The Necromother and the Influencer

The science of human nature. The anniversary of her death, rich workwoman of pornocapital, coloniser of smut, heiress of snuff. People flocked to her grave. I stood among them under the rain, covering myself with a computer sleeve. We chanted her words of wisdom, which, in their abstruseness, brought us closer to the Truth and the Understanding. “You’re peng,” we chanted. “Just click on subscribe, love,” we muttered over our tears. Some of us lay down, caressed the ground and lit up our cellphones’ torches. A man on his twenties read transcripts of her videos – pornos and make-up alike. “The mere skank is a character that’s supposed to give nothing back to society. She’s all up in her stuff, taking some cock here, licking some pussy there, hardcore stuff…and if she ain’t recording it no one’s gaining anything, you know? I’m a reasonable being; I want to be a practical slut who only does stuff that everyone can do and see and be like, ‘hey, that’s cool, that makes sense.'” Amen, little dead sister, amen.

Staring out of the womb. Amidst the madness of grief, the crowd exhumed the her body, then stopped in shock. Her corpse was pregnant. We did not know how or when this had happened, but our eyes were transfixed by the bloated and distended belly in front of us. I retched; a girl by my side vomited and passed out. A woman, an ex-nun and now a midwife, approached with extended arms. A baby – a failed copy of another person. A dead human – the conjoined concepts of death and mankind. Two children, likely brother, applied pressure on the belly. The ex-nun received the melting fetus and cuddled it. We gave it a family and in return it gifted us with infinite wisdom and intelligence and goodness. Whatever it could have been, the stillborn child was now not only an amalgamate of impressions – nausea, putridness, congealed blood, grey skin, fungal decomposition – but an idea, something we could stand behind, our guide, our saviour, our idol’s angel sent to continue her mission.

Hand in hand now. That was my favourite line from her last video. She had said that as she poured a bottle of mascara on her hands, before she started writing non-existent glyphs on her sternum. The bullet chat had been frenetic, often occupying most of the video frame; both my phone and computer crashed when I tried to gaze beyond that intense and torpid abscess of ever-streaming data. In the present, holding the hand of her stillborn necrobaby, I could not avoid thinking of her smile and her ink-stained hands then: “you look just like her in that video,” I whispered and touched its nose. I brought it close to my heart and it was like carrying the relic of a saint. Could her beauty, her joy, her life be more present to me than now? How could I doubt her power and energy with such a clear proof of her empyrean swag in my hands?

Primordial memetic fork. We had escaped the police. Helicopters darted frenetically on the sky above, looking for us with searchlights and playing fast-food chain’s jingles. We were loving it: running through dark alleys, tying our mobile phones to stray dogs and cats so we could not be tracked, only saddened we could not livestream the chase. Laughing and breathless, we discussed whether our love for her was something that transcended reason and existence; if, just like numbers and equations, it would still remain after the planet exploded; would our love for her exist forever as an inescapable cosmological constant? How could we not copy her, how could we not base our whole existence on our impressions of her after she revealed herself to our dreary realities? The purity of her idea reshaped our lives. There was only one real way of judging things: were they a logical extension of the terms of the idea of her, or were they facts of the matter that she existed?

The agitations of passion. We discussed whether we should give her baby a name, whether we were even worthy to do so. In the end, all we were able to agree upon was that no one could ever know the name we gave it; we addressed it as the Influencer and its necromother became known to us only as the Streamer. Splinter groups began to form among us. Mine believed that the baby was not delivered by us, but the opposite: we had been delivered unto the world by it. The original idea of our lives was her existence; all else came to us through experience. Regular people based their whole lives upon the assumption that things would continue as they had always been and reality was immutable, yet our necromother’s videos had been designed to show our expectations were flawed, that it was not certain that sun would rise tomorrow, that concealing imperfections was not the true aim of make up. Like a humean glitzwhore, she told us between moneyshots that the only thing that led us to connect the cause of an event to its effect was the assumption that things would repeat themselves. For me, it was equally logic to think Her child had brought us here, in its inanimate wisdom.

Our threads are too short to fathom such immense abysses. The police had found us. Some of us were captured and tortured – severed from the connection with the Influencer, their profiles were erased and their souls haunted by the echoes of likes and views blinking out of existence. Some accepted this as the Influencer’s wish, believing that nothing in the world could have happened if it had not been wished by the shrivelled fetus we loved so much and its holy necromother who had given our lives meaning and our minds a body. “When I touch the ground, it is the Streamer who interfaces my body with the dirt. Watch her videos, hear her words, she says that super clearly around 2 minutes in on her Another 10 tips for better skin video: ‘when you use this brand of mascara, you can think that it only works because I am there with you, putting every molecule of pigment on your skin, hon.'”

Everyday happiness. Three of us grabbed the Influencer and ran away in the middle of the night. We sought refuge in a community of nomadic people. Digital ascetics. They knew better than asking questions about what we reverently carried and watched over. I secretly bought a new phone which I used to monitor the most and least viewed videos. Patterns emerged: nigredo was everywhere, bursting at the seams of reality. Was there really no way of proving causation? Had it always been like this? My theory: when the Streamer – the original, a priori idea of her existence – got in touch with the world, it was like reality became her corpse bride. The always-already decomposing reality penetrated her being, weakened her purity and putrefied the connection between cause and effect.

There’s no such thing as chance. A server farm. That is where we believed the Influencer could finally reach its true potential. Being around it had begun to change us: we saw leylines carrying bits and pieces of meatspace into cyberspace, a giant tree hovering on top of a skyscraper and a constant drizzle of runes calculating probabilities of every possible event at any given moment, as if it were a slow-motion spitting on the face of determinism.

The falling of a pebble may extinguish the sun. “Who’s to say that if I straighten my hair the world won’t be a better place? Like, can any of y’all prove it? Didn’t think so, bitches.” That was her second video, notes on hair straighteners. The four of us were laying down on a soggy mattress: myself, the Nigerian computer girl, the middle-aged ex-bank-teller (he had been automated away), and the Influencer. We dreamt of the pics we would take if we could post stuff online, imagining angles that could perfectly frame the disconnection between cause and effect, the impossibility of ethics if all our actions had been determined thousands of years ago and the Influencer’s cute little misshapen fingers. Could she, our innominate, undefinable necromother, know which colour looked best with livor mortis?

Thousands of fans. The Nigerian whispered, her voice almost fading beneath the sounds of the server farm. “I think she wanted to decompose causation.” The child seemed happier here. “But she couldn’t do it, that’s why she gave us the Influencer.” Holding the baby, I got up and walked to the closest rack; delicately, I raised its hand until a finger touched the casing. For a short moment I saw an image forming on its skin. “She also probably wanted to run away from her body,” said the middle-aged man. “I heard she got accidentally stuck inside her own body, that she was in truth just an abstract concept trapped in flesh and electromagnetic fields. And that only after this traumatic event we started seeing things as cause and effect.”

There was no necessary connection. On the third day, the server farm became a forest. Cables were vines, servers were all sorts of plant life, we were mutant amalgams of animal parts protecting our young, precious child. We were invisible to the janitors and sysadmins and engineers who regularly visited. It was as if we lived in a dimension unreachable to their eyes. The Influencer had become livelier, as if joy had started to emanate from it. “The third world war will not be physical and will not be cultural, it will be metaphysical.” Did we see things that were not there? Were our eyes failing us?

Ontological putrefaction. The middle-aged man looked at me, his paws stained with blood. “I did not do anything. Suddenly there was blood.” He climbed to the highest branch of a tree. “I taste something sweet, like a mix of honey and copper.” The Influencer was the only thing that hadn’t changed. Even the workers had now been altered and refused to leave the farm. They looked like lewd Hatsune Mikus, all identical. They seemed to notice us, sometimes, between one choreography routine and the other, but did not seem to mind our presence. Some of the plants had become pinker, fleshier. I did not hunger – when had we last eaten anything? – but I ate a raspberry plucked from a server rack bush. Its insides were not sweet, but umami.

An austere, brutish rip. “I like liquid because it spreads easy – like me, lol – but also because it makes me look more like something that’s not human.” The signs were so clear, once we searched for them. One of the trees that had not turned pink started to grow a glass jars filled with transparent humours and brains. Looking closely, we could see all the Streamer’s videos on the bubbles that formed in the liquid. Our deity, our holy necromother, did not speak to us with the works of nature, but with our own inner voices. Our deity was reason, once imprisoned in flesh, being weakened and decomposed by it. The memetic war of causation had been the background of all we knew as history.

Unbridled reason. Unknown to us, the Influencer articulated a stream of posts online that ate away at the limits of the enslaved reason. Between make-up, lewd live-streams, pharmaceutical porn and deep fakes of pregnant men giving birth, it brought forth the old argument of the unimaginable infinities embedded within floating point arithmetic operations that showed the precise moments when human cognition breaks down. The atavistic incongruities between what we knew as reason and its true form were finally made clear. We produced mobile phones from our gigantic ears, helped by porn actors and other sex workers and followed the Influencer in a disconnected chain of events. A pebble brought down the sun.

References

Ballard, J. G. 2014. The Atrocity Exhibition. Sydney: Fourth Estate.
Hume, David, and P. F. Millican. 2007. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Negarestani, Reza. 2012. “The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo.” Edited by Robin Mackay. Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development IV (December): 129–61.
Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York.