"The Sluicegate Incident"

Date: December 8, 2024

I recently came across an old photocopy of a leaked waste anomaly report from the San Luis Obispo Civic Gland Authority. Brief writings of a “Sluicegate Incident”, chronicling department overflow and the people it ended up inside of. A Dr. Marlow Pax is quoted, mentions of “cube cheeked van-sized insects once human and dog”. The on-site computer was immediately deputized. Translation efforts were arduous, uncovering more dislanguage than language (then, and then, or and…). Semioticians and Post-Chomskyan alt-linguists were called in with little luck. “They don’t understand symbols, they eat them” says one note, unattributed. “My storage unit feels like a house for something else and it’s wet” says another. The writings drift from subject to subject, halfwit commentary on giant meaning-eating things. One idiot compares them to rhinos. I’ve seen rhinos. There is an inspectors report attached to the references section. Approximate height 8 feet when upright. Exoskeleton of organic sofubi material. Mandibles evolved(?) to shred matter indiscriminately. Subjects demonstrate overwhelming attraction to dictionaries and pirate radio lexicons. Corpses recovered at sites of invisible crimes. Slop. I see one name I recognize, reminded of the doppelgänger discrepancy audit of 2019. There were skeletons found in identical genetically non-similar subjects that pointed to deeply rooted misunderstandings of selfhood in temporal disjunctions. Nobody is really born at the same time, and never with the same bones. This was where all of this started. In hindsight they should have seen it then. They were possessed by whatever ancient drug lives in this hovering grey mist. Appendicular bones are minute hands on a clock, vertebrae are minute dial markings. There’s a before and after in both directions. The bone marrow of both skeletons was extracted, their genetic sequence mapped to a vertical axis where genetic variation was represented horizontally in parallel repeating line patterns. The differences in these lines were measured and noted. Uncountable patterns emerged. Nobel prizes were delivered under the table. Entire fields of study died, replaced with eidolon simulations of themselves acting out imagined potential had their insights not been so violently rebuked by bug-revelation. What made us? Only they know. But now they’ve made something else...