MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Tag: vignettes

  • Affirmation

    Scene: A dusky afternoon in the Vatican. The light from high windows slants across the unfinished vault of the Sistine Chapel. Scaffolding creaks faintly in the background. Michelangelo, spattered with pigment and fatigue, stands before Pope Julius II. The Pope, impatient yet curious, watches him from his elevated chair. POPE JULIUS II You are always…

  • Butler

    You wake up. Reach for the phone. Thumb scrolls before brain boots. Load me up, Jack. Infinite feeds, infinite loops. A dopamine drip straight to the veins, a carnival of blinking lights. You don’t even know what’re looking at. Doesn’t matter. The Machine knows. The Machine feeds.   And the screen hums like a cicada…

  •  Dog Eats Übermensch 

    I was on my usual caffeine circuit, shuttling between the Starbucks and The Cow’s End, because one coffee is never enough and also because I enjoy the illusion of productivity that comes with walking briskly while holding a cup. It was a normal Venice morning—skaters wiping out, tech bros on rental e-bikes, a guy playing…

  • Iterative Adaptation

    The Sage of the Eastern Mountain spoke: In the garden of ten thousand possibilities, he who takes a seedling from the emperor’s own thief may find his name written in gold for a hundred generations. Yet what appears as theft to the morning eye becomes wisdom to the evening mind. Consider the humble water beetle…

  • Checkpoint

    The agent crouched low in the alley, the flickering neon lights jerking like a mind caught in a seizure. Shadows danced on the walls, erratic as neurons firing in a dying brain. The Interzone hummed with the static of fractured realities, a buzz that bled through everything—glitching, fraying, as bits of half-thoughts and lost memories…

  • Block Time

    “Time is a junkie. Shoots up eternity and comes down as minutes. You’re not living in time—you’re processing it.” He sat cross-legged on a floor that never aged, scribbling with a pen that never ran out, his hand looping eternal cursive over blank sheets that devoured ink without a mark. This was Block Time—slabs of…

  • PAC Memo

    Internal Memo To: PAC Strategy Committee From: Funding Allocation Team Subject: Maximizing Value from “Independent” Thinkers Team, In our ongoing mission to counter the dirtbag left’s narrative, it’s critical that we double down on funding independent thinkers like [Deleted Name] and [Deleted Name]. These two have perfected the delicate art of looking like they’re just…

  • Firestarter

    Scene: Boardroom, Stratodyne Aerospace Headquarters, circa Now The conference room shimmered with chrome surfaces and LED screens, a mausoleum for billion-dollar decisions. Aloysius “Al” Riparini, CEO of Stratodyne Aerospace and occasional reader of Popular Mechanics, slouched in his ergonomic chair like a sullen Apollo.  He forward, hands steepled, his face carved in the grim expression…

  • Shell Script Town

    In the neon-drenched shadows of Shell ScriptTown, where wires twist like the fingers of old gods, and protocol rules with the iron fist of a soulless algorithm, the Tire is no longer a simple rubber circle. It has become GhostTown—a sprawling urban wasteland where bits and bytes float like tumbleweeds. Tires, once full of air…