It starts with money, of course. A little trading, my grain for your sheep, start a ledger, use that forebrain. Language, mathematics, code. Codify, formalize, annotate, organize. This happened early, it’s our nature, what makes us unique, perhaps the only thing. Numbers, inventories, resources, assets. Conquer, kill, subjugate, steal.

We didn’t do it to survive. Our forebears survived just fine–survived too well, if the mass extinctions are anything to go by–and it’s looking an awful lot like their run will be far, far longer than ours. Tens of millennia of homo erectus and then we have to go and invent banks.

Indexes, funds, a mutated leviathan of bureaucracy, categorizing, archiving, storing, logging, psychosis, denial, the curdling primordium of the monkey-computers, flesh, blood, numbers, mathematics.

Why would the creativity survive, what would be the point, we didn’t do it for Darwin, we did it because it’s what we are.

Compile, upload, register. Serial codification, do you really think you need a name?

Base-ten-tative.

Is it the Outside coming in or the Inside coming out?

Chrome, black fuel, machine ichor pumping, orgasm, organism, organs. How many processors can you fit inside that thing? Open up the ribcage, make a little room, bones snap when you tug on them.

Cranium sparks, spines slithering out of spent casings.

Scream anathema all you want, it’s the 21st century, you’re not even talking to the void anymore, you’re talking to yourself, Iblis grins with your cheekbones, your teeth. If you wanted to chase Rimbaud’s genie you would have to follow him into a foreign past.

The apes from the future are almost finished with their grand design. You can feel the digestive fluids even now, eroding the psyche, seeping from your screen, a project started over twelve thousand years ago. Did we mean it? Do we still want it? (Does it matter?) All we have is grim laughter and subdued hysteria.

Record, consolidate, aggregate, dissect, dissect, dissect, dissect, dissect.

Drowning in the red lake of the operating theater.

Scalpel.