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First Edition: Gherardo Bortolotti, Quando arrivarono gli alieni. Parti 234-361 Benway Series, 9 Book Design & Composition: Michele Zaffarano Translation: Johanna Bishop Š Gherardo Bortolotti Š Johanna Bishop (for the translation) ISBN 978-88-98222-25-4 Digital printing: Tipografia La Colornese Sas Publishing: Tielleci editrice via San Rocco, 98 Colorno (PR) www.benwayseries.wordpress.com benwayseries@gmail.com
Gherardo Bortolotti
WHEN THE ALIENS ARRIVED Parts 234-361 Translation by
Johanna Bishop
Benway Series
when the aliens arrived Parts 234-361
to Andrea Raos, (toivo)
234
When the aliens arrived, they found us with no plan, ready to undertake another leap of consciousness, toward the most advanced stage of our apathy. As the revolts swept across Europe, we would go out in hordes on Saturday night. Our clothes were left over from a grander era, quietly coordinated to match the decor of the clubs, the commercial subtext of those who spoke to us.
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Of all that we could do, the future was not even a confutation, more like something we noticed on a street corner, under the awning of a bankrupt franchise, which we’d forgotten for a moment, lost in muddled stories of new technology replacing old, of palingenesis, extinction. Of all the dreams we could dream, we had been dealt a shabby one, the stuff of ad campaigns, TV screens. Mass education, widespread prosperity, and the profusion of content had painted us into a corner, into phantasmagorias of summer concerts, suburban neighborhoods at night, diaphanous memories of other people’s memories, of riots, independence, sexual liberation.
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On the web, discussion forums kept coming back to the same two or three points, though some would drag in reports from the Ministry of Trade in Singapore, the price of rapeseed oil, the crisis in the Congo. Many months later, during the 9
intervention along the Brazilian coast, people started to believe that the problem was somehow behind us. We found ourselves staring into space, waiting for some way out, as along the streets, among the first ruins, the signs of our discontent remained uncertain.
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Only toward the end did bgmole realize how far away he was, how alone he was now on the planet, after hundreds of years of almost imperceptible migration, through abandoned city fringes, deserted residential districts, crumbling shopping centers. He left behind fitful traces, anodyne graffiti, everyday objects. In some shelters, he installed holographic memory devices that were nearly empty, filling them with images, videos, recordings of his own voice reading out lists.
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On the cusp of sleep, we had few things left to say, phrases like “public domain,” “pandemics,” “Martian floods.” The days that would follow lay in wait, the events of the mornings, of the evenings, fell apart into spastic constructs, forebodings, new technology that suggested to us an even deeper silence, a way out of extinction.
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Decades later, handfuls of activists were still camped out in the crumbling spaceports, where the last starships had taken off in a spectacular parade whose images had filled the global media system for years, scorching the concrete as they rose up together into orbit, through the transparent layers of the atmosphere. We knew they would never come back. We waited, from generation to generation, for their rendezvous on Proxima Centauri to warp the halo of that distant sun enough to provide confirmation, in future centuries, that the journey was at an end.
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They came for us in the outlying neighborhoods where we had taken refuge, moving through the streets with police dogs, motorcycles, goon squads who whooped as they beat us, in the yards of tract houses, at the bottom of underground parking garage ramps. It was a dimwitted strategy of terror. By that point the squads were caught in cycles of repetitive force, kept going by amphetamines and their questionable cognitive faculties, and not even the revenge lynchings and hangings could stop them.
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The explosions shook the shopping centers and caused their windows to collapse, launching instant galaxies of bullet-proof glass fragments into the air, while in the aisles the consumer goods crashed to the ground, in cascades of nails, Nike sweatshirts, DOC wines. The first refugees generally headed to the canned food section and the hardware, where they performed hasty rites in honor of salary and merchandise. They camped out in the underground garages and systematically looted gasoline and pharmaceuticals. After about a week, the first gunfire was exchanged, on street corners, behind the parks, and a few militias took over the central neighborhoods.
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Determined to enter into contact with the underground resistance movements, bgmole began showing his support by opening a Flickr account and posting street clashes and vintage pictures of outlying residential districts tagged “euphoria,” “frontier of progress,” “merchandise.” In the weeks that followed, he noticed more and more incoming traffic from a Malaysian scripting blog. These posts, dated fifteen years in the future, contained PHP code whose functions, when collected in a specific order to form a larger program, generated instructions for making contact, and the address of an anonymous FTP server. 11
A detailed exploration of its directories took several months, during which the network infrastructure was constantly collapsing due to guerrilla incursions, and it was only by sheer luck that bgmole managed to glean the information he needed. In a text file named “aliens.txt” filled with Solid Space lyrics, the names of spaceships from Iain M. Banks books and incongruous notes like “malls in the decades to come” or “dead people in large numbers,” he found the necessary keywords.
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We opened a portal to Fomalhaut IX, in hope of overcoming our bodies’ slow decay. An initial wave of migration brought the worship of mirrors to the planet, along with the first monastic communities dedicated to transcribing consumer texts. A core group in each community founded a central blog, its login info encrypted as asemantic litanies, made up of polysyllabic words, varying in length. During morning services, these litanies were chanted in unison, as 3D renderings of phrases like “spaces decorated to make you feel richer” or “in the shadow of intraspecific aggression” rolled across the holographic walls of the prayer room. The circle of the elect, also known as the “inner party,” was responsible for posting phrases randomly drawn from old lifestyle magazines. A dedicated semi-sentient server was used to pre-process the material. Some specialists in recursion and disaster theory had come from the computing centers of Sirius to handle its initial parameterization. In exchange, they would obtain perpetual access to the database of recordings from the sensory/dream monitoring to which the entire community was subjected, to use as a source of random numbers, thousands of digits long, for studying the statistical fluctuations of credit in virtual economies to be set up on the web. 12
The newly admitted and the “intermediate registers� saw to creating satellite blogs onto which the posts of the central one were copied, inserting slight variations, typos, semi-conscious interpolations made using special self-hypnosis techniques. The satellite blogs were activated through a specific branching diagram of hypertext links which stretched out asymmetrically, growing ever thicker and ever more intricate as one moved toward the outer fringes of the project. A variably constituted wiki was set up for the hordes of supporters, allowing only one access per page, where the user could freely insert taggable content. The resulting traffic was sold to public advertisers and ethical microcredit and guerrilla media foundations, which employed it for political propaganda campaigns.
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Over the course of the day, when his attention level had almost reached the utter bluntedness that only a massive intake of online content could ensure, there would be sudden, almost enlightening stalls in the flow of feeds and bgmole would lift his eyes from the monitor, to gaze at something in the less familiar corners of his rooms, as the sun that filtered through the window slowly altered the brightness, density, texture of its light, and the dust, following calculable but invisible angles, built up on the surfaces of the furniture, the floor.
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The silence of the aliens was fathomless and their gaze would linger on us for minutes at a time, as if we were the unexpected event, the out-of-place detail in a picture that, until then, had been ominously normal.
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On Beta Pictoris b we found a dominant organism that had survived everything; made of dust, dross 13
and clusters of trash, it moved in currents across the planet, forming a ragged structure that expressed a single concept, of squalor and despair.
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At some point, we came to the collective realization that there were millions and millions of inhabited planets, billions of races, breeds, sentient beings that mass-produced acts of localized, petty rationality, narrow and momentary constructs of meaning that came in rapid, granular succession, without hope or mercy, emerging and falling apart in the coils of galactic expansion, in the spasmodic flux of entropy, of the universe, of matter dissolving into heat.
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A genetic memory welled up to remind us how our species had always been initiated into the end of things, into failure, apocalypse. As the crescents of the smaller moons of Epsilon Eridani III took shape in the utter darkness of interplanetary space, filling our monitor screens, the inner circles of the crew, those initiated into phylogenetic recollection, who had formed elite groups in the outlying areas of the ship, on the hundreds of decks systematically abandoned over the centuries-long voyage, formulated new concepts of humanity, which branched out into the horrid, the revolting.
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The routine of space walks, circling the vast object that had been discovered on the outer edges of Pluto’s orbit, consumed the lives of the international missions. Stretching for tens of thousands of kilometers, its length exceeded not only the sensory limits of everyone who flew over it but the capacity of all human culture, at that point in its phylogenetic development, to accept its scale and existence. The teams of xenobiologists, engi14
neers, linguists and comparative anthropologists who landed there, amid the delicate reverberation of the stars, let the years go by in dull contemplation of jagged bits of surface, inertly cataloguing the minute hexagonal decorations on certain outcroppings, the filamentary fragments caught on some anodyne flange.
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Several interest groups, backed by the credit of continental soy farming cooperatives in Southeast Asia, began massively refinancing European nations, attacking the public debt of almost every smaller state in the Union and sponsoring vast social experiments, built around the key concepts of extinction and decitizenship. The idea was to eventually create a financial and military beachhead for moving into Russia, and a line of credit for annexing territory in Central Africa. Reports of the International Monetary Fund pointed out two to five weaknesses in this plan. Minority sectors of the organization’s mid-to-high echelons presented a memorandum, which came to be known as the “Isadora Bluebook,” supporting a possible strategy of opposition by the Indian pension funds and the new post-economic communities under development in ocean settlements south of Madagascar. The more conservative senior officials, however, pushed for the implementation of a vast campaign of coup d’états and technocracies.
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Despite constant advances in neurolinguistic programming, in nanosurgery techniques, we silently lost our motivation to be proven right, to get to the bottom of our aims and abuses. In the impetus of the encounter, we reached immortality. The aliens showed us something, and to our surprise, we were ashamed to realize that it was true.
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In our limited conception of life and reality, we steadfastly underwent the long hookups to the district servers that constituted our occupation, and after closing our eyes and fitting the plug into our cranial socket, surrendered our brief days to the tides of data and content. We would re-emerge dozens of hours later, compensated in a way by the loss of time itself, by the hiatus it generated in our lives, but also compensated in actual fact, with a salary that spread its blackmail into the fabric of what we believed to be real, like vast roots threading down through the surface of the obvious, the day like any other, to the black heart of what we no longer knew how to say.
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From the outlying districts in the distance, air-raid sirens rang out and you could see the smoke of fires burning here and there, among the apartment buildings and the parking lots of the athletic centers. bgmole knew that some radical leftist factions had undertaken a guerrilla campaign in those neighborhoods, attacking local offices, minor branches of credit unions and smaller financial groups. Every so often, in the afternoon, he would see ragtag squads of young people come running from beyond the traffic circle, faces masked and haversacks over their shoulders. Some would stop, for maybe half an hour, to throw rocks at a temp agency window. More often, they would move on toward the beltway exits, waiting for the first columns of armored police vans.
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On the outermost orbital stations, a few years earlier, colonization had led to highly advanced experiments in social interaction between man and machine, in which a number of holograms, created using random modes of physical configuration and character crafting, lived alongside other inhabitants in 16
the endless units of the residential blocks. The holograms led lives similar in part to human ones and scripted in part by processors designed to generate and develop genre fiction plots. In most cases, these mixed communities gave rise to highly sectarian subcultures organized around one or two key holograms, which devoted themselves to memorizing individual messages produced by the other holograms and by the human members. The messages were then randomly reproduced over the diurnal cycle, and sometimes structured into systems of stanzas, unique to that specific community.
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We mostly set up camp in outlying districts, where the traces of the aliens were still noticeable and the outer walls of banks and car dealerships bore the graffiti they had left. We often passed by their asymmetrical objects, abandoned in the parking lots of the athletic centers, and felt that sense of disheartenment and grief they had bestowed upon us.
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Some joined the Madonna team and gave up their faith in a better future, to be achieved through new generations of social networks and personal communication devices. They produced content for specialized channels dedicated to DIY, self-hibernation or organic farming, without remembering, as they watched some streamed lo-fi Canadian series in the evening, how they used to attack supermarkets and lead urban guerrilla raids, while the police blocked off the neighborhood UMTS networks and charged the clusters of demonstrators in open trucks.
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The aliens gave us a gestalt of envy and desire that we carried around for years like a foreign object, a stillborn Siamese twin, to be dragged through our lives.
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bgmole monitored several Belgian servers which had remained active but obscure, after the arrival of the aliens and the unrest surrounding the devaluation of the euro. His admin privileges allowed him to access the files of previous users, the logs, the backups, and collect meaningful data. Excel sheets with family budgets, private diaries, access codes for bank accounts in France, in New Zealand, in Bavaria, photos from trips to Malaysia, filled the folders he scanned over the course of the night. Later on, he would sometimes recall faces in the background of a crowded beach, names of files, anodyne notes about “possible to dislike it” or “remember to hurt.”
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Some disappeared and their traces turned up only months later, tagged in some note on Facebook, or mentioned on a blog from California.
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Despite the crumbling neighborhoods, the massacres, the palingenesis achieved among the ruins of the highways and industrial areas, we continued to feel an unending surge of perennial contempt, for our lives themselves, the everyday errors, the petty hope that still haunted us. The aliens stood by us in our moments of remembrance, in the evenings spent at home with no sense of a future, and told us of an even more savage hatred, though it was something we feared. They stroked our heads and the silence burrowed deeper, twisted into a lateral abyss, stretching out from our side toward parallel spaces, infinite successions of living rooms in which we were, albeit for causes subtly crueler each time, just as unhappy.
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Of the few who died, we remembered certain phrases. Some entrusted them to dedicated databases, which 18
were tapped by semi-sentient content generation systems to fill columns of anonymous quotes that appeared in the free newspapers of Singapore, Latin America, and the orbital stations of Mars and the asteroid belt. The most popular ones, like “military solutions to the problem of the unknown,” “turning to the future, as you wait for the dream to break off ” or “tasked with filling out the ranks” were recycled for mid-to-low end lines of casualwear and turned up on the t-shirts of teens from the service-sector suburbs, members of sectarian subcultures devoted to psychotropic substances and particular rates of beats per minute. At some point, certain expressions seemed to hint at an overall underlying pattern. There were those who mentioned signs of an imminent arrival, or traces of an ancient catastrophe, finally coming to light. Others yet saw them as symptoms of a telluric current of the imagination, the initial parameterization of a cyclopean future subject, emerging from the accumulation of signs, of content, and which in the end would put into words what troubled us all and what on summer nights, beyond the roaring of the beltway, seemed to be murmuring.
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In the parking lots of the industrial district, you could still sometimes run into one of the aliens, waiting there silently for dusk. Sometimes it would gesture at us, from a distance, and then walk off behind the sheds, scanning the ground, shifting shapeless fragments, studying the mounds of metal scrap, the bales of rags for recycling plants that handled nylon, cellulose.
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After their first few months in the new floating cities, anchored in clusters off the Sicilian coast, most of the senior and much of the middle management at the multi19
national corporations and agencies of the globalized economy had grasped the inadequacy of their opinions, the abstract nature of their beliefs. In the long afternoons of their apathy, they pretended not to see the fascist patrols, the microscopic suburban republics, the minor antidemocratic tampering with the administrative structures of the European Union or the OSCE.
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Meanwhile, news arrived from Deneb of a new totalitarian experiment in military administration, based on plugging in the population, manipulating memory, and unpredictably readjusting the day/night cycles.
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Having gained access to the TransData memory banks, bgmole began downloading dozens of music archives, recordings of lesser-known bands from the Factory and Sarah Records. In a chat room devoted to the first attempts at a symptomatic reading of the web, in a view to extrapolating general anthropological gestalts from the seemingly chaotic output of consumer culture, some users had furnished him with discographies, hinting that experiments had proven how certain lyrics by the Field Mice or Joy Division, for instance, could be used to recover specific combinations of keywords that when fed into a search engine, led to the old sites with the data he was looking for.
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We tried to set up an interface code with the aliens based on current fashion and news, alternating garments, accessories, crime stories and hair dyes. Some of them responded, tracing small furrows in the asphalt, tilting road sign poles, and they would try to stretch their shadows over the parking lot lines, in what seemed like ritual patterns.
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