With a radically decreasing life expectancy the neighborhood declared war. Acid attacks at dawn. Hack genre militant organizations set internet kiosks to play ice cream truck song to frustrate the heat wave public. The bohemian peripheries of militant formations rerouted the world’s fastest internet speeds, seeing posts before posted, livestreaming conversations that hadn’t yet taken place.

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Their predictive machine language speed-running the future.

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Through the choreography of artificial intelligence, private militias apprehended the real-estate market. They had a bunch of bricks and were going to find the theory. Low-resolution homogeneous representations lost in a horrific hard-drive incident. Resolving to create a literature around not a living person but around a living deed. Residing sovereign in the people and absolving time of being permanent.

As the social body repeated its habitual postures, the stateless kids wore grooves into space and shared useless, inaccessible secrets. The whole delinquent tribe was nocturnal. There was Calibri, a former lingerie model whose parents killed themselves with addiction when she was aged thirteen. H er parents had taught her to be fearless and call a tiger a cat but she would never escape their shadow and would join them again at age twenty. There was Rockwell who once pulled 99 second-hand smartphones in a handcart down a busy intersection to generate a virtual traffic jam. He could get his hands on anything and his drowning drunkardness created the city at night. There was Forte who believed himself a real artist and whose forged Matisse once sold at Sotheby’s for $11 million. He says he’s never seen a cent. There was Leelawadee who appeared and disappeared with the sound of snare drums, one morning she flooded the market and the market was washed away. There were many more some appearing surreal in street-view posing cheerily, faces hidden by cameras in the foreground while in the background the sun rose over the bombed-out Citadel. The debris lay all around spanning months in pictorial space, their legs spliced themselves out of shot. Commodified to the romance of the struggle like tattoos from the mall. They returned to the Barrio clutching dead geraniums and fell in line with the firing squad.

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The smell of imminent death

hung in the air like a friend who

wouldn’t pick up the tab.

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Vague manifestos cascaded through networks of correctional facilities reaching the troops on the ground. Neighborhoods formed loose associations and stormed the studio. Full companies were wiped out in the ensuing carnage. Journalists delivering their piece to camera were devoured by pixelated shrapnel and delivered in pieces to camera. The weather broke. Until sunrise, Leelawadee and Forte played mute in the steeply sloping highway-drainage system beneath the complex. They smoked cocaine mixed with gunpowder and made a break behind the loading bays when the artillery trucks moved in. Shells rained down upon the newsroom. Glass pieces powdered the pioneers of this violent language. From amongst the wreckage of broken images and under the cover of low resolution, Tohoma led a rebel group into post-production. He saw clearly upon invading the suite that they were too late for this news cycle.

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Their bodies were left on the cutting room floor.

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Everyone is asking for car crashes, detail-oriented military invasion, real junk-designer habits and payouts from insurance companies. Drowned zones and involuntary parks portrayed on vandalized billboards in Detroit. Insurgents. counterinsurgents. Foreign regime elements. Religious movements predicated on the belief that information is sacred and that information wants to be free. All this, forging the path for a new pirate politics using slice-by-slice salami tactics processing threats and allegiances through a factory of images.

The future had been predicted and this had made the present unpredictable. It would only be identified from the shadow it would cast. It’s somewhere in the language of digital camouflage, damaged patterns in coyote brown.

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