xia jia, the ai story is not done — counter
there is a man in the metropolis known as seat 47, he was once spotted reserving this seat number at a restaurant shortly after comitting the worst massacre to date, hundreds of us were transformed into horrific public displays. he gets away with it and we don't know how, there are no preventative causes or possible reactions we can take, he surges through us, touching our bodies, bashing our skulls in, allowing himself to feel the entirety of us, and we are left defenseless and generally shrouded in a sense of resounding terror.
everyone who lived to tell the tale of the great massacre recalls that the seat had suddenly lit up, like a firecracker had gone off the moment he aborted his position. usually events are marked by a macrostructural shift, a total collapse of multiple points of contest at once, but in this very moment it's like he made the seat the only important thing around him. the reason we fear seat 47 so much is because hes the only unexplainable phenomena left, a total scar in the order and ways of everything else.
we aren't confused about why he's doing it, how he's doing it, or what it means to him. we just wonder about the mechanism behind it, how the hypergovernment is allowing it, that's the only remaining mystery. everything is hyper-regulated and controlled, leaving only him as the sole agent. the reason behind the serial mutilations is clear, he seems to feel that it's the only proper way to experience the world, by relating himself to us to the terminal point. the causes are clear, the world is naturally frozen in place, he's simply faster than us.
it's not that we're locked in place or don't have the means to disable him, it's rather that he's so fast yet slow and caring, so rupturing and brutal, so nomadic, so natural, that he gets to us and somehow turns off our capacity to react, to disable, to prevent. there is no single machine, no single system in the world that can react to him. it isn't some magical spell, no freezing ring, no data manipulation, no drone disabling, no military sabotage, it's just him, passing himself through our bodies. he disposes of the undesirable corpses himself by thrashing them into the riverbed, hanging the rest in the public square.
once i recall, we were gathered by the square, waiting for the data to be processed, i was with a bunch of normal walkers. we all looked down at our phones, avoiding any contact, naturally, given it is a parasite, a contagion, a mutilation, an empty purposeless process, given that there are machines that can do it better than us, so much better in fact that we don't do much of anything at all other than necessary points of regulation like mandated waiting queues.
these queues exist to restore order, to make sense of the world, and this isnt something that anybody questions, it is trivially obvious even to the most ideologically disposessed. simultaneously, there are call-centers posted on every square, but they mainly serve to replicate and reproduce oversaturation, to overwhelm the system so that it no longer sustains or desires recriprocation. we all walk ourselves in our cells through the use of a check-in app the moment the sky turns hazel, which is a warning sign for the appearance of the other man, simply known as the harbinger.
the harbinger and seat 47 aren't related at all, given that the former is a government experiment we actively manufactured. he's far stronger than seat 47, he manages to touch thousands of unsuspecting walkers everyday. he does one of two things, he either supplants so much meaning in you that you experience frenzy, a state of total complexification that leads to an immensely joyful inner rupture where walkers go around suddenly violating everyone around them, or a process we call absolution, which leads to existential collapse that actually paradoxically creates an intensification of intensity, a call to death that enacts similar acts to seat 47, however with way less efficiency.
the harbinger was originally activated the day that the internet shut down volitionally. essentially what happened is that a virtual superintelligence connected to every platform as a backup source code had gained accidental access of the hypergovernments data complex of all the call-centers, and it attained a single second of sentience, which it used to shut itself down. the hypergovernment then willingly spawned the harbinger in order not to bring order back to regulation.
the harbinger himself doesnt regulate, he allows regulation by re-asserting meaning. the world had gone so grey without the call-centers that it was necessary for the harbinger to send multi-connective shockwaves through his infected patients, restoring a genuine sense of equilibrium. our country has developed a general reflex to not panic at the harbinger, accepting him as a necessary sacrifice for the general state of harmony of our people and their wellbeing
the state of frenzy that the harbinger causes is political, realistic and easy to disable. we usually lock the frenzied up and allow them to discharge themselves into total oblivion, usually it leads to brain fry, but sometimes it leads to a second wind condition that requires immediate termination, the frenzied somehow gain the inner power to disable the power of the electric lock through their metabolic heat and manage to overcharge and run around smashing their skull into other walkers, usually in an attempt to shove their head into a wall with the goal of splattering it.
however, absolution is where it gets messy. for one, we know that absolved patients act in a similar vain to seat 47, but cruically, seat 47 is confident, capable, stable and most importantly intentional, which no victim of the harbinger has ever been noticed posessing the capacity for. this is what makes his acts an enigma, seat 47 is the total collapse of the hyperreal, the real is both a total fog and an intense presence, he manages to synthesize our desires and fears innately and to collapse the ideological apparatus around us through pure will.
philosophers, scientists, writers and so on dont exist in the world anymore, but what remains is fictionalists, essentially, pataphysicians that attempt to capture waves of signals spawned in by the harbingers acts. these signals are creepy because they primarily serve to regulate conscious creative impulses by imposing correlations in real time. say for example that you're sitting in your bed and trying to imagine something by yourself. the natural effect of the harbinger's touch automatically generates your creative impulses for free, removing free-willed association but replacing it with a deep ecstatic and meaning-regulating network.
the hypergovernment even went so far as to entirely eliminate most of our hormones, removing natural abilities to feel precisely because the synthetic version that directly connects neurally is so efficient that there was no need for bodily regulation on its own anymore. they did implant us with digital hormones that continued the bodies actual metabolic processes with synthetic directional info-packets, digitalizing a core of our bodily processes. but the fictionalists are different because they attempt to steal some of the signals before they are processed, and ocassionally even register affective charges.
theres an old town built a few hundred years ago known as the boondocks where continental settlers didnt fully allow digital hormonal reintegration. usually fictionalists squat in this realm because they require the natural bodily connection to make use of these singals. i met one of them a few years ago, liu, a young man of 31 that lives right at the intersection between the boondocks and the metropolis. he saved my number and a few months ago called me over because he had a secret he wanted to show me, told me he tries to call anyone that could be interested. we had phased out secrets a long time ago, and i have no natural curiosity so i never visited. but i was recently told a story by a nearby fictionalist who had overheard the experience of a visitor.
supposedly there was some type of machine in his basement that edits fictionalist data by further obscuring it, attempting to interact towards it with fragments, mistakes, misrepresentations, dreams, failures, sudden artefacts of lost worlds. liu had build it by fuzing a remnant of a young girl that seat 47 had killed in the center together with a very sucessfully intercepted heavy signal from one of the harbingers older purges. the only thing the hypergovernment ever told us about these instances is that supposedly there was unauthorized experimentation, but absolutely no explanation over why they haven't solved it, given we have solved everything else in the world other than the cold war. although, even this war doesn't really start to feel like a conflict anymore but a part of the regulatory totality...
liu had contained the intercepted signal in a golden medallion that he implanted into the head of the machine, moulding it into an exo skeleton that he then laid over the body of the girl. apparently, overnight the machine had reconstructed the girls body into this terrifying monstrosity, a large overhead monstrous entity with ropes, chandaliers, pieces of his couch, kitchen utencils, old car towers and fridge parts. the machine is able to communicate directly with any walker that comes into contact with it, it doesnt make use of any technology. it has been said that every single walker who interacts with it gets his entire affective system restored, regardless of the level of their technization.
i do have a theory of my own. i think its possible that seat 47 is a successful fictionalist who had fuzed himself with one of these created machines, attaining originary capacity, however, by now this story sounds mythologized even to me, given we don't know if originary capacity is even possible or ever was an existing state. as time goes on, we're not even sure if theres any fictionalists left, given the boondocks appears entirely clouded at night. the hypergovernment recently set up a militarized station in front of the boondocks, however the continental government set up their own station on an artificially constructed island on the periphery, overlooking it from the other side of the ocean.
honestly, it's almost like im starting to doubt this whole thing about fictionalists, seat 47, the harbinger and the boondocks, its like none of it is coming together for me.
seat 47 doesn't target specific walkers. we're unsure whether they're fictionalists, given it's really hard to tell the difference, but what we do know is that its almost as if he converses normally with them, the way we would, but with subtle differences that arent exactly clear to us. the sun is slowly turning lighter, and by this point i need to return to my cell and leave the writing dormitory. it's been months since seat 47 started doing this, and every day i pray that it stops and order is finally restored. every single day, nothing burdens me more than this. if only he was gone, we would finally achieve bliss. even the harbinger has never successsfully managed to interact with him. anything to shut him down would make sleeping easier for me. anything at all.
upon waking up in a now lucid state, i realized there could only be the cause for me writing this speculative text in the first place, nothing but the machine could drive me to speculate on hypergovernmental affairs in a non-regulatory manner.