Can anyone say 'Tesco Value Gibson/Burroughs'...?
…I don’t know how long this has been going on and it’s hard to recall when it started. I know I’m driving down the highway connecting the outer ring road to the city’s core. Lights stream by, becoming uninterrupted luminous streams in my vision, harsh against the velvet darkness. Fuck knows how fast I’m going – the figures on the speedo have become unintelligible cyphers and I deactivated the onboard nav some time ago – I now have my own onboard nav; where it’s taking me I don’t know either but there seems little point in resisting at this juncture. I feel in my shirt pocket for the baggie: good, still a fair bit left – not that that’s so critical, in light of what I’ve noticed recently about the dosage.
Not even sure what day it is. Normally I’d be worried about driving while this unaware but this is different – actually I’m totally aware, hyperaware even, just not of mundane things like the time or my location. My mind has been shifted into a gear I’ve never used before even while it’s ever more dissociated from what I can sense externally. This is surely the most perfect dissociative there ever was…
The city has become a grid, more explicitly than ever. The more I look, the more the materials that structures are made from becomes insignificant, even invisible. All that’s left is the pure structure itself, naked and unsullied by matter, abstracted. Structure, function, potentiality, systems…that’s what I see now. It appears as vision but it’s almost like it enters my eyes only by convention, or out of force of habit. Now everything is approaching wireframe, one-dimensional lines delineating 2-D surfaces enclosing 3-D volumes, themselves embedded in higher-dimension structures…but then I blink and it’s back to normal. For now. There’s a patina of unreality to everything that gets a little stronger each time this happens.
Sense of time comes back to me, a little. I think it’s been about three weeks now. Started with that nutter Carson, for me anyway – another night round his flat, sampling whatever it was he’d got this time. Some fucking ibogaine analogue, wasn’t it – ten minutes of hyperspace, then spend the next four hours thinking you’re five different people, two of whom are dead. Jesus, not my idea of fun. But he also had that stuff, that black stuff…still don’t know what to call it. But that’s what we do call it, ‘the stuff’…too new even to have a name. Turn off the highway onto a slip road, now round the grimy estates that line the flyover…grey concrete washed a flat dirty yellow by the sodium glare…a crude simulation of a settlement. But it was black, which was weird for a start, I mean anything in a powder is usually white, especially for something new on the market. And Carson didn’t want any money for it, said that would come later…still haven’t given anyone a cent for it. Come to think of it I still owe Carson fifty euro for that other time, but he didn’t seem to care. Had that glazed look…guess I’ve probably got that now.
Out of the estates now and along a road that edges the industrial park. Empty now of course, but the lights are still on at the tops of the cranes and other structures. I pass under some heavy overhead cables, also lit up at intervals for some reason. The lights form a matrix that remains in my field of vision when I blink and eventually look away. I feel confident I could close my eyes and still drive and navigate perfectly, so completely does the car’s response mesh with my nervous system. And it meshes on a level that’s more and more bypassing my consciousness.
So anyway: the stuff. It’s a kind of junk, that’s for sure – you know you need more of it, but you’re damned if you can say why. You’re not high, you’re not stoned, it’s not what you could call enjoyable…it’s not even like you crave it, it’s more like your autonomic systems steer you towards it without you even being really aware of what’s happening. Other weird things about it: dose is immaterial, as is ROA. Take less than about 20 em gees and it does nothing; above that and the effect is the same no matter how much you take. And that’s whether you bomb it, snort it, smoke it – weird gnarly black smoke, same dense blackness as the powder – probably be the same if you slammed it or stuck it up your arse. I’m starting to get the impression you don’t even need to physically ingest the stuff, like it would work eventually if you just kept it in your hand or in your breast pocket, like I’m doing now. It would affect you eventually.
Back onto a main artery heading into the centre again. Traffic is uniform, neither dense nor sparse for the time of night (whatever that is). Wonder where all these people are headed at this time, whether any of them are in a similar state to me. Road straight now, dual carriageway, lights once more forming unbroken corridors, staring at the red dots ahead of me, white dots oncoming to my right. Hypnotic enough even when you’re straight. Pylons march by, parallel with the road – part of the city’s musculature – its nervous system of course buried under the roads.
There was that report on pravda.ru last week about the stuff, or at least it sounded like the same gear. Some chemists at a government poisons lab did tests on it and couldn’t find anything. I mean no molecular structure at all, couldn’t even detect any carbon in the damn stuff. What the fuck is this substance? Then I realised: it’s a placeholder, nothing more. A passive, inert symbol for something else. Like a pointer to a memory address. Pointing where and to what…well, the ping just doesn’t come back. Some people in my circle spoke of a factory in central Asia somewhere, but whether there was any truth in that, or if true, whether it was just a distribution point from somewhere else…no idea.
Traffic slows and I slow with it, not even noticing it consciously and suddenly we’re at a standstill. Endless corridors of lights to either side, ahead and behind. This is truly a global drug though, reports in the official media few and far between but everyone knows someone who knows something, or has read something on a messageboard or in a tweet…it’s coming up in Vancouver, LA, Shanghai, Tokyo, Rio, Cape Town, Beirut, Moscow, Marseille. Virtually simultaneously, we hear a rumour of it appearing in a new city every other day now, often hundreds or thousands of miles from the last hotspot. And everyone says the same thing: you don’t get ‘high’, at first it seems to do almost nothing in fact, but you can’t help but keep taking it. Has everyone else been receiving it for free, too? Can’t recall anyone talking about prices. I’ve met Carson for top-ups three – no, four times now – but didn’t some appear in my mailbox in a plain envelope a few days ago? Christ, my memory…what is it doing to me?
Traffic’s moving again now. I see we’re now heading due east, into the heart of the city. Buildings tall now, glass-encased, endoskeletons of steel and concrete. Street lights glitter on the reflective surfaces, shop signs still illuminated hours after businesses have shut for the night. Electricity spent profligately, extravagantly. How much longer will this go on? Russia turning down the gas taps a fraction with each passing winter…AGW can’t happen fast enough for the old and the poor with fuel credits out the window. On an impulse that I’m sure has its origin outside me I reach down into my breast pocket with my left hand as I steer automatically with my right, dip fingertip in the open baggie, raise it to my tongue. The texture is dusty, the taste unplaceable, entirely neutral but distinct and alien nonetheless. Nothing tastes like this – but this stuff does. I know I’ve got enough for now, and at least you can’t OD on it. Sensation of all the nerves in my body lighting up like this damn street, starting at point of contact on my tongue and spreading…fungal hyphae infiltrating the xylem of a host tree…I am a host to this junk now, that’s for sure. Cannot begin to imagine what its agenda is.
Glance out the window. Physical substance recedes still further, now I can see electricity and optical pulses coursing through the office buildings as the workers sleep…current supply for power, merely brute musculature, runs parallel with the subtle nerve impulses in ethernet cables as computers talk to each other, keeping up a silent colloquy throughout the night. Plotting, scheming perhaps…but by now I feel so far removed from humanity myself that I can’t even muster up any paranoia. The great city continues to breathe, hum, vibrate with occult potential – truly an organism in its own right, more alive now than the fleshy bags of tissue and electrolyte that scurry through it each day. Capital’s myrmidons.