T-8.4y⌫
"Oh, come on, cunt, don't tell me you're gonna let that fucking CUNT just burn your FUCKING head off!"
Oxazepam's Armoured Handmaiden writhes her last on the richly textured approximation of an anonymous steppe. This Will Hurt is doing quite well on the hastily reconfigured LAN. The floor is littered with the leftovers from yesterday's lunch (Chicky's Surprise), some unplugged (i.e. hand-drawn — aren't we clever?) designs, some "ironic" Iomega relics. Andreas, Japanise and Blydvyrd are on Oxazepam's team, Retroplex, Combat Yggdrasil and Happylogy on Marina's. Guys and gals alike recline in various configurations (lackadaisical air through and through) around a not-so-edgy-anymore steel ZenSpace Industro, some time ago compared by Japanise in a flash of drug-induced inspiration to "a spitoon with an Escher soul screaming to be let out, and, like... now".
"Blydv, not to interrupt your little tea-party somewhere down-fucking-hill, but I could really use some fucking help here..."
"Mind the Owl... Mind the Owl..."
"Just murder Zep, somebody'd better get on with murdering him..."
"Nothing to fear, Marina should be burning the tits off the Maiden right about now..."
"Mind the Owl... Mind the Owl..."
"Just shut the fuck up with the fucking Owl!"
"The Maiden's resilient and Zep knows the map better than the wrinkles on his drooping sack, we might not be out of the woods yet—"
"WHY DON'T YOU JUST FUCKING BAYONET HER, YOU STUPID CUNT?!"
Oxazepam's disappointed baritone booms against the five-metre ceiling. The Handmaiden's screams exhibit an uncanny variety, it must've been a minute and Marina still hasn't noticed a loop. A tsunami of flames licks the Handmaiden's neck with a mechanical, iterative tenderness. She actually does try to wave the twin bayonets, bless her heart, but the motoric function is already severely impeded and Marina steps back effortlessly. 2.0 is the first version with BioTruth more or less faithfully rendering the trajectory of writhing — all previous builds exhibited the tendency to slip into generalities. With her index finger gently nursing the cool whiteness of the plastic trigger, Marina is impressed with the final moments of the Handmaiden: the new build handles the transition between burning clothes and skin with utmost precision and an AI-like flair. She quickly recalculates the odds: if it was Blydvyrd's Telepathic Philosopher who produced those inhuman screams shortly after the kick-off, then by now, even if alive, he should be much too mutilated to pose any serious threat. Retroplex's Dangerous Androsynth, due to a highly unfortunate lapse of attention, was eliminated already at the re-arming stage — for the last twenty minutes bored out of his mind Retro has been admiring the centrefold of Playboy's Weihnachtsmädchen Julia Jentsch. Japanise is a proper sport in real life, and her Bemused Bum is but one step behind, but their combined combat usefulness leaves a lot to be desired. Andreas — as befits his Militant Feminist — always targets "the icky bits" first, and Combat Yggdrasil's Unorthodox Sniper is "metacamping".
Without skipping a beat Marina torches some already screaming villagebots and swiftly changes direction, hoping the shrieks will throw off the hunters eager to avenge the Maiden's undignified demise. Her left hand absent-mindedly checks the slippery orange bead of a Sony Exacta against her sweaty ear — try focussing with In Your Memory looped on an ancient MiniDisc: plastic, hollow bass bashes blindly about with a teutonic fierceness. Downhill Marina notices a ragged darkly purple blur of Happylogy's Undead Tengu X, who must've turned herself into the aforementioned Owl. Relief washes over her. The Owl, while clearly overpowered, is an indispensable ally in times of need — Marina is still recovering from the showdown with the Handmaiden (many of the latter's frantic slashes did reach their pixellated target). But she has survived and they seem to have won anyway, which Happylogy not so subtly underscores by means of an offhanded, gratuitious mutilation of a clueless passerby bot. Ugly, still too synthetic wounds on the little farmgirl's sternum deftly torn apart by the Owl remind Marina she's pregnant again. The girl's head is just a placeholder, the build makes a last abject attempt at an emergency exit to console, the whole room's worth of hardware crashes with an almost audible sigh of relief.
T-0.06y|T-14y|T-0.06y⌫
She saw the beggar outside the entrance to the Pergamon Museum. Though sitting on a bench, the girl had a cardboard rectangle on her neck with KALT/HUNGRIG written carefully in felt-tip pen (she couldn't help but appreciate the visual economy of the slash), as if she were mute — or too humiliated to actually, you know, beg. She wasn't glaring at her, didn't want to pummel her with a sense of guilt. Marina had had a phase of sympathy for beggars, later came to despise them, finally ignore them. That, however, was a long time ago. Now there was only envy.
She wanted to go to the museum just for a bit, to get warmer. Oh, fuck it. Why did she still bother to delude herself? The crippled stone landscape of the Pergamon Altar immediately brought to mind Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, his dog-eared paperback mutilated with the adoration of copious notes, from which she remembered mostly the inspired use of Minion Pro on the mauve cover (Suhrkamp had always hired phenomenal designers). Her German was too weak to read it, his English too weak to translate, so he took her to the museum and, propping himself with Heilmann's lecture about the frieze, tried to explain why Berlin A.D. 2005 was a battlefield, torn by a conflict which raged here seventy years ago and seven hundred years ago and seven thousand years ago, and she wanted to remind him that seven hundred years ago Berlin probably hadn't even existed, which most definitely could also be said about Germany seven thousand years ago, but he didn't listen, only kept explaining who was who and why one always had to fight, even when faced with imminent defeat, especially when faced with imminent defeat, always to the bitter end, because we would all be dead one day, but our lives were meaningful and would be remembered, and that every moment and every decision was important, and nothing could be erased or made up for, and still one had to strive for courage and truth and excellence every single day, and she didn't know anymore if he'd meant art or life, but didn't want to intrude, only thought that if she was to be one of the deities, she would like to be Nyx, in part because she was quite well-preserved, but also because she liked her hair and strong shoulders, and most of all because she was the goddess of the night, and let's face it, you couldn't really get much cooler than that. Then he said they shouldn't waste their time studying with idiots, they should be working and reading and thinking for themselves, never get sidetracked or corrupted. That craft without truth and courage was pointless. That truth was courage. And that even if they were to fail — as they were — their duty as artists was to fail better, since otherwise they wouldn't be different from normal people. She wanted to reply they weren't that different from normal people anyway, but didn't do that, knowing it would hurt, and also because she felt too happy to start an argument, so she just waited till he'd got hoarse with his lecturing and when they left the museum pressed her cheek against his duffel coat and pointed to the bold PERGAMONMUSEUM above the entrance and asked whether he knew what that font was and he said she obviously hadn't understood a thing, to which she nodded happily, closed her eyes, hugged harder, savoured his muted winter scent.
The beggar was young, had a fresh, spotless face. When she half-heartedly motioned as if to grab the battered guitar, Marina quickly shook her head and gave her a hundred euro banknote. Where she was going, money would not be of the essence. The girl tried to smile in return and Marina took a step back — rotting teeth dispelled the harmony of her cute face. Then she realized her own teeth probably didn't look that much better. Her mind had trouble processing the demise of her once so successful life. On the other hand, she'd be lying if she said she didn't feel a certain perverse relief. It would be over soon, she thought as she hung her head and hobbled slowly away.
T-20.6y⌫
In 1998 she flew from Glasgow to study typography in Hochschule der Künste. She was 19, had a round face, disarming accent, warm smile, epic limbs and a certain flair for make-up. She was attractive enough to be desired and talented enough not to be dismissed as flesh. She was a virgin (unthinkable at her age/social stratum), favoured black bras, had freckles in all the right places, a formidable tongue and feisty disposition. The rumour had it some people actually went as far as to study at HdK to get to know her (where "get to know her" was a euphemism for "possess her", which was a euphemism for "fuck her senseless"). Her reluctance and otherness destabilised their vision of womanhood. Though competing against each other, they shared a common goal: to tame her, emotionally, through the foolproof seduction-fucking-dumping trifecta and biologically, via the destruction of the hymen. And they tried, you had to give them that.
She got a part-time job in a small shop selling vinyls and comics, twisted Bezier curves in Fontographer on the first Bondi Blue 233Mhz iMac, rented a flat with Happylogy on Skalitzer Straße overlooking the S-Bahn, had the walls decorated with tasteful black-and-white Newtonian nudes and posters sanitised by the tDR-championed ironic use of Helvetica Neue. She felt lonely. (Obviously she had no idea then what loneliness meant.) The stuff they were coming up with to breach her defenses was, as befell future artists, sometimes quite innovative — she'd even been told that someone had fallen in love with one of her fonts! She'd laughed so hard. Good times, these.
He was a loner, shy, arrogant, bad-tempered. He was clearly neurotic, though she detected nothing of the conveyor-belt goth-pop angst Berlin was famous for. She couldn't solve him, reduce him to a usually very basic combination of sociobiological vectors. He studied painting. He despised typography and considered her obsession with "visual identity" the prime evidence of a deep fear of the essence, the raw stuff of humanity. He hated abstraction and believed that the flight into geometry was in fact the flight from truth. She said graphic design was playful. He said it was soulless. She showed him some of her faces and went on to jabber about x-height. He showed her some of his nudes and shut her up. His paintings were like tatoos, painful, aggressive, ugly, black and blue, unforgettable, genuine. Unlike her designs, they weren't nice, submissive, didn't beg to be petted, didn't whine to be loved. She was jealous of his models. She envied him the talent. Striving for offhandedness she asked him if he would paint her (she didn't dare to say "naked"; it went without saying). He said no, he never painted people he was indifferent about. She blurted out she loved him. He laughed her off and told her to go back to her toys, he was busy. The humiliation didn't bother her, she was beyond caring. She was about to literally go down on her knees when he shooed her away.
Her understanding of the male-female dynamic (which hitherto she had had no evidence to disprove) could be reduced to the following axiom: Given the slightest chance, anybody will fuck a pretty girl. Yet she encountered (and fell in love with) somebody who behaved in a way that could be described as nothing short of utterly irrational. To the best of her knowledge he was heterosexual, used to have a girlfriend (only one — God, how she hated her). She called him one night to ask whether, even assuming he didn't love her (as if such a thing was even possible), he'd rather masturbate than simply go to bed with her. (Yes, she did say "simply".)
"How much have you had?"
"Just... a bit."
"Don't drink any more. Good night."
To survive she had to find a way to come to terms with her unlikely rejection. She went to great lengths to be seen with semi- to very attractive males. (She had to let them fuck her as well.) In bed she always thought of him, sitting in his study, lonely, miserable, unloved. But then it was only she who was lonely, miserable and unloved. (Oh, they said they loved her alright. But that was so far off the mark it had to make her laugh. And it wasn't a funny kind of laugh, either.) She had always wanted to bask in the dark glamour of feeling cheap and used. Existentialism for the pretty ones, sea of sin, the works. But now that she'd tasted it first-hand it felt somewhat less glamorous than Ladytron and Jelinek had made her imagine.
T-16.5y⌫
In 2003 she used her first-class degree to get an internship at Neubau, where she helped to brand the Berlin incarnation of Gatecrasher. Two of her typefaces (Rêveur and Zeist) were licensed by Emigre, then magically found their way back across the pond to a number of European design bureaus and, blown up to ridiculous sizes, started adorning buses and billboards, while she thanked God she hadn't screwed up the kerning. Then for six months she worked for Tremendous, from where Happylogy brought her to the fledgling UI team of Hexagon Sun, just about to start work on This Will Hurt, at that time still only a gritty, gutsy virtual sandbox harking back to the garage start-up culture from before the crash. She was clever, conscientious, had a pitch-perfect sense of space and colour, and quickly became an indispensable part of the team. She could soon afford to rent a small flat in Mitte. She cloaked herself in fictions. Every day for sixteen hours she spoke the lines of neopunkish Chevette Washington, feisty Zona Rosa, hypersensitive Cayce Pollard. She took pains to rid her clothes of logos and her 12-inch Powerbook announced itself to confused VPNs as Sandbenders. Her employers were a bunch of Stephenson fanatics — the job interview was basically a Snow Crash comprehesion test. She rode to work on a Cube Analogue, the whiteness of the glinting frame coordinated nicely with the iPod earphone cable (Laughing Quarter on track repeat) leading smugly back to an inside pocket of her only slightly over-the-top metallic jacket. She glided against the sun, eyes squinted, her exhausted, sweaty thighs laughing in the bitter faces of the drivers behind the old-fashioned wheels of crawling cars. In the twenty-inch mirror of her Cinema Display everything seemed so grand and vivid. She drank nine coffees a day, had a sharp eye for detail, got promoted to a senior UI designer, then head of the team, suddenly the world was at her feet, she was immortal, she was invincible.
He dropped out of school ("fucking waste of time in the first place"). His work was steadily getting crueller, sicker, more deformed. He was gaunt, had a hollow glint in his eye. She kept giving him money and he kept taking it. Then he could no longer afford the flat and she made him share hers. She came home at night and watched television with the sound off, while he painted copulating people with wolves' paws for hands.
T-15.8y⌫
On February 29 she bought a small bunch of lilies of the valley and proposed. When he said no, she demanded the pound. He had to trot out to a Wechselstube. On his return he found her with her wrists and neck slit, grinning and sobbing quietly. It looked bad but the bleeding stopped almost immediately. Some of the pus that seeped from the wound on her neck was yellowish. It hurt a lot when he disinfected the shallow cuts and she clenched her teeth and hugged him, glad he didn't bother asking silly questions, and whispered:
"I know damage excites you."
He didn't answer but, as she learned not much later, it did. She made him fetch the mirror and smiled at the bluish, naked apparition with bandaged wrists and neck. That was
bliss. (Wearing polo-neck sweaters every summer wasn't.)
T-12.6y⌫
He told her he'd quit painting.
"You can't. You can't give up. Don't worry about money."
"I haven't given up. I've finished."
"No... but... what do you mean finished?"
"I've painted
everything that mattered."
"Well, yes, but nobody knows that yet. We need to get you some exposure..."
"This is irrelevant. If it's any good, it will survive."
"You have to keep painting, keep learning... You're young, it's not over."
"It is over. Age has nothing to do with it. And there's nothing to learn. At least not in the sense you mean it."
"But... so... what are you going to do now?"
"Nothing. You mean you want me to get a job? You said money was not a problem."
"Well, it isn't, but..."
"What do you want me to do? Start designing posters? Maybe do some
matte painting for your little video game?" She was surprised he even knew what matte painting was.
"I just meant doing nothing is a waste of talent..."
"I haven't wasted my talent."
"Ah, I see. Now comes the part where I have to start justifying being able to pay the rent."
"You want to know the truth?"
"Straight from your holy lips? Always."
"I don't give a fuck about the rent."
"No surprises so far."
"As far as I'm concerned we could be living on the street."
"Have you ever actually lived on the street?"
"If you must know, I have, for a bit. It was rather inconvenient but on the whole irrelevant."
"Well, anyway, I don't want to be living on the street."
"Obviously. You'd rather keep doing what you're doing..."
"Oh, stop it. Maybe it's not great art, but it's harmless. I like it, I'm good at it. Also this is actually a somewhat ambitious undertaking."
"For one thing, you should lose the ironic tone when talking about art. For another, nothing is harmless. Least of all something endowed with 'ambition'."
"You don't know anything about it."
"I know all that's relevant."
"Please, can't you, if not love me, then at least accept me... pretend to accept me... let me love you... let us be happy, just for a while..." Is that the bit where Marina starts crying? Yes, it is.
"You don't seem to understand the concept of sacrifice."
"You think so?"
"Yes. You, and women in general..."
"Sacrifice?"
"Exactly. You think—"
"Sacrifice? You mean, like disfiguring myself so some self-righteous ungrateful cunt can fucking deign to shove his fucking prick inside me? Is that the kind of sacrifice we're talking about?"
"You loved every second of it."
"You don't even begin to comprehend how much I hate you."
It was the last time they had sex, and by far the best.
T-11.4y⌫
Her mother died of leukemia at around the same time when he hanged himself. The wicked symmetry of injustice kept haunting her. Some bodies thrash and cling to life against the will of the occupant, whereas others fail so spectacularly and malevolently, stranding the terrified passenger suddenly vesselless in an utterly inhospitable environment. The initial instinct was to follow both of them right then, immediately, to shamelessly exploit the momentum, as a damaged capsule for one might use the gravitational well of a dying planet to accelerate its inexorable slide towards the sun. She was too tired though, too weak. Also, there was some unfinished business. Cutting his paintings, she strove for coldness and detachment, but kept crying nonetheless. It took her two days to get through every single one — for all his clinical depression he was surprisingly prolific. She derived particular pleasure from slashing herself — clothed, naked, always genuine, complex, beautiful. The canvas slit open eagerly, nothingness blooming from behind like dark blood against unblemished skin. They killed him — it was only fair they should do without this angry sliver of vicious, surreal beauty. They won't even notice. This candyass world didn't deserve him anyway.
If it's any good, it will survive. Well, it was good. And it hasn't. So much for his wit.
T-10y⌫
She got married, to save herself. She did it quickly and efficiently. She called one of her telepathic admirers from the university days. She dimly remembered him being profoundly average, which could only mean two things: he was now either married to an equally boring mamushka with three kids, or alone. He was alone. He was too shy to ask her out, she had to coax him along. Two months later, after some by-the-numbers "dating", they were lawfully pronounced husband and wife. She started cheating on him almost immediately; he was so spineless he was begging for it. She knew he knew she was way out of his league and would quietly accept everything. Approaching her 28th birthday, Marina, not without certain amazement, realized she actually loved the taste of strange new cock. Her marriage was by all accounts a success. She didn't resent her decision (much). Somehow she had managed to survive the unlikely and terrifying transition from being consumed by an ego-shattering passion to moving in with a 30-year old bloke who only recently had still lived at his parents' house (yes, the famous "separate entrance" deal), who actually admitted to having paid for a full account on Soulmates once (no dice, only some fat redneck Poles replied) and still played "proper" D and fucking D (3rd edition) with a bunch of girlfriendless twats with oily hair who truly seemed to believe that knowing what THAC0 meant would facilitate "some hot no-panties action between the sheets". He owned three pairs of 20-sided dice (one of them transparent). He took her to the park to play frisbee (she always aimed at the head). He read Dostoyevsky (all self-righteous fucks did), Wharton and Coelho. He was efficient, petty and exact. He always shielded the ATM keyboard with his cupped left hand while entering the PIN, "just in case". The idiot even started going to the gym, apparently in a half-hearted effort to impress her, but some hardcore muscleheads scared his skinny arse away in no time. His favourite band: Lighthouse Family. He was sophisticated. She barely survived the mosh pit at Prodigy at Columbia-Halle while he tapped his loafered foot to Smooth Jazz Vol. 3. Once a month they had to go to one of those "difficult" six-hour-long theatre plays, where half of the audience were dozing off on triple espressos, the other half were playing Stack Attack 2 on their handys, and the applause was thunderous. (The less is said about the opera, the better.) Straight from those bouts of bourgeois pretence she would escape to Maria-am-Ostbahnhof, still in a white blouse and classy skirt. On seeing her the resident DJ always managed to magically mutate the tracks into Neon Sky Rain and her awkward body and tight clothes dissolved in the dark and she let herself be thrashed about by the calming waves of the bassline and dreamt of better, simpler times, past and future.
Every Sunday they went to visit his parents, who were bursting with pride at their offspring having nabbed such a "looker"; and successful, too. Their genetic investment had clearly paid off. The stern, greedy glare of his mother always made Marina feel reduced to an organic neonatal intensive care unit, a fresh unused womb at the mercy of her son's acidic semen.
If I were to have his child, a creature infected with his parents' genetic material, I'd personally strangle it with the umbilical cord.Obviously, she did no such thing and gave birth to a healthy boy (she prayed to God it wasn't his; it might have been, though).
T-9.2y⌫
High as a kite, she surfed into Troy on Premiere. She muted the awful dubbing with one hand while automatically going south with the other. It felt so good, flavoured with a remote bitter echo of postnatal soreness, she didn't even notice his untimely arrival. He was outraged. Was he to infer that she fantasised about some... fucking... Achilles?! "Fucking Achilles", that sounded just about right. She couldn't stop giggling, both hands still firmly wedged between her legs. As a matter of fact, her shaky focus had been oscillating between Helen and Briseis, but she didn't want to give him ideas. Wanking was the realm of... of losers and... atheists! Of course he has never done it! Because married people didn't do it. No, he didn't have any filthy "wet dreams" either. Has he then by any chance managed to somehow partake in the trials and tribulations of the enigmatic and ethereal entity known in certain circles as "ejaculation"? Enough of this, she wasn't even being funny.
"Could you please leave the room, so I can finish? Unless you'd rather watch. It's all the same to me."
"Marina, you are mentally disturbed."
"Flattery will get you nowhere."
For a bit she did indeed toy with the idea of bringing herself off right there and then (she'd been working at it for a few minutes, it must've been close), but desperate shrieks of their newborn threw her off. She had lost the beat anyway, angry, frustrated flesh was already cooling off. She got up uneasily, got dressed, packed a few things, snagged a cab and drove to Happylogy, leaving her righteous husband to deal with the fucking brat screaming his head off. Somebody was in for a sleepless night, she thought not without a hint of malicious delight.
T-10.2y|T-6.9y|T-3.4y|T-1.5y⌫
In 2009 This Will Hurt went out of alpha and a first usable demo was presented to the general public. The market, already saturated with both virtual worlds per se and sophisticated MMORPGs, was initially only mildly intrigued by a new contender. This Will Hurt was in a way a mixture of both and had two distinguishing features: the level of personalisation, which was ridiculously comprehensive — and a truly unparalled spectrum of possibilities with regard to inflicting and reenacting pain. Its killer app was BioTruth: a proprietary engine, the result of the combined efforts of coders, physicians, neuropathologists and motion capture engineers, which dynamically rendered avatars' reactions to a wide spectrum of stimuli, providing a variety of uncannily life-like responses, thus facilitating all types of realistic torture and dismemberment, previously unheard of even in the more violent computer games. With the support of the heavily modified Havok physics engine and Digital Molecular Matter and Euphoria middleware, this virtual sandbox offered an unmatched realism of suffering. Users, somewhat bored with the sexlessness and geometric cliches of World of Warcraft and Halo, yearned for some rock and fucking roll.This Will Hurt had closed its first year online just a few hundred subscribers shy of the five million milestone. The buggy 1.5, frantically concocted to capitalise on the runaway success of the original, was even gutsier, and included eagerly anticipated rape and burning alive modules, a heavily extended suffocation and amputation paradigm as well as dynamically rendered realistic trajectories of splattering guts and other bodily fluids. The number of subscribers in Europe alone quickly exceeded 10 million. But then, the Old Continent had always been about decadence. The server farm had to be outsourced to Austria though, to do away with pesky German censorship issues. And, for a time, all was dandy.
In 2013 a proper execution system was implemented, as well as tightly controlled starvation, crucifixion and drowning modules. A completely revamped 2.0, apart from major improvements across the board, was to offer subsystems of suicide, gang rape and sexual torture. Three days after release the 15 millionth subscriber had submitted his credit card data in exchage for the possibility to inflict mayhem on virtual representations of fellow human beings. A week later Hexagon Sun's public offering stormed the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The next day Marina woke up rich; this time properly so. The fact that her wealth was hypothetical didn't bother her much; she had been dramatically overpaid for a long time. 2015 was the tentative date for the release of the third iteration, which was supposed to be "revolutionary" and "transgressive" via the addition of child and animal torture, and the long-requested support for the slave market and concentration camps. Critics and sociologists raged: for some it was a heinous, hateful exploitation of the most primitive animal urges, for others a brilliant, daring commentary on the free-market economy and the liberal mindset. Nobody had the slightest doubt they were witnessing, if not actively taking part in, an event of a paradigm-shifting importance. Hexagon Sun beat Rockstar North to the prestigious Coolest Employer Of The Year Award; to add insult to injury, a year later it happily assimilated the creators of GTA through a hostile takeover of their owner, Take-Two Interactive, which, following a number of unwise investments, was struggling through a protracted spell of recession, one that Hexagon Sun was blissfully immune to.
Marina didn't much care about her work anymore. Fortunately, she was in a position to surround herself with talent and didn't have to lift a finger. Truth be told, the whole enterprise now appeared to her disgusting, as did the seemingly endless supply of money she kept receiving. She couldn't wait for the three-year vesting period to expire. She had long since stopped riding her bike to work and only ordered cabs, usually hung-over, stoned or drunk (and all that in the morning, no less). She started spending nights at the office. She created a test bot, named it Tobias (after her ex-husband; the divorce was swift and painless, he even got to keep the kid, the sucker), took his voice sample from an ancient voicemail recording, modelled and then rendered his anonymous body and face, onto which she mapped his vacuous grin from the wedding photo. Then she would order a giant Whopper and a sixpack of Heineken through her Deutsche Bank Concierge Ultra account, a gram of high quality coke from her dealer, and spent the whole night repeatedly throwing the bot into the clutches of a brand new boiling alive module. The amplified shrieks and purple face of her ex-husband proved to be perfect masturbation fodder. Initially the poor bot kept passing out too quickly, but she was in for a nice surprise: even at the pre-alpha stage somebody had had the sense to include a set of sliders allowing for subtle changes to the temperature of the boiling pot. Following some experimentation she was able to prolong the torture so as to time her orgasm with the most inhuman phase of his agony. Having recorded the shrieks as her voicemail greeting, she had a (possibly coke-induced) revelation: she couldn't have been anything but raving mad. Then she remembered her shrink was spending more time in This Will Hurt than she did (handle: BatailleDisciple, weapon of choice: the Pear of Anguish) and she felt better. Well, slightly.
In 2016 she quit and sold her stock on the spot. By that time she had managed to accumulate half a million euros, fifteen kilo of extra fat, a mild drug habit and a first-class depression. She went back to the flat she had rented for them in Mitte and now simply bought it, the repository of her former happiness, which she was now attempting to re-create in the dark, empty rooms, as if searching for an aleph in a Borgesian basement. She spent her days in front of the television, having located an obsolete cathode-ray set, like the one they'd had, and every night drank herself to sleep, waiting for the ghosts to appear. She started talking to herself; surely the first sign of insanity, or acute loneliness; or both. After the second abortion she finally agreed to a tubal ligation. For some time she ordered prostitutes, male, then female, then both, but even that ceased to excite her. Maybe having her tubes tied messed up her hormonal balance. Every now and then she checked Zeitreise on Wikipedia. Her decaying body disgusted her. Masturbating to prehistoric photos of herself in bathing suits she regretted dearly having cut up his nudes — that would work so much better. Then she had her last pre-40 sex-crazed phase, a three month binge of frantic non-stop whoring, during which she finally managed to contract herpes. And with that fitting coda, her so-called sex life ended for good, to her immense relief.
Having left the physical world safely behind, she returned to the one she had so shamelessly helped bring into being, the ruthless midwife. In real life she was now only a rich, lazy alcoholic with a fat arse and alimony payments. In This Will Hurt she was still the divine Nyx, inspiring fear and awe with her unmatched prowess and dark brilliance, hurling her vessel full of serpents, routinely eviscerating and torturing and maiming lesser beings. She even stumbled across her ex-husband. She still had (somewhat unauthorised) access to Hexagon Sun's subscriber logs; in This Will Hurt her God-fearing, Dostoyevsky-reading former life companion went by the endearing moniker of "SlutHammer" — upon closer inspection, he turned out to be a lieutenant of The Prinz Eugen Rapist Squad, an honorary member of The Female Zoo Travelling Pack and the proud founder of the Torquemada Sturmgruppe. The things she did to him became, quite simply, the stuff of legend.
In 2018 four punks beat her senseless. It was dark, she was coming back from an off-licence with some food. It took her some time to lose consciousness. She couldn't blame them. They probably just wanted to rape her and then maybe kill her. At that stage, she was even willing to comply. They didn't do either, though. This lack of logic puzzled and unnerved her more than the assault itself. She had a broken hip, smashed teeth, too many scars. The trajectory of the flesh: she used to adore it, then hate it, then eventually, after the beating, it became so alien and strange, a scorched surface of a barren planet, she disowned it. She became utterly indifferent towards it, as if it were an ugly monkey suit somebody had made her wear every day for 40 years, initially cute and funny, now oversized, musty and damaged, so that in the end she had forgotten what she really looked like.
T-0.0008y⌫
As unthinkable as it might seem, she was running out of money. It was alright, though. She could already see the light at the end of this hateful journey. She'd had enough. In a rare moment of mental clarity she had an epiphany: she had simply wasted her life, no more, no less, and she had nobody to blame for that but herself. She hadn't been alert enough, let herself be tricked by — and into — a swarm of the clever idiots, Marina the wielder of the strobe light, Marina the purveyor of fluorescent shit. Instead of putting her talents to real use, learning proper craft, painstakingly acquiring wisdom and patience to try and create something beautiful, she helped shape a sadistic universe which seemed poised to effortlessly conquer the world; driven by thoughtless spite she destroyed his paintings, of which every single one was more essential than all her typefaces and logotypes and colour grids put together, she used her charm to fuck up a number of marriages, her own included, she suppressed the love for her first child, and the next two she simply killed, out of laziness and spite. She had blown a fortune on drugs, booze, whores, toy boys, cheap hideous fast food and unbelievably expensive and equally hideous restaurant food, she drifted thoughtlessly on the wave of the basest, vilest drives, wanked away the energy that could have fuelled something good, stopped working, stopped reading, stopped thinking. He was right. She hadn't understood a thing. And for that she now had a price to pay. Mr Walker, meet Ms Temazepam. Goodbye, cruel world. One of the marketing slogans for This Will Hurt was Hello, Cruel World. She remembered the fun they'd had coming up with that. She thought evil was alluring. She thought evil was buying silken handcuffs at Spoylt. She thought evil was choosing Agent Provocateur panties and counting imaginary hearts she was going to break. (Can you break a heart with a pair of panties? If you think you can't, then clearly you haven't seen her in these.) She would sing Only Happy When It Rains in the shower. It wasn't supposed to look like that. Her demise (because you see, the demise had always been part of the plan) was to be dark and glorious. It was to be an aesthetic act, and an entertaining one at that. Instead she was to die feeling helpless, scared, pathetic and ugly. And she had to admit there was some painful justice to it.
She ran a bath, undressed, put on a bathrobe and checked her mail. One new message from a CialisPeddler. In a flash of subdued inspiration she saw how with a few simple moves the garbled copy could have been transformed into a somewhat silly, curiously adequate poem. Exhilarated with this sudden sense of control, an unlikely surge of power laced with the regret that she had never tried to exercise it with the things that mattered, she copied the lines in her neat handwriting in lieu of a generic suicide note:
Be a man long enough for nights of pure fun
of love deepest ass free ecstasy and booty
in which lead gliders freeze against the sun
for 0981 seconds of Earth-shattering beauty
And she left it at that.
SQ9999