Legend tells of an Ancient named Yoro, a man taken to ingesting infants’ stem cells as a means to maintain some approximation of eternal youth. When the Great Lord of the West heard of this transgression, he cursed Yoro’s soul by releasing a mist of corrupting nanites upon him, locking him in a perpetual state of tormented near death. Whenever one of us were tempted by the conveniences of technology over diligence, the village elders always made a point of warning the children that Yoro still wandered the forests, descending upon the villages to drink the blood of the slothful and steal body parts to replace those of its own rotting carcass.
My village was no longer of any nation, not since before my birth. It sat deep in lush, green forests surrounded on all sides by mountains and their abundant streams. We lived by the teachings of the Lord of the West; existing harmoniously with nature whilst the great cities suffered their ruinous decades. This is not to say we were insular luddites; we used the data on the global data veils to revitalise the land and air, to provide for ourselves and to educate the young. I know little of what came before the Great Simplification that disintegrated our former nation state, but as a teenager I heard my parents talk of the old King and their gratitude at his passing. It was agreed it was better to be free, to honour only the spirits that manifested as the trees, soil and mountains. As a child I accepted their worldview as truth, yet I see now how wrong they were. They were wrong because our gods, our spirits, our Lord of the West, none of them were there to protect us when the sharp, black aircraft fell upon us from the darkened skies. They abandoned us as the warriors from another land erected tents and lined us up like cattle, injecting serums and potions indiscriminately into every one of us, even the blessed children and babies. The thing that stays with me is that during the weeks they were with us, they uttered neither a word to us nor to one other, as if possessed by an evil that had robbed them speech and conscience; their hearts as black as their fatigues.
A lot of us died over the following weeks. We died in ways that did not occur in the world I had known. Blood from the eyes, limbs sliding off, mouths melting, new appendages growing and then rotting away. I did not react to their potions, but I did not consider myself lucky for it is better to pass back into the Lord’s ground than to watch so many that you love die so savagely, so pointlessly. Those of us who survived were taken somewhere alien, to lands made of materials that we thought lost long ago, abandoned in favour of mother nature’s endless, renewable bounty. I came to understand that swathes of humanity were backsliding into the old ways that had brought us to the edge of ruin; this chilled me more than any of the obscenities that I had seen inflicted upon my people.
If you cut off a person’s toe, are they the same person they were before? What if you irradiate their gut bacteria to inhibit their mood regulation? Or overdevelop their prefrontal cortex so that they become obsessive and rigid in their world view? Where is the line where I stopped being one person and became another? For another person I surely have become, or maybe not another, but a pale, distorted shadow of what I was; smote and abandoned by the Lord of the West, as if Yoro the Ancient before me. In that city of glass and carbon my body was cleaved and remade so many times that I became numb to it all; pain defined my entire existence. Much of my memory from this time was purged by the Sisters of Light who found me dumped, half dead on the streets; it had to be that way less I go insane from the trauma.
For years I stayed in the temple under the care of the Sisters, hidden from view, cleaning filth to earn my keep. The Sisters christened me Kintsugi on account of my appearance; metal holding broken flesh together. The monsters had replaced my eyes, various internal organs, my lower left arm and interfaced a computer with my brain, all of it crude, experimental; exposed metal and infections covered my body and my left arm would stop responding for days at a time. When I had some proficiency in their language, the Sisters explained that my form was a blessing, allowing me to interface directly with their deity, an AI they called Light. It is a very human trait to cling to the gods that have abandoned us in our hour of need; to rationalise it as a test we must overcome, but I am no longer human and Job was a simpleton. The gods of nature had abandoned me, the Lord of the West had lied to me and I certainly did not wish to be let down a third time. I left the temple, travelling by the cover of night southward until the city faded away.
This is not my country; the trees are unusual, thin and threadbare and there is little left of nature here. Nevertheless, I will stay here and rehabilitate the land as best I can. My new form seems to have little need for sustenance, so despite the curse inflicted on me I will never seek the pain of another for my own gain; the curse of Yoro can die with me.
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Visual album @ MTHRBORD
youtu.be/MbW3jsQqUwI
Cover art by Jason Scarecrow
instagram.com/jasonscarecrowart
released June 2, 2023
