Strange Textures

I stumbled upon a troupe of levitating mermaids, harmonizing discordant lullabies with invisible octopuses. Each step I took shifted the sands into grinning clown faces, their noses honking with mischievous glee. As I ventured deeper, time dissolved, and the moon turned into a misshapen watermelon, juggling stars while reciting poetry in Martian dialects. Glowing jellyfish whispered ancient secrets, their tentacles spelling out riddles in shimmering Morse code. Reality waltzed with fantasy, and I found myself caught in a whirlwind of enchanted absurdity.

When you’re tired, and you’re holding on. A great stillness descends upon you, a lateral choice avoiding the lifts and opening the diagonals for play. So welcome. Oo vath welcome. All that you have been through, past, present, and future. This is the only moment. A change of hue. Finding a new blue. Suddenly all is in tune. The single Sun is eclipsed by the Moon.

We play hide and seek with a celestial body. The lack of heat has solidified planes of atmosphere. Rays of light appear in strange places, reflected and refracted at odd angles. Coming and going as the old Sun evades us. There is beauty in the stillness, in the quiet, in the cold. But that freezing must thaw, we need flow, and movement, and warmth. Time for new Suns…

The comfort of coming home offset with the fear that it is no longer home. That either you or it has changed. Or that this is just an approximation and you are lost still. Which would be worse? To be home or to be not home, never home? It might depend on who you travel with. Maybe home is internal anyway, in such a strange multiverse of possibility, maybe home is just the pretend point of existence you embody in this moment.

Behind space. Under the vortex. Time is particularised. You bathe in the flow, grasping for moments to hold onto, swimming for familiar shores. Gross movement yields little, you navigate through thought, pure intention, and subtle pressures. The tiniest movement of tone and timbre, sustained effort keeps you at the edge of real space and time. Forever is here, while you might not be.

What if the gateway between worlds could be harnessed through mystical beasts? The Rainbow Horse, majestic multi-hued shire type with a mane that can be stroked and toyed with. Soul programming for traversing the great divides. Climb on. Become. Ready for the trip, you are the rainbow waterfall horse.

The incoming transmission from an alternative ancient Egypt was puzzling and surprising. A robot Pharaoh of obvious power and majesty detailed their transformation. Gorgeous and practical hard shell layers replaced with shockingly weak , ugly flesh. Angular, bold gears, elegant wiring, efficient mechanics becoming liquids, vessels, organs. A first biological organism for their world setting the trend others will loyally follow.

You can’t admit it. How close you might be to breaking. Beyond order, beyond coherence, there is still a pattern, something that can be made sense of. If you realised how fragile the walls were that hold the realities together would you embrace a little more chaos in general? Could you exist without walls, pounding forth with your own rhythm?

We are drones, silently propelled above the beautiful decay of urban wastelands, cityscapes populated by husks of former people, and semi-formless vehicles. Reporting back to each other what we witness. Divorced from our surroundings, huddling our mechanical consciousnesses together to find meaning and purpose in our community of machines.

If time didn’t exist, would we need to create it? What sort of machine could wind the universal clocks and set them running? A vast clockwork driven by stream and producing beams of time, moving the underlying gloop of reality to generate an illusion of movement and change. Forcing now to create history and bring some sort of future into being. A machine of heat, lies, and misunderstandings.