Future Shock

Flesh Metal

St. Boniface

Edward St. Boniface, mutant biomechanoid and cyber-philosopher ponders steel mills, evolution, genetic engineering, and biochemistry, and finds he can no longer sleep at night.

In my deepest, darkest, weirdest reveries I think of the future, of evolution -- and of metal. Of its texture, its tensile strength. The cold luster of fine metal haunts me, growing menacingly around my fears. Liquid and molten and sensual and dangerous, it trickles into my dream-images and and molds them into ghastly portraitures of pewter skies and and twilight labyrinths swarming with fiendish leper-creatures -- the reengineered, rampant changelings of tomorrow. All the undertones and sounds of metal -- shrieking, ringing, rapping, hissing and blistering -- take on shape and substance, erupting from the skin and scales of these frightful zombies. All the glamor, the pumping power of bronze and brass and platinum melts into semiliving tissues and hideous cybernetic cretins - pallid demons and superhuman hulks leering against landscapes of biomechanical madness. As I look ahead into the centuries, my tortured mind envisions a disrupted world of howling grandeur and pale genetic ghouls.

What horrors will the fossils of the centuries to come reveal to the archaeologists of the distant future, to the descendents of the terrifying archetypes and morphologies now waiting to emerge from the frightening achievements in human modification that loom over our fragile world? What somber thoughts and dreams will torment them as they gaze into the abyss of distortion and technological fury in which those awe-inspiring remains were born? Will they know that ravening monsters of organic steel and living alloy and foaming liquid metal still lurk like an iron-tinted specter within the twisted patterns of their own infected genes?

New orders of being, conciousness, and semihuman species wait to erupt hungrily, painfully into existence. The transposition and redesigning of the fundamental molecules of life systems can have only one end. Nature is jealous of her secrets and harsh in her lessons. Such abilities and processes cannot be controlled. The effects wil be volcanic and colossal. Evolution, like an intangible guide in the forest, will minister to the chaotic clamor, brutally selecting her champions. The fusion of man and machine at the atomic level will spawn incredible mutations and devastators, creatures urgently alive with the world-shattering force of competitive ferocity that watchful Evolution has implanted to carry forth its cruelly enlightened program. These new predators and the mechanical wilderness they prowl will be grim and macabre, but they will be illustrating anew, and with uniquely profound effects, the hard laws that have governed this planet since the dawn of time.

How will it be to have skin, muscles, reflexes and senses that have been amplified by synthetic biochemistry to unprecedented levels of strength and sensitivity? To have a body full of silicates, composites, organometric complexes and circuits, and unnatural plasticity? A mind and nervous system overloaded with receptors across the entire range of light and radiation? We will be awash in microsounds, babbling electronic transmissions, plagues of static-disturbance and the delicate universe of fragrance that drifts through the atmosphere. Our biometallic brains will respond to these and to the remorseless commands from a ruling intelligence and entities that will be stronger than we can imagine. Our heritage, psychological orientation, and instinctive perception of destiny have become alarmingly elastic, and so our nightmares more vivid. Our arrogant religions and rational philosophies cannot gainsay a sophisticated DNA paleontology which has clearly drawn the biological arrows which relate us to the other animals. We have lately indulged in technologically-assisted warfare to a psychotic extent. The malignant aftershocks of the Slaughters have twisted our world out of any recognizable human shape -- all in a mere hundred years.

We have adopted such a hysterical pace of invention and change that our civilization grows sick and dizzy. A schizoid glow plays luridly over the gotham of mindless activity,searing the souls of the weak who are no longer capable of enduring the intolerable demands placed on them.

This is the black, secret pit of psychic crucifixion where lunacy grows. From here come the mad catalogs of gun catastrophies, wan apocalyptic art, and my own diabolically grinning fantasies. Everywhere there seethes and smoulders an anguish at what we have lost, and the voracious might of what we have created. So crassly violated is the human soul by the callousness of modern events, so harshly contracted by paranoid fears, that hoards of cackling phobias play their splintered symphonies on our lives and culture still. Our common fears heat a vast furnace that uneasily smelts the mind-maddening and sanity-corroding poisons that flow through our world, writing random horror-signatures as they sear us; coiling threads that weave the malevolent metallic synchromesh which I dread and cannot escape.

An emblem has affixed itself to us and our future paths, re-directing them. We are like an embryo, a chrysalis awaiting some obscure narcotic pheronome or catalyst to ignite a fantastic metamorphosis in which we shall be transfigured and finally comprehend the meaning of what we are. But to get there, we must first plunge to grotesque depths and survive the long, savage night before which the million-year terror of our simian forebears will be as nothing.

And we cannot turn back; we can only accelerate. The mind and body of the human race are no longer fixed, solid things. They have become quicksilver; a churning cauldron of fleshmetal oozing and squirming and lusting in its hyperactive orgies, alive with instincts and perverted programming that will fetalize all the gargoyles and juggernauts that ever leered out of a cathedral crypt or flickered in the gory polychromes of a cinematic extravaganza. However lewd or startling the children of these gross eugenic acts, it will be ourselves who look back at us from those calculating eyes and colorless faces, gloating in polarized silicon and chrome.

Future nightmares and future majesty waver like steel mirages on the frontier of our civilization. Appalled and fascinated by the paintings, the photography and the literature from which we distill our apprehensions to silhouette the way ahead, we confront the hive, or colony organism, the destiny we so fear and desire in our ancient loneliness. From the gunmetal oceans of engineered evolution will at last emerge calm, transfigured beings fit to dwell in the celestial firmaments above. And they will be shining avatars that drown all this darkness with their godlike roars.

St.Boniface

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Copyright Circuit Traces Communications 1995