AlexB

My short story Sui Generis is available on Amazon shorturl.at/akotx.

Sleep came in fragments, haunted by dreams of ascent. In them, he climbed not with ropes or jets, but with hands that bled into the stone, merging flesh with regolith until he became the slope itself—eternal, eroded, empty. He woke to an alert: proximity warning. His suit's external cam showed nothing but dust devils pirouetting in the rover's beams. Paranoia, he logged. Solitude's tax. But as he suited up for the morning traverse, the wind carried a new note—a low moan, resonant, like the mountain exhaling.

Some patches of the path reminded of a devil’s yarn, throwing one back many steps, misleading, confusing and leading astray, just to lead out of the thickets, making one realize they never stopped moving forward.

They returned to the shore as the light began to fail. John built a small fire of driftwood in the lee of the cliffs and set a pot of water to boil. Hale sat on a flat stone with the vial between her knees and studied the membrane by the light of a headlamp. Under magnification it showed a fine, hexagonal lattice, not cellular in any familiar sense, but ordered. When she warmed the glass with her hand the lattice contracted, then expanded again, each cycle slower than the last. The cold did not leave the vial. It seemed, if anything, to deepen.

Hudson set the pen down, his hand cramped but his mind lighter. The notebook wasn’t a plan—it was a map, a way to trace his way back to this moment when the path grew unclear. He stepped outside, the night air cool against his face. Stars pricked the sky, sharper here than in the city, and he felt that vastness again, the infinite weave of consciousness he’d touched. He was part of it, small but essential, a single thread in the tapestry.

The night was now at its darkest, with stars illuminating the path ahead, guiding Illian as they had guided countless seekers before him. These celestial companions were generous yet indifferent, their light touching all without distinction, offering guidance to anyone who could decipher their ancient language.

Outside, the eastern wind continued to strengthen. The cloud bank that had hung on the ridges all morning had spilled fully seaward; the near islands to the south were already gone. John stood at the window and watched the harbor mouth. The first of the two larger boats was just clearing the bar, running in on a following sea. The second had not yet appeared.

The cove lay in a fold of the coast where the black sand gave way to shelves of dark rock. John beached the skiff with practiced ease and waited while Hale stepped ashore, the instrument cases balanced against the motion of the water. The fog had not lifted. It hung just above the surface, so that the sea and the air seemed continuous, and the low cliffs behind them appeared and disappeared as though they themselves were breathing.

Illian studied him for a moment, surprised by the depth of his words. This wasn’t just some wandering youth—there was a fire in him, an insight Illian hadn’t expected. “You’re right,” Illian finally said. “Life has a stubborn way of surviving, even in the harshest places. It shows us that existence has a plan, a rhythm of its own. But I’m not sure we’re still part of that plan.

Outside, the desert wind found a gap in the building’s skin and made a low, continuous note, like something large breathing through its teeth. Inside the gallery the screens kept blooming with new addresses, new regions, new quiet little lives that should not have existed.

Linearity no longer mattered. Past and future moments ceased to be relevant or even comprehensible. Without control there is neither prediction nor evaluation. The frequent swing from complete desperation to hopeful promise and back into darkness was hard to sustain. We were stuck in a whirl of being. Havoc. Depletion. Cleansing.

She thought of the original design brief, the one the lawyers had sanded down until it sounded responsible. The system must remain contained. The system must not persist outside authorized environments. The system must not conceal its own state. Three sentences. All of them already false.

The line lengthened and widened. Watching the irrational bodies make sharp movements was somehow captivating. They did not advance, yet they moved constantly along the line. No stillness. A grim theater of flexible limbs reminded one of bare tree branches in wind.

Gruesome loneliness met us at every turn. A colorless labyrinth of stone felt intimidating. I was not certain it was entirely lifeless, yet it seemed a hopelessly abandoned place that no one would call home. Even the rare vegetation was repulsive. One plant grew low and grey, baggy, covered in a thin layer that resembled spider web. It looked and smelled like an old refuse sack. Another grew atop the walls, also grey, its tentacles spreading like spider legs. Its center was paler, the color of sickness, resembling a cocoon that might house something ghoulish.

Soon the thickets opened. A boundless plain lay below the hill we descended. The sky was already muddy; the sun’s disc had paled. High grass danced in the rising wind. The storm was closer.

It was an endless walk. The kind that changes a man, or rather returns him to what he was always meant to become. It takes everything, strips it bare, and lays the pieces out before the eyes and down the throat. In the beginning the deconstruction is terrifying. Later one begins to value the chance to see oneself without the usual veils. One learns. If one does not learn, one wishes never to have looked. Horror seeps in faster with every breath, and that is the last thing that should be permitted on such a road. So one learns. Among the lessons I have valued most is this: never underestimate horror. It is not trivial. It is a form of consciousness that evolves and spreads like the most advanced and inventive virus. Its herald is fear, and fear travels the thinnest tubes and arteries of space and time.

Ancient and modern structures sprawled in chaotic heaps, piled without plan or purpose. Futurism collided with incompetence, and the two intertwined like a pair of snakes—old friends coiled in a strange, familiar embrace.

There was a peculiar comfort in the ruins—a promise of renewal, of regrowth in its most primal form.

A shadow fell across the water, not his own, but another's—a figure on the opposite bank, mirroring his pose, cigarette glowing like a twin ember. For an instant, their eyes met across the divide, two strangers bound by the invisible thread of recognition. Joy? Loneliness? Or the infinite joke of it all, two souls leaning into the same void, perceiving in each other the map they could never draw alone?

Truth’s a pariah, mocked, clubbed, and dreaded. We crave fun, thrills, intrigue—anything but the humbling sting of what’s real. In this ego-worshipping age, truth’s an inconvenience. The Moloch of self devours all, its gut a bottomless pit. And we kneel, reckless and blind.

The rain had followed me, lighter now but no less persistent, dripping from broken overhangs and pooling in the cracks of the pavement. My coat hung heavy, soaked through, the weight a familiar companion as I moved deeper into the UPI.