now was as good of time as any to get to the point.
I seek no pity, for I am beyond hope. Make me inhuman.

Awake ye devils. The time of heroes has ended, the age of horrors is neigh.