Xtinction Agenda

Hallway audio like a fun house welcomes us to Renaissance Station. Here they were seeking solutions to the problems of peace and war. 3D printed rape crabs. Black Lovecraftian goo. What more would mankind need to ascend? Dig, horrors, dig, and die for the Company.

"Get away from her, you bitch."

The forearm flakes black like burnt paper into the wind and into the river, seeding and plumping molecules into adventurous life. Come find us, the caves say, run through the night and dig up our tomb. Our hands crafted you but our voice cannot be heard. Nor our final judgement. But you can guess.

"Why do you hate us?"

Great beast, black carapaced and limbed, hiss and spit for us this continued acid drama. Rise from your grey silt, beetle humped, and give us your bloody tale. Let our lungs touch and entangle in the breath of this swamp. Your mother needs more time on the stage and we have little on the page. Ideas man, quick. Give us an ending oily and slick.

"That's right. Come down and have a look--"

Let thunder awaken the senses and fire burn away calm. Raise the palisades against these nightmares, for we are now soldiers turned victims. Victims of weak willed men and rapacious rogues. Victims of nature itself. Like the one who crawls along the beach, dragging their lost limb, let us call out for mother. She is our only hope.

"What do you mean *they* cut the power? How could they cut the power, man? They're animals!"

Slithering reptilian shadows turned to bone and left in the dark for fools to blunder into. Mother knew the meaning. She knew and she did not care. Through her, the Company scrapes the stars, a troubling cosmic dragnet that this time turned up something that could not be contained.

"It's almost primordial."

Paul Chadwick. Dave Gibbon. Gray Morrow. Eric Shanower. John Byrne. Andy Kubert. Coleen Doran. Ty Templeton. Alan Brennert. Dick Giordano. Mark Waid. 1989. DC Super-Heroes. Christmas. Today.

"Vell, and isn't this nize!"

True loss is wordless. Vengeance is pure. We are all grieving fathers driven into torn flesh isolation, garage drunk and cursing inflation, plotting our cold, bloody revenge. Prepare the stunt car and fill pistols with tears. Santa Claus arrives early this year.

(newspaper ripping)

We are enfolded in the hot white wings of the red phoenix, journeying into small worlds of pressure, passion, and forced evolution, the thin tendrils of tiny machines licking the flames that power our pathetic lives and make us weep. Is this everything? Our purpose? Beyond the infinite rock that surrounds this cave, what truth is there? Red and claw catastrophe looms.

"Scott my friend...how can I help?"

Sweet small crime hustlers of Sunnyvale, they of foiled scams, driveways of hash, a daily menagerie, a misfit cast. Theirs is the land of lost souls who lost nonetheless impose their will, trapped in the churning grind of statute mill, self-representing, shameless and still. Within this park under camera lens they scheme and trade the day away until such time as law doth raid and bring the boys from their trailers hence to prison quick to serve sentence.

"You have permission to smoke and swear."

Everything is fine until, inevitably, the gnarled bone of infidelity protrudes into the world and blood drips onto the pages of your life. You will forget your sniveling soft manor and soft father, replacing them quickly with a man who will take from you your love. You will be made in a camp and let loose into the wild, betrayed by forces that you never had a hope of understanding.

"My name is Smitty. Remember it well."