BIG BANGING BLACK HOLES: chptr 1

The beginning was the end

Of everything

Now

—DEVO

Tearing through the atmosphere as instantaneous as lapsed time, the Singularity merged with Diocletian’s massacred virgins. With one powerful pull of its gigantic black wings, it accelerated through the dense spider-webbed electric storm up into the stratosphere, bursting through the anvil cloud into the eternal darkness forever hidden from the storm-ravaged town of Saint-Genis-Pouilly.

At maximum speed, it folded its wings close to its circular segmented body and dove, spiraling out of the sky, a thunderbolt of abominated antimatter plummeting from the heavens as if hurled by a hackneyed and digitized Zeus. The last split-second before impact, the Singularity, spawned of a singularity, extended its black wings to escape the proton beam and traced the rolling waves gracefully as a stingray traces the ocean floor.

Blind, it navigated by extrasensory feel, the earth’s shape extending a signature force beyond the spectrum of normal broadcast frequency. Each color smelled differently, each hue and changing angle of light resonated with its own vibration. The new dimension it had come into was a pandemonium of signals to decode and adapt to, accompanied by the constant mantra at the moment of its creation: papa om mao mao…

The wailing and weeping virgins cried out to it from the ground still, thousands of miles away, its once and future primal destination. Directly below the surface it sensed a world of billions of swimming creatures swirling through the deep, as well as solitary leviathans. Then the landscape began to radiate instead of leach; stillness sans undulation. Foreign objects bent the light in many unnatural loops and folded spaces requiring increased altitude to stay above the matter. On the horizon the vertical empires silent towers, monuments of glories past and the barren hills the dissociated masses had chosen to die on. In the nonexistent and omnipresent dreamtime, the Singularity felt the baying hounds that after so much fresh carrion had been forced into devouring themselves.

A black cloud expanded, contracted and coalesced over the jagged skyline of desultory misery and ashes. The echoes of the damned cried from the manmade canyons of glass and steel, their voices expanding out into the cosmos, repetitive as the light of long exploded stars, lost; denied the earth to live again, consumed by fang and fire. Rising up along the parallel vertical of shining skyscrapers, squared 1600 times in reflecting glass, the sun beat down through the avenues and empty streets of desolation.

Plunging back down the other side toward the sheltered alleys and their traffic of scattered remains, the domain of thinning flocks of crows, and the emaciated dogs that gnawed on death too long, bones flew out from the epicenter of the thunderous impact of its clawed feet upon touching down.

Immediately, the starving mongrels converged on the strange apparition that appeared to be sometimes flesh as it shimmered in and out of real and dreamtime. Before they got too close their specialized senses caused them to skid to an abrupt stop on their roughened pads, scrabbling to change direction and, yipping, run off in the opposite direction.

Despair, a stale derivative of anything of optimism’s past clung to the pavements as the afterimage of dead stars. The winged abomination opened the gashes on its welded wheel of flesh to sample the atmosphere, tasting the bone dust and emptiness of the open-air sepulcher. The discordant cries coming from the bloody slits covering its segmented body issued forth with wailing disharmony, accompanied by the pained howls of the dogs holed up in the ruins and still born silence of  the shaded canyon streets.

With despair for creation, it reared back and screamed in concert at the sky, not quite remembering, but nonetheless feeling, that which had caused it so much pain: the rape of innocence around the roaring fire and the selfish sacrifice of unutterable greed that had set the stage for the impossible mocking perversion of it own chance creation.

The damp heat of open thighs and thrusting hips. Aanya’s dropped cell into a vacuum-protected proton beam, disrupted by the impact of the fall. It’s last broadcast before vaporization: Papa om mama.

The instant of its inception and moment of its destruction categorized its ephemeral genus.  Combined of the polarities of Diocletian’s evil consecrations and the atom smasher’s experimental conception, the Singularity was birthed of extreme cross purposes: history-altering black magic and coincidental, but no less harmful, human folly. Nothing, as yet, neither heaven or earth nor itself had understanding to what end it had been thrust blindly into the world.

As the bone-strewn streets tasted of nothingness and oblivion, it pulled itself along the pavements like a giant headless bat in search of something, anything to quell its instinct for consummation. Whether thrashing above the clouds in the thin air of flight or dragging itself over the ground in a slithering crawl, it craved the anodyne of direction; a singularity without a purpose was actually nothing at all. Overlapping shadows splashed across the dead end streets and the towers blocked the sun, casting premature dusk onto the empty mausoleums, blurred by subtle vibrations of the wind against the loose angles of their welded girders and jagged tinted glass.

Leaving a slimy trail of blood and protoplasm behind it, dragging its mouths over the street, the monster tasted the sterile ground. Turning down an alley, pushing the growls and whimpers of the routed dogs before it, it arched its back and inhaled the piles of excrement and half eaten animals whose annihilation was, at least, proof of life among the barren landscape the city had become.

Barely perceptible, even to it, a high-altitude spy plane’s contrail made a white hairline crack in the blue egg shell firmament slotted above the alley. The monster stretched itself vertical, the blood- and shit-smeared sphincter between its shoulders puckering, dilating and pointing at the heavens. Sensing prey deserving of its attention, the Singularity spread its black wings, snapping them out behind it, and rocketed up toward the ribbon of blue sky piercing the space between.