That Autopoietic Machine by Chase Griffin & Christina Quay

The trap door for the organ dropped and we fell onto the cold dusty floor of the underbelly of the stage. We landed with a simultaneous OOF.

“Welp,” I said as I dusted off my shoulders and stood. “That didn’t hurt like hell.”

Octavia, doing the same, said, “What smells like cheese, balls, and a dusty ass dancing the waltz of death?”

At the heart of a profusion of switchboards, television sets, blinking lights, and tangled tubes and wires, was Rocco Atleby, strapped to a stainless steel life-support chair. His skin hung from his ragged skeleton.

“I thought you were dead,” Octavia said.

“I was,” he said, “but I came back.”

“Did you fake your death?” I asked.

“Several times. But I really did die after the hyperloop.”

“The hyper-what?” Octavia said.

“Yes, that’s right. You wouldn’t remember.”

“Huh?” Octavia and I both said.

The beeping of Rocco’s life support monitor suddenly rose to a frequency so high it sounded like the machine might sprout arms and wave them to a dropped beat.

“Hang on,” Rocco said. “I haven’t seen people in many years, so my anxiety is a bit out of control. I know this is a bit direct, but we’re old friends and you’ll understand my desire to speak without veils. I need to verbally recognize what is happening so I can process it without being overwhelmed. It’s a grounding technique I’ve been practicing for decades. I name every surface pressing against my body, and after this I name every sound I hear.”

Octavia lifted an index finger. “We just stumbled into a long-dead cyborg version of our favorite psychedelic fiction author under the Tampa Theater, and he’s overwhelmed? Rocco, are you being funny right now?”

I said, “Yeah, I can’t tell, which I guess makes him either … an awkward fucker if it’s not on purpose or a goddamn genius if it is. Either way, I’d say he’s a pretty sick bastard with whatever it is he’s got going on here.”

“It reminds me of what he used to tell his readers,” Octavia said.

Rocco blurted, “Believe me but don’t believe me.”

I touched my forehead to flag my frustration. “I love the jokes and jeers encrypted into your books. They make for fun puzzle solving in between the lines of story, character, and ontological riffing, but I think pushing your pranks out of your body of work into Actuality makes for some dark magick.”

Blue ooze dribbled from Rocco’s lips down his chin. “You’re mega fans, right? You understand that I’m a necromancer, don’t you? Necromancy is dark magick.”

“You never stop contradicting yourself,” Octavia said. “The noblest lie of your mythos is the joke about you failing out of necromancy school. I always interpreted this as you saying fuck you to the dark art of necromancy.”

“If you throw jokes, jeers, encryptions, and pranks into your fictions,” I said, “you must be as earnest as possible on the plane of Actuality. Otherwise, you throw too much confusion, noise, and fluctuation into the world. And there’s already enough of that in the world.”

“This used to be the way to fight despotism,” Rocco said and then coughed and hacked more blue bile into his hands. “The despotism of the ancient texts that linger beneath the surface.”

Octavia said, “No amount of linguistic machination, even if this tinkering and plotting is from an anthropomorphic eldritch book or a goddamn seven headed vagina angel, or whatever the fuck you want to see the divine and supreme logos as, can deny us possibility.”

“But it also could.” Rocco slapped the large red button in the center of his console. A jaunty piano tune blasted from the dozens of speakers mounted to the rafters.

Rocco spoke over the music. “Pleather seat cushion against my butt, several vinyl figurines of my favorite pop culture icons sitting on the shelf of the inner shell of my life-support seat’s chair including The Séance Hour’s host, D.P. Delemore, stabbing into my thighs, my life-support tubes and wires shooting into many points on my body including my head and spine, my pet rat, Kero, chewing on my big toe which perma pops out of the hole in my shoe. Attire: blue peacoat and white button down with blue marbling and slacks with psychedelic tie and thin socks and brown dress shoes I found at sunshine thrift store a million years ago and gray underwear all hanging off my frankensteined body in tatters, purposeless metal gloves I’m wearing to make myself look more psy-fi, my obnoxiously large eyeglasses pressing into my tissue paper-thin face, my extra tiny futuristic hearing aid jammed into my ear canal, and several cockroaches who have probably mistaken me for moist dirt.”

I lifted a finger. “Rocco, can we possibly get an explanation for all of this?”

Octavia said, “Or is this going to be like your notorious open-ended period in which all of your books between 1972 and 1983 had incredibly ambiguous endings?”

Rocco cocked his head at us. “Do you mind? I’m trying to pull myself out of a spiral.” He waved us off. “And now for the noises: Echo and Octavia’s incessant bantering and commentary; the jaunty piano music; the beeping of my life-support chair that seems to have finally faded into the background; the raucous bird song coming from what must be an absurdly large number of birds; the whirring of the motor that controls the tiny flap up there that doesn’t seem to serve a purpose other than to annoy with its perpetual opening and closing,; the audio from a rogue frequency picked up by my hearing aid of an eighty-six hour audiobook of psychedelic fiction writer M. Vivar’s Collected Correspondence, which is surprisingly entertaining; my craggy voice; that mysterious voice repeating all of this, yes, spontaneously manifesting event that Echo and Octavia only half-remember has occurred in subtly varied forms ad infinitum. Ah, I feel better. Now that I’ve centered myself, what I really want to tell you is this: The DNA strand and the Logos are–”

“I know,” I said. “I know. They are one in the same, and yet the DNA strand–this pandimensional cipher came together when the Pata Beings tore chunks of the Codices, Plasmate, Living Information, or whatever the you want to call it from their binding of implicate order and then reconstructed these chunks into the holy spiral strand and let me be clear right here and now that this is not a definitive origin story only because there are no definitive origin stories because that would imply that something came from nothing ex nihilo which is why we are trapped within the self-generating self-referential infinite homunculus regress machine cannot be activated without its circuitry being properly plugged into the Logos, the Codices of Actuality which pluralistically allow for harmony to be molded into chaos, living information to be formed from noise and fluctuation.

“You were also going to say, ‘Actuality is built on contradiction,’” I said while doing my best Rocco impersonation, “‘so please excuse me while I contradict myself.’ And now you are going to ask me a question.”

Rocco asked, “How did you know I was going to say that?”

Octavia said, “Because everything we are saying and doing is written on this page of the Codices, The Golden Tablets Of Lucidity, These Universal Texts Of Organized Chaos, These Top Layers Of The Infinitely Dimensional Plane Of Total Consciousness, The Pluralist Tractate, The Book of Whatever You Want To Call It Because It Has No One True Name that continues to expand before our eyes.”

Rocco scratched his head. “Why would I say, ‘Please excuse me while I contradict myself?’”

“Because after you said that if you had been given a chance to say that you would’ve gone on to describe the self-destruct mode built into this Actuality, into this plugging in of our DNA into the Codices. It is like a box that switches itself off when switched on.”

“What Echo, or you, means,” Octavia said, “is that once the twin beams of total consciousness, absolute clarity, and perfect lucidity arrive it is zapped away in a near instant.”

“What is this called?” Rocco asked.

I put my hands on my hips. “Why does that matter? What is with your obsession with names?”

“Because I am obsessed with magick,” Rocco said, “and if magick is anything it is the naming of things and the knowing of all possible names for all things. One can do anything if one uses all the correct names that correlate to the presently correct circumstances.”

Octavia said, “That sounds right. Maybe the self-destruct mode is called improv comedy.”

I said to Rocco, “We’ll finish what you started. We swear.”

Rocco snapped his fingers at this in one loud snap of finality and then smiled like the name, improv comedy, pleased him. “I think I get it now. I had it all wrong, before. Language and laughter is the antidote, and reality is the vector. We had our hero and we obsessed over his words and his life, but I don’t think we ever truly listened to him. If we had listened to him we would’ve known to write our own words from the beginning. We would’ve found gnosis between our own lines. We don’t need him and we never did. We’ve always had the words. Everything is chaos, and every once in a cliched blue moon coincidence and incongruity throw a wrench into the absurd clockwork of chaos, and an entity of harmony emerges from the stillness. Love is the force borne of the collision of chaos and harmony, a language against the chaos, against the absurdity of existence. And guess what, you two have found it.”

Octavia squeezed my hand and I squeezed back.

“I love you infinitely,” I said and kissed her deep.

She kissed me back. “I love you more every day. Beyond the infinite patasphere.”

We kissed until our lips went numb. We kissed until we forgot where we were. When we looked up, Rocco was gone. His life support egg and the many tubes and wires sprouting from its top shooting into the rafters of the stage’s underside remained, branching off and crossing a wall of fog that had surrounded us from out of nowhere.

The ground beneath our feet rumbled and we lifted into the air on the pipe organ platform. A blinding light from above clicked on. A noise, like unceasing thunder from a paradigm shifting storm of sanguine upheaval, poured into the square of daylight we were rising toward. Our heads met the threshold and fresh air puffed into our faces. The sky was the most vibrant blue I’d ever seen. The clouds puffed and flowed into creamy impressions of fat tornado clocks.

The platform stopped, and Octavia and I wobbled and caught ourselves as its locking mechanism snapped into place with a metallic ring that proceeded into the atmosphere to combine with the thunder rolling off an unseen sea. The too-blue sky met an edge of stone covered in art nouveau reliefs of cacti. Sitting on the edge was a small stand with Rocco’s theremin resting on it, humming, waiting to be played. From the stand to our platform was a small stretch of marble terra firma.

The thunder rose and its sheer sonic force felt like it was a mere decibel away from cracking the marble in half. Octavia and I stepped off the platform and walked to the theremin, the edge of this marble cliff. A row of Parisian apartments and the Seine and a mass of Paris beyond that rose above the edge as we approached and then quickly faded away, leaving behind a series of movements and shapes that could barely be classified as movements and shapes, and they were spreading across a plane of actuality that expanded and grew into a thing that could barely be classified as a plane of actuality.

The marble roof up to the edge retained its actualness, its place that could still be registered as a place in our realm of space-time consciousness and this sight of the real, a place where signals connect to objects, which connect to symbols which connect to signals, was all that grounded us and gave us insight and context into the non-actuality beyond the edge of the marble.

It was beyond the Earth, beyond the Patasphere, beyond reality, a habitat of total clarity and absolute lucidity that could be looked at but not observed or accessed, only understood by the sight of its surface that could not quite be classified as a surface that this realm must be a plane of total clarity and absolute lucidity.

Octavia said, “It looks like an ocean of noise and fluctuation.”

Octavia took my hand and squeezed. She switched on the theremin and it hummed to life. The ocean played its static for us. She raised her hand to the volume antenna and I raised my hand to the pitch antenna.

We bowed to the ocean and played an original tune. It was a tune that spontaneously composed itself as she controlled the volume and I plucked the notes from the air.

I strained my eyes as I peered into the unknown. Fluctuations that appeared at first glance to roll out these very words you are reading at us, but upon closer inspection the words revealed themselves to be but glossolalia. The suds and bubbles floated and drifted between the extra-dimensional noise and fluctuation and all swooped and danced together in the impromptu foam party. Bubbles detached from their mother bubble clusters, the superfluid multiverses of suds, and found their way into the Patasphere as rogue universes.

The theremin cracked open and unfurled as an infinite number of interlinking planes of sparking wire and circuitry. Fat tornado clocks, one by one, popped out of the tippy top of the cactus-shaped capacitor in the center of the machine. The FTCs floated into the fluctuation and each shimmering, churning device of golden spirals was gobbled up by a bubble.

The planes of sparking solid state formed a bridge into fluctuation. Bubbles landed on the plane and the sparks exploded into a display of reticulation that spread through the network of suds and set the extra-dimensional realm of noise ablaze. The bridge collapsed and settled into a canyon as the fiery noise crackled.

“I can still hear the music,” I said. “Can you?”

Octavia said, “Yes. Let’s play on.”

From a realm beyond the void, we could hear a voice sing, Goodbye mother bird, my watery dream, O puddle birthed from that fluctuation bucket. I’m off to the big time, to the city, my rumspringa!

A meshing of bobbing persons found their way into the grid of the solid state canyon, and the grid morphed into a network of streets, swelling onto the sudzy bricks, filling in the gaps between the people who came before, these pre-gamers, these ancestors of the night yet to become, and lifted their index and middle fingers to pop the rogue bubbles. Their feet, marching to the rhythms of nonlinear actuality, the pumping cacophonous symphony barely beginning to begin on this blustery edge, strapped and swaddled with sneakers, fuck-me-pumps, sandles, and clogs, stomped the mother bubble clusters of the rogue floaters, the clusters that drifted down to their bucket splash borne puddles.

And more of them arrived. Big gobs of rovers and dwellers all stinking of sexual tension, anger, fear, and happiness arrived. All of them stepped outside into the air that rang with midnight rooster screams and smelled of cigar smoke and rotting palm fronds. It was an air that carried the echo of air conditioners clattering to life and thudding to death in the relentless heat that settled on your skin like hot wet cellophane. The feet of the rovers and dwellers hit the wet bricks and I imagined the reflection of the globe lamps bounced off the water and made dancing stars in their eyes. Their heads bobbed as they walked. Music from radios on balconies and buskers on corners whose equipment included instruments of their own invention, and the blaring amps from live bands like Satanic Panic And The Very Special Episodes spilled into the street. This caterwauling concord rose, but the crescendo was well into the future, a place that could only be viewed from the sparking and vibrating edge of psychedelic fiction author Rocco Atleby’s grand machine, the tessellation of his fat tornado clocks, his exegesis, his fractal ekphrasis (ekfracsis if you will), his accidental posthumous opus.

Octavia and I leaned over the marble boundary. We inched further and further over the edge but never tumbled into this grand machine sprinkled with bobbing heads roving in and out of the residences and municipalities of the chrome and silicon greebles and nurnies that slowly faded and morphed into words on a page.

We pushed with all our might toward a fall, praying for a fall, over the edge until we were sprinting around and around the marble like log rollers on a grecian column. The passages on the page blurred as we passed, going around and around, until the words patamorphosed into glossolalia.

Chase Griffin’s debut novel, What’s On The Menu? (Long Day Press, 2020), was a finalist in the 2018 Wild Onion Novella Contest and featured in Entropy Magazine’s 2019 Best of Fiction list. His work has been featured in Oyez Review, Fugitives and Futurists, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, Sobotka Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.

Christina Quay has a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Media Studies. She is a painter, florist, and lover of nature.

Chase and Christina are the proud parents of two boys