13. Mar 2020
Kazimir Kolar / 2 0 4 9
14 January 2049
A month before you die the night is thick, almost purple.
As soon as I meet up with my companions we stick on 50 milligram night patches,[1] and in less than 10 minutes we feel the NH2, C3H5, NO3 chemical chains penetrating our epidermis and reaching our internal organs, nerves and glands. It’s particularly refreshing when they penetrate the stomach lining. Feels like your stomach cavity is gently flapping around.
We sip purpledrank[2] from a tetrapak. The wind is strong. Stars appear in the sky for a second. Someone remarks that they’ve “only experienced wind like this once, during a storm at sea; it drove into the mast so hard that the ship’s cables started howling like a raging beast.”
A long silence is followed by a sort of quarrel with no clear mental orientation.
“When are you most satisfied?” I hear someone ask. Someone gives a general answer: “When you put on a Burial vinyl and it’s thundering outside, and you’re drunk and high and you dream the neighbours upstairs are moving furniture.” A third person is taken aback and launches into a lecture. He climbs to the top of the dumpster like a prophet and starts screaming: “You think I have a steady diet? Do ya? A ham sandwich with pickles at 3 in the morning is not a steady diet! The world is in total collapse! Nothing is where it should be!”[3]
I interrupt his shouting. It’s all pretty annoying. “We love speed, that’s the only healthy thing we got! The only thing keeping us on our feet is our lust for survival. The mornings our stomach hurts because the lining’s been destroyed are an investment. For us, the night lasts 24 hours. During the day we wander around and in the morning, trucks filled with trash rumble down an empty, empty street!”
The toxic fog eats into the streets, the sidewalks are greasy from the salt, icicles hang from the roofs. It’s high time we took over a building. We move towards the city center and break into a seventeen-story tower. We take the fire escape and make it all the way to the thirteenth floor. “This copier has wheels,” someone notes. We roll it into a larger space, where you used to step off the elevator. We bust up the plastic lid of the copier with a baseball bat. We kick it to pieces and set it on fire.
Fire. Some dude with a hoodie is going on about a country where it never stops raining. It’s so rich in rain that there are rain mines, and they export the rain. “Too bad Africans can’t export desert sand,” I say. “But they do,” he replies after a while, “it’s just that it’s the Chinese that do it.”[4]
Somebody I don’t know standing in front of me says, “I don’t know why the sun shines during the day. If it shined at night, that would make sense, because night’s when you need light the most.” In a way he’s right. Our mayor Prankovich Jr. installed a huge flood light on the Ljubljana castle, and on the most depressing days, when the city is covered in a thick pocket of fog, it shines in an attempt to imitate sunlight.
A drone starts humming above the building. We break out a couple of slingshots, pull bandannas over our faces and start pelting the thing with rocks. Soon we see a police helicopter closing in. It fervently pokes the search light beam in every direction, like an angry insect.
We run for a long time, until our sweat-soaked bodies unwind in the train underpass. The wind is obnoxious, but we’re safe and we can rest.
15 January 2049
Morning and correspondence with the accelerationists.[5] A lively debate. #Pied Piper of Hamelin# says: Being is monosyllabic, just like Duns Scotus says. #Me#: I’m not sure it’s monosyllabic. It seems to me that it has infinite voices. Every being screams its own language: the table screams, a rabbit screams, the sky screams—in their own language of course. #Witt de Stein# says: Screaming in NASQAT financial language is something completely different than if a human screams. #Marko Bauer#: I had the opposite experience. Sometimes my head is so full from the strolex that I can’t draw the line between money markets screaming and my girl screaming. #Aljaž Zupančič#: Nobody can take over the border. You can only pass through. #Mirko Lampreht#: Speaking of being is a forbidden pitfall. We can only have control over medium-sized objects and their states. But if the objects pick up speed from the Outside, things get complicated. #xenogothic#: Guys, do you remember how the plastiglomerate[6] came about? You laughed back then, but I told you: “They’re raspberries.” #Mirko Lampreht#: That theory of yours reminded me how utterly psychotic matter is. If matter is psychotic, why wouldn’t materials be psychotic too? Apparently the Presocratic atomists argued for something similar.[7] #xenogothic#: By the way; history could not confirm the existence of Presocratic atomists …[8] #Marko Bauer#: I correctly predicted the appearance of microcommunities that abandon the classic framework of the state.[9] #xenogothic#: Ever since Saudi Arabia bought the Italian peninsula and covered it with sand for oasis tourism anything is possible.[10] #Marko Bauer#: It’s been ten years since the Great War and the fragmentation continues to grow.[11] #Jan Kostanjevec#: In the Cryptocene it feels like the fossil age is a thousand years away.[12] #Tjaša Pogačar#: Not so fast boys, you know you can also die from speed.[13] #Primož Krašovec#: In some Asian cities where there’s lots of suicides jumping off skyscrapers they’re thinking about using antisuicide architecture.[14] #Andrej Škufca#: That’s nothing. New York is half underwater. Stockholm too. The sea will slowly flood all the cities. The water apocalypse is coming.[15] #Primož Krašovec#: You sound like someone who adheres to the doctrine of French philosopher Gilles Deblues.[16]
2 February 2049
The fog refuses to dissipate. I hide away in my apartment in the hills above Ljubljana, in the morning I step into the deep snow and trudge my way to the woodshed. I chop some kindling and light the stove. I have enough tobacco, the logs sizzle pleasantly. I’m reading Nicholas of Cusa. I take notes from his voyage to Byzantium while messaging Marko Bauer. He says Nicholas’ philosophy reminds him of chemical mysticism and that his docta ignorantia seems like a crystalline fog.
It’s snowing outside. Once I’m done reading I head down the hill into Kamnik and from there I take the train[17] to Ljubljana. Thinking about the SSC.[18]
During the ride I message Aljaž Zupančič. He’s already lived in New Berlin, New London and New Shanghai. He has the following to say: “Fog. Fog is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The fog in the air, exhaust fumes from traffic and steam from buildings. But the fog above the tall buildings is not radioactive. Just thick like cardboard. On the other hand there’s fog from subterranean tunnels, and it’s sticky from the polypeptanyl.”
Two in the morning. We find ourselves at a poetry reading, and there’s a huge crowd of rowdy people.[19] Drunk students offering critiques and clapping. A girl on the stage recites a poem.
I’m not a fan of the adventures of Batmale or the Alpine travelogue philosopher.
No! I’d rather wonder at the dawn
of the bionic man,
as he and his artificial limb reach
the 400 metres final.
Maybe someone’ll think
someone’s got a craving for something
that doesn’t belong to him,
but it isn’t like that.
When we were kids
we would play in the forest
with a crossbow,
and even though mom would warn us: “don’t do anything stupid!”
it didn’t sink in.
One day we hit a living being.
Unusual voices were heard
we ran through the forest, through bushes and thorns
all of us scared of what would happen.
Suddenly we were in a clearing, full of light.
We saw our neighbour at the edge of the meadow.
He stood by the cow and patted her head,
as, arrow in stomach, she let out a sad moo.
The wound got infected
and despite our pleas the veterinarian stood firm.
They took her into the valley.
Sometimes when I stand on the platform
and observe the city, enveloped in a white envelope,
I think to myself we’re all doomed:
to eight hours,
to technics,
to the crystals of the thick Ljubljana fog.
We all agree the poem is a shitty copy of bacterial poetry[20] and leave the cafe.
On the boat. When we get to Trnovo we shut off the motor and quietly row into the landing at Špica. We open the sack with the briquettes and quietly empty it into the river. We light our lanterns and wait. Ten minutes, the silence is absolute. The fog is thick and we can’t see more than five meters in front of us. The only sounds are splashing and river birds taking off.
We have to remain perfectly silent. First come the babies. They feel out the food with their tentacles. Ten minutes pass and we breathe a sigh of relief when they’re joined by their mother. Visibility is very poor, but we get enough footage to convince ourselves the creature is healthy and unharmed.
16 January 2049
The goods in the boutiques are superfluous. That’s why we’ll break into a store every now and then and stock up on potato chips, coats and other articles of clothing. The stores are poorly guarded. The farms in the country, the forests and the warehouses of artificial food are better protected. Police units regularly patrol those.
When they run an ID check you just need to be quiet and show your ID card. They take down your info and leave you alone. Nobody wants trouble. The politicians can sleep peacefully, they don’t have to worry about burning cars. Riots and violence are but an expense.
You can also see it on the streets during the day. The whores are quick to lose their shit. Doesn’t matter who you are, they’ll break your jaw. They’re dangerous, they’re armed with switchblades. And they’re also on those K-drugs that have flooded the city. They’re particularly aggressive when they’re ODing; they’ll attack a bum who’s fallen asleep in a dark underpass. They’ll strip him down and tear at his face until he’s bleeding. Sometimes they blind him. Usually they don’t know what they’re doing. Memory loss is a fairly common thing with them.
17 January 2049
Aleš Mendiževec informs me of an unusual find. They found some old manuscripts on the subject of Louis Althusser in a passage under the student dorms. For now he’s got them in his safe. I had to promise him the authorities wouldn’t find out. He asked me if I knew how to shut off the security systems so he could move the texts to the roof of an abandoned building in Bežigrad, where they’d be safe. I ask him to go over his plan.
Here’s the plan. First we have to shut off the secured perimeter or find another way to fool the ion sensors. (Which we don’t know how to do.) Then we have to open one of the basement windows, crawl into the basement, and get the containers with the writings inside. (Which is impossible.)
I suggest we hand over the writings to the accelerationists, they’ll take the key information and convert it into their own format, then we go on the roof and burn the papers and calmly watch as the smoke dissipates throughout the urban matter.
“How can you suggest something like that?” he asks. “Even Prešeren will be lost in the static of artificial intelligence. He’ll be reduced to a file, an archived bone kept in a state safe,” I respond. He hangs up. I call him back. “The same thing’s going to happen with the texts on Empirioheideggerism, Pharmakomarxism, Anarchoprotestantism, Afroconfucianism and Voodoohegelianism.”
18 January 2049
It’s hard to stay out on the street. A strong winter wind is blowing through and the blasts of snow are so overwhelming that it’s impossible to breathe in the open. The ghosts have left the city. The underpasses are iced over, the trains are running late. I meet Crystal Duck in a tunnel. She’s just gotten in from the Russian islands.[21] Conversations with her are always special. She’s silent most of the time. She makes a living mining cryptorubles.[22] “Half a meter of snow has fallen,” I say. She looks at me but says nothing. Yet her gaze doesn’t exude doubt or blame. That’s why I love Crystal Duck, because we communicate without words. She read the writers of the Brown Baroque[23] in her youth and it shows.
From the bar we observe tightly guarded kindergartens surrounded by soldiers with automatic rifles.[24] She orders coffee with whipped cactus cream and I order a protkebab.[25] Nothing new in the tabloids, except that they found the Leader’s letter.[26] Looking at the crime section I see that Joseph Roth (aka Lea(h) Uxhül von Oxxen II) died. Ovarian cancer. He was 51.[27]
20 January 2049
That morning something changes. The feeling isn’t the same anymore. We’ve been walking for three hours without a break and we still haven’t come across water. Just swamp and mud everywhere we look. It’s clear we’re going in circles. We stop in a half-collapsed factory for our break. Well we think it’s a factory. Then Primož Krašovec says, “That’s dumb. We’re in the middle of a winter museum. Look around. It’s artificial snow.”
We find an old broken refrigerator and open it. There’s some cans of expired food. Nothing of use. We put down the expulsion rifles we’re carrying to shoot embryos. “It’s not off to a good start,” someone says.
Some of them make it back. They found the remains of a decaying seagull carcass on the abandoned banks of the swamp, our cook can use it to make a ragu. Lunch is off.
The next group sets out into the snowy swamp in search of water, while the rest of us move into an adjacent concrete building. There are no windows and we sit on the crumbling, lime-covered stairs. We look out at the falling snow. A cold dampness strikes out at our bodies from the walls.
There’s a large puddle in the middle of a huge room. It’s very deep and the water in it is contaminated, but reeds nonetheless grow, unfurling their blades in the wind like some sort of tentacles. Only now do we notice that the puddle is so deep that it has covered the train tracks. As we leave the room we notice a graffiti in the underpass. Someone wrote SOMEBODY KILL ME, PLEASE. I’M SICK OF MY EXISTENCE. CALL 041 963 177.[28]
21 January 2049
Nobody’s answering. I called Primož Krašovec. He’s not picking up. I try to call Marko Bauer and they tell me the last time they saw him was in the boat repair shop near Barje. Andrej Tomažin moved to Alt-Grosuplje. He makes a living selling ugly sentences.[29] It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that this is a diary of the last days. Tjaša Pogačar moved to the southern Alps, and she makes the kind of objects that are compatible with extraterrestrial intelligence and cognition.[30] Mirko Lampreht moved into the woods. He lives in a cave and carves tools out of wood.[31] Andrej Škufca still heads up the Institute for Xenomorphistics and Biothreats.[32] Jan Kostanjevec is currently working at a light conservatory in the Pannonian basin.[33] Miroslav Griško traveled to Scandinavia.[34] Ela Praznik is still studying octopuses.[35] There is no data on the others.[36]
22 January 2049
In the morning I get a call from Crystal Duck. She tells me they killed you.[37] I’m very drowsy and I don’t really understand. I feel like Jacob Schnitzler in the last days of his life.[38] Crystal Duck is grief-stricken. She can’t stop crying. I’m also distraught, but I can’t tell her that I feel bad for our expedition, for my companions. I keep quiet about it for a long time, then we say our goodbyes.
This is no longer a diary of the last days. It’s more a text seeking shelter from death, because it actually wants to survive.
I descend towards the river where the machines are buzzing. Behind them are crumbling buildings. I decisively step into the interior of an unknown space without a roof and I stop. The night is becoming purple again, maybe the hue is more in the direction of blue. I tour the collapsed walls, the damp scratched up surfaces that seem utterly destroyed. Someone lit a fire here. A month ago, maybe two. A handful of calf bones are strewn around the pit. Someone disappeared without a trace, I think to myself, but he also persists without a trace. That’s my first thought. I t ’s n o t o v e r y e t.
Kazimir Kolar is a writer. In his view literature is connected to both creating new worlds and the mysterious faithfulness to an event. In 2016, his novel Glas noči (The Voice of the Night) was published by the Litera publishing house. He lives and works in Zalog near Ljubljana.
Published in Šum#14 – Ljubljanastrophe: Alien Perspectives. Artwork by Blaž Miklavčič. Translated by Michael C. Jumic
[1] Adhesive strips containing night hormone (melatonin) blockers, stable oxygen and synthesized vitamins.
[2] A xenodrink. Made of a mixture of cough syrup and Sprite. It triggers hallucinatory effects. It falls under the same heading as asp-cola (aspirin and Coca-Cola), a drink that appeared on the hip hop scene in Nove Jarše in 2022 and from there spread throughout the Ljubljana underground. It was banned until 2031, then later legalized and freely sold.
[3] Astrophysicists discovered that space has (at least) 135 dimensions and that it’s considerably more wrinkled than they originally thought. Cosmic paradoxes are the order of the day. Some planets were found to orbit in the opposite direction of their movement. Sometimes it happens that they meet and crash into themselves and explode. (Not always though. In some cases we’re dealing with ghost planets that can pass through each other.) But that’s not all. They also proved the existence of glacial stars. Although readings show that the surface of such stars reaches a scalding 31,000 degrees Celsius, their structure is made of ice. Thus there arose the theory of hot ice—it’s ice that’s hot, but it appears to be cold. In terms of fuel consumption this means that the fuel in glacial stars is ambivalent, as it burns in the form of ice structures. But it’s not that the ice is burning, it’s more like the heat vapors “freeze”. Huge shifts also occurred in our understanding of the cosmos (the “personalization” of space happened). They discovered that some planets “aren’t in the mood”, that they’re “sad”. This causes them to lose a dimension—to become flat or to shrink down to a single point.
[4] Neo-China is using light bulldozers to dig up Africa in search of metals. Africa is one giant sandbox. It’s no longer colored black, but red, like the surface of the Mojave Desert. The rivers are poisoned and have turned into mountain ranges of manganese salt as a result of oxidation and the unbearable heat. There’s neither nature nor culture in Africa. There’s only (artificial) genetic reproduction. Superslaves (concubines, porn actors, athletes, murderers and soldiers) are bred for sale to the wealthier continents in giant underground laboratories. They can be purchased at slave boutiques.
[5] Certain individuals who go about the city at night and clandestinely release octopuses into the Ljubljanica and other waterways. They believe in the coming of an artificial intelligence that will manifest itself in these animals. The nervous system of an octopus has long been known to be considerably different than that of vertebrates (the neuron mass of the octopus is evenly distributed throughout the organism and bears no resemblance to cephalocentric ordering). They draw on the tradition of bots sent from the future by artificial intelligence. They emphasize mutation (the physiological level), fragmentation (the political level), atomization, pixelization (the aesthetic level). They tend towards an abstract approach in science and swear by the unconscious that will appear on the markets of the future, which is why their language resembles program code. They reject orthohistory and swear by non-history. They love wormholes and hate open spaces. In chemical matters they prefer the molecular to the molar. In their philosophical views they place their faith in the great Outside, and not so much in the big Other.
[6] Due to the mass dumping of plastic in nature, rocks and plastics have merged. This process resulted in so-called plastiglomerates. On the geological level plastic has led to the appearance of new continents, so-called plasticontinents.
[7] They put forth a naive explanation of the formation of ricotta (R). They supported the “insane” milk argument (a “i” m). (R)icotta was formed by the atoms in milk “going insane”, that is, they began to join up with other atoms in a “panic”. This is how milk curdled. (R)icotta is therefore the result of “milk” delirium or, as a logic equation, “m” d → R.
[8] History was rewritten in 2047. That was when physicists made a quantum listening device with which they could pick up very faint, chronologically distant frequencies. On the hypothesis that all energy in the universe is preserved and no frequency (wave movement) in the universe disappears into nothing, the device was first used to listen for extraterrestrial voices. But instead of voices from the future they found voices from the past. It turns out the device could be used to reconstruct conversations dating back 150 years. Thus the public learned what Hitler and Stalin talked about at their secret meeting in 1936. They found the telephone conversation where they ordered the hit on Kennedy in 1963. Within the year they had amped up the range of the quantum listening unit by a factor of 10, which meant that mankind could now listen in on Caesar’s murder in 44 BC. Phonetic analysis shows that Caesar did not say “Et tu, Brute!”, but “Et tu, porce!” (You too, you pig!).
[9] That was the year intellectuals began leaving the country en masse, as they realized nobody respected them. They moved to the woods (“silvans”), to riverine areas (“riverids”), to the mountains (“montanids”) and to islands in the ocean (“oceanids”).
[10] Insolvency forced the Italian government to sell the entire territory of the Apennine Peninsula. Italian citizens were relocated to the shores of the Black Sea (due to similarities with the Mediterranean). Thus the prediction of Roman historian Gaius Crispus Sallustius, who wrote that you can buy absolutely anything in Rome, came to fruition (see DE BELLO IUGURTHINO, 35.10).
[11] The history of the internet took a tragic turn. By 2027 half of the files on the internet were pornography and cats. A year later tensions grew between the two political blocks and a cold war lasting two years followed. In 2029 serious conflict finally broke out. The two armies of algorithmic bots—The cat army (CATS) and the United Army of Internet Pornfarms (UAIP)—faced each other down and all signs pointed towards total catastrophe. A week later all hell broke loose. The war lasted three months and enormous amounts of porncapital were destroyed, while on the other side many cats were killed or sent to gulags from which they were never to return. But nobody won this great war. Chaos reigned on the internet. Uncontrolled internet “foresting” became a thing. The world wide web was saturated with megadumps and digital ruins. It was useless. Thus there arose multiple nationalized versions of the internet: Ether.net (Europe), SpaNuli.net (Latin-speaking countries), noIR.net (U/D/S U/n/i/t/e/d/D/a/r/k/S/t/a/t/e/s), Pluri.net (various private networks), Brex.net (DK – D a r k K i n g d o m), Xiao.net (China), to name a few. These also folded over time, as everything tended towards individualization. Each individual became his or her own civilization, creating his own internet, his own history, his own tradition. Fragmentation and individualization accelerated at a frantic pace.
[12] The oldest remains of the fossil age are a pile of coal that sits untouched at the train station in the town of Hrabal in Chile (on the Fujento-Hrabal-Salgado de Romanella line). The coal is 162 years old. It was granted special protected status as a monument in 2032.
[13] In 2038 Uwe Langstromer had his hips and legs surgically removed and replaced with special artificial legs resembling those of a shrimp (the order of decapods). Shrimp are known to accelerate their bodies to a speed of 6.4 km/h in just a few milliseconds. Uwe Langstromer thereby made history as the fastest person in the world when his body reached the speed of 11,520 km/h in one second. Of course what the scientists said would happen happened—the burst of speed tore his body in two and he died at the very moment he set the aforementioned record.
[14] The idea behind antisuicide architecture is as follows: build skyscrapers so high that a body thrown from them would fall into the void for several years, which would certainly scare the would-be-suicides and dissuade them from such a course of action.
[15] Venice was the first city hit by the water apocalypse. On 22 April 2024 a giant cruise ship from Indonesia entered the harbor and disembarked 20,000 tourists. St. Mark’s Square and other parts (San Polo, Santa Croce, Castello, Dorseduro and Cannaregio) sank nearly half a meter below the surface in a single day. The city was quickly evacuated, but disaster could not be averted. That day Venice began sinking at the unthinkably rapid rate of 10 cm a day, and in 14 days the city was 1.5 meters under water. The sea not only flooded Venice, but also the neighboring towns (Treviso, Padova, San Dona di Piave). By 2033 the seas had completely flooded New York, Stockholm, London, Barcelona, Trieste, Koper, Poreč and most coastal cities in Dalmatia. The year 2033 was formally designated as the start of the Hydrocene.
[16] The founder of weird shit in philosophy. His widely known findings include, for example, proof of the individuality of dead material: 1. All depth must become surface. 2. Infinitely tiny particles become medium-sized objects (chairs, tables, tools). 3. Molecules, for example. 4. Cuts or scratches on molecules attest to their individuality. 5. Molecules can also rust, that is, they have their own past. 6. Molecules have the properties of objects, perhaps of living creatures. 7. Therefore they are individuals.
[17] The Paneuropean Express was built in 2026 with European funding. Some call it the “carbon express”. Its basis is carbon pudding—a malleable mass with low weight that alters hardness once it comes in contact with a larger mass (the locomotive and cars). Because of its ideal weight and flexibility this type of railroad was very easy to construct. But now it’s old and slow. The trip by rail from Ljubljana takes 31 minutes to Vienna, 44 minutes to Berlin, 58 minutes to London and 14 minutes to Maribor.
[18] SSC, the Spermatospiritistic Church. This church’s doctrine can be summed up in an equation: seed = the spirit (that is, sperm = spiritus). It was founded in 2041 by Juan Guardia Xomos and was based in Spain. Its basic economic activity was the long-distance impregnation of women (even across continents).
[19] They seem to be members of the BSP (Black Sun Party). They believe the sun is black.
[20] Bacterial poetry was discovered by accident. In 2031 certain strains of the Escherichia cristalensis (KNCC12726324-BNP-R300, FGPTO791736453-COR-121 and ZEM958473643-BE-140) bacteria were observed to create special crystalline forms that could be translated to human language using a xenolinguistic program. (Strictly speaking, bacterial literature is not literature but crystaloture.) Monstrously beautiful poetry was discovered. Its beauty drove some scientists (those with weak immune systems) to internal bleeding and death. In 2035 bacteria were awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for the first time. There are two theories as to why bacterial poetry is so profound. The first claims that it has to do with the infinite number of bacterial holocausts caused by antibiotics. The second states that highly developed bacterial groups are the logical continuation of history. The latter is pretty convincing. In 2022 they began using 127 amino acids in the genetic engineering of enzymes (previously only 20 were available). Humans thus began using bacteria for a number of tasks: 1. mining precious metals (a single bacteria can dig up approximately 0.000001 grams of gold), 2. cleaning the air, 3. converting carbon dioxide from the air (eliminating hunger). With time bacteria acquired a sort of reflexive consciousness. They began to be aware of their own existence, and they even developed their own language. For example, their language was found to contain hitherto unknown types of future tenses. These tense modes refer to future bacterial generations. Bacteria reproduce at an exponential rate, which is why they “use” 11 types of grammatical future when “forecasting” future generations. Future tenses III, IV and V refer to the cytoplasmic membrane, future tenses VI and VII refer to the nucleoid, future tenses VIII and IX refer to the endoplasmic reticulum, future tenses X and XI refer to the golgi apparatus and photosynthetic pigment. The rate (of reproduction) of bacteria thus led to a new understanding of (human) grammar.
[21] Russia used hacker attacks to pay off the Greek debt and in return got a few Greek islands. The islands were renamed accordingly: the island of Lesbos – Atok Skripal, the island of Chios – Atok Nizhni Novgorod, etc.
[22] The first cryptoruble purchase was made on 27 November 2023. Afanasiy Bezyanov ordered two pizzas from Shuttle Pizza. The transfer of currency during payment took seven minutes, and the food got quite cold (it was lightly snowing).
[23] The Brown Baroque is a literary genre characterized by high-sounding descriptions of the urban jungle, tunnels, underpasses, public restrooms, roadside drainage ditches, dive bars and other dirty parts of the city. Its key authors are Marko Hovel, Manca von Underpass, Andrej Dumperton and Frančišek Traintrackford. The expressions “dirty” or “yellow” Baroque are also used to describe these authors. It’s an important literary movement because it led to the development of Iron Baroque (whose authors include workers at the steel foundry in Ravne na Koroškem), Visceral Baroque (a genre popular with nighttime security guards) and Platinum Baroque (popular with trap gangsta geisha). The main proponent of Platinum Baroque was Kukla Kesherović.
[24] A response to Vegan Terrorists declaring war on the entire world because of the killing of animals. They kidnap young children, euthanize them, cut them to pieces and throw them to animals for food. Softer forms of vegan action didn’t work, which led to one camp of vegans becoming apolitical and another becoming extremely radical. Vegan Terrorism developed out of “grim” speciesism.
[25] A kebab printed with a protein printer.
[26] The wreckage of German U-boat U-3523 was found on the Danish coast near Skagerrak. It was one of the submarines the Nazis intended to use to escape to South America. It contained the Fuhrer’s final message to the world:
Translation: [I’ve pulled one over on you a hundred times, and I’ll do it a hundred more because you’re morons, you’re so stupid that those matching your stupidity have yet to exist [on earth]! You’ve learned nothing, let alone understood that I’m too smart for you to keep up mentally. Even though I make fun of you and you hate me, I know you’re going to read my last letter. I want to tell you that you exist as I deem fit, that you think and feel as I deem fit. Such is the nature of the weak minded. So this is just one more prank. I was happy to please you, idiots! HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA! A.H.]
[27] Lea(h) Uxhüll von Oxxen II was the first man in history to get his period. The year was 2033, specifically 13 April, at 11:35 AM. In 2029 they implanted a uterus, Fallopian tubes and ovaries. But the road to his monthly bleeding was still a long one. It took three years for his ovaries to produce a dominant ovum and for ovulation to occur in his reproductive system. Then complications arose in evacuating the ovum. Due to low levels of luteinizing hormone (Lh) it refused to mature and leave the ovary. This was ultimately achieved with hormone therapy. Joseph Roth had this to say on the occasion: “I’m happy it worked. I’d like to thank all my friends, my dad and mom and everybody who supported me and believed in me. Winning OVULBOYS! [a reality show] really means a lot to me.”
[28] Suicide was prohibited by law in Slovenia in 2039 (lex suicidaria), which led to the appearance of companies on the black market that carried out contracted “suicides” disguised as murders.
[29] He made millions with the lines “I cut the girl up and cook her”. Owing to its cringe and ugliness, the sentence became so popular that they even used it as the name of a famous restaurant in New York. There diners can order baked arm of young girl, child ribs, placenta lasagna and fetus meat (all lab-made replicas). The drink menu contains different kinds of urine (animal urine too). Yuppies and other people with serious issues frequent the locale.
[30] Her objects more closely resemble weather conditions or rare geological occurrences than medium-sized objects: “rocky storm”, “metallic flood”, “synthetic rain”, “Pleistocene heat wave”, “concrete fog”, “wildfire ravaging the bottom of the ocean”, “fossilized water” etc. In her view this type of art represents the final shift away from OOO (object-oriented-ontology) towards AOO (alien-oriented-ontology).
[31] Last I heard he made a wooden pot that can be used to boil water without burning the bottom. This takes a great deal of patience and nerves of steel.
[32] The Institute was founded using money from predicting the fall of real estate values. In 2029 the values of cryptorealestate shot up, while those of real real estate tanked. The 2030 prices of certain buildings are a telling example of the fall in value: Buckingham Palace (98 pounds, purchased by Susan Lipton, a single mom working as a cleaning lady at a school in London), the White House (123 American dollars, purchased by John Steel, a down-and-out bum and drunk), The Sydney Opera (77 Australian dollars, purchased by a group of homeless people of aboriginal stock, upon purchase they intentionally burned it down), the Eiffel Tower (125 Euros, mistakenly purchased by a bunch of college students while surfing the web drunk, currently unoccupied), Cankarjev Dom (23 euros, buyer’s identity unknown, uninhabited), Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana (18 Euros, still on the market, reports of paranormal activity).
[33] Work takes place in light “warehouses”. Scientists have managed to use artificial lenses and diffractional bulbs to box different types of light that, due to climate change, no longer exist: Antarctic light, the light above Siberia, the Northern Lights etc. August fell out of the calendar system, so they’ve also packaged and stored “light in August”.
[34] He got a job at an animal nursery, where he helps birth white bears.
[35] She works with octopus cell genetics in her laboratory. She has managed to figure out that cephalopods are capable of sabotaging DNA transcription: once the copying process is complete (following the polymerization of tRNA) they break into the RNA sequence and remove a particular nucleotide (usually adenosine) and replace it with something else (usually inosine) … – GCTGCTGGTACGGACTGAAAGATACTCCTGA-… >>> …-GCTGCTGGTICGGICTGIIIGITACTCCTGI-… Perhaps this “hacking” property is the key to understanding why octopuses are such special animals.
[36] In a different time loop almost all the accelerationists are dead by 2037. Jan Kostanjevec went missing in the autumn of 2030. They found him on the side of a soccer field at an elementary school in Šentvid on 14 December of that year. His face showed signs of force (very strong), which broke his jawbone (at first the forensic analyst thought that Jan Kostanjevec was injured in a car crash during his kidnapping, but he dropped the idea as soon as he saw the x-rays). A year later, on 7 June 2031, Maks Valenčič disappeared without a trace. Aljaž Zupančič vanished in 2033. The same year they found Miroslav Griško behind a fence on a highway off ramp. Ten meters below the body lay his jacket, torn to pieces by lacerations. His breastplate was punctured multiple times and the autopsy confirmed a fractured hyoid bone. Marko Bauer was last seen in the boat repair shop in Barje on 10 April 2036. He was found drowned in the Ljubljanica on 13 April. Mirko Lampreht met the same fate. His water-logged corpse was found on the roof of a hotel in Greece by a boiler repair man. Blood tests revealed the presence of strolex and other antidepressants. Andrej Tomažin was shot by the cops in an underpass in Bežigrad in 2035. Two years later, on 15 August, Primož Krašovec was found strangled behind the table in his apartment in Ljubljana.
[37] Someone knocked on your door in the morning. You just assumed it was one of your friends, so you went and opened it. But there were two state agents and they told you they have an order for your execution. It was issued by the state court. You got dressed and went in the car with them. They drove you out to the edge of town and pulled over ten minutes later. You got out of the car and proceeded to walk for a while. You wondered whether they were going to shoot you or give you an injection. You told them, one more time, that you’re a former official attorney. They didn’t care. Before you was a quarry. You let them tie your hands and blindfold you. Then they read the order again. They gave you your last cigarette to smoke. In the end they asked if you have any last words for your parents or friends. You said no. You weren’t afraid but all of a sudden you began to shake. It was drizzling, and it was getting cold. The agents finished you off with two shots from a pistol. Someone hid at the edge of the forest and saw it all. He thought: they killed you like a dog.
[38] Jacob Schnitzler was the first android to stand up to the system by refusing to become a scientist. Despite his IQ (144), in 2028 he moved to Sauler Berg in Southern Carinthia. He worked as a lumberjack. He chopped the branches off fallen trees and put them in piles. He also used logging machinery to prepare logs for transport to the valley. In the winter he maintained and operated the lifts at a nearby ski center. Tourists who met him said he acted like a human. He was calm, quiet and spoke few words. He lived in a small log cabin at an altitude of 1677 meters above sea level. It was here that he was found hanged. As they took him down from the noose, “Tanci! Tanci! Seks na balanci!”—the lewd, nonsensical refrain of a Slovene polka-style pop song about having sex on a bicycle—could be heard from a small transistor radio.