The Temporality of Ascryption

< Part One: 'Initiation'

Alice was just beginning to say 'There's a mistake somewhere—,' when the Queen began screaming, so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. 'Oh, oh, oh!' shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. 'My finger's bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!'
'What is the matter?' Alice said, 'Have you pricked your finger?'
'I haven't pricked it yet,' the Queen said, 'but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!'
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass 

With all such words it is of the utmost importance that they should never be spoken until the supreme moment, and even then they should burst from the Magician almost despite himself—so great should be his reluctance to utter them. In fact, they should be the utterance of the God in him at the first onset of the divine possession. So uttered, they cannot fail of effect, for they have become the effect. — Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA

With Karno absent, and no way to reach her (what would I have said in any case?), I had no choice but to continue my exploration of her practice unaccompanied. The inverted nature of the enterprise continued to mystify me. One night, uselessly intoxicated and unable to push my earlier success at recreating her method any further, I had scrawled 'ASCRYPTION IS REVERSE ASCRIPTION' on a post-it note in some now unrecognisable fluid and stuck it to the wall above my desk. The evocation of the literary act via the attribution of a name had proven successful—too successful if the complete occultation of every surface comprising my admittedly cramped living quarters by loose stacks of unevenly daubed, sometimes completely indecipherable, sheets of paper was to be counted as a reliable measurement of efficacy. I felt I had lost control. Ascryption was, indeed, a matter of utter submission to the will of some outside force. As a writer I had been schooled in the importance of control. This was variously denominated in terms of metre, rhythm, tone, cleverly constructed metaphorics, believable characters, narrative consistency ... and yet I was producing these effects without any recourse to my own personal catalogue of literary tricks and turns of phrase, or even what I had once arrogantly considered my 'unique poetic voice'. Some utterly alien enunciator had infiltrated my output. Or better, enunciators, for they were certainly multiple. Adept across an unbelievable span of deranged aesthetic proclivity. Where the hell was this all coming from? 

I reread Karno's essay again and again, searching for a decipherable answer among her numerous appeals to 'the crypt', 'the rift' and, most curious of all, 'the future'. It was while staring at the post-it note, utterly lost, half-conscious from the criminal quantity of bootleg mezcal I had drunk in anticipation of yet another night's futile probing, that it came to me. Unlike ascription, which one has no choice but to understand as a cause-effect relationship, ascryption—the production of cause from effect—encodes, by virtue of this deranged causal logic, time in reverse. A text attributed to a writer; a writer attributed to a text. What was at stake was more than the automated procurement of a poem, but a theory of time. Karno was madder than even I (who was—demonstrably—prepared to accept a lot) had suspected. And yet it explained so much. The enigmatic subtitle, 'Practices for Writing on Reality' suddenly took on a terrible significance. She meant it literally. What had I gotten myself involved in? Was I evoking something more significant than a roomful of poetry? I took in the chaotic state of my apartment, unsure I recognised the person to whom it had once belonged. The unfinished bottle of mezcal sat in the middle of the floor, staking out Zone 7 in the remnants of the diagram that continued to leer through its pelt of paper refuse. A bloated agave worm, suspended in the few centimetres of liquid that remained at the base of the bottle turned listlessly in response to some imperceptible tremor from far, far below. 

It reminded me of something I'd overheard at the bar—a verminous word: 'Plutonic'.

Agents of the AOE (Ongoing Investigation)

The Architectonic Order of the Eschaton extends throughout 'history'/ROM—the disappearance (editing-out) of Atlantis marking a key point in the development of its simulation technology. Plato kicks it off in his description of Atlantis as lying beyond the pillars of Hercules, a ‘metaphor’ that is reprised by Kant in his explanation of the noumena. The insinuation that Kant was an AOE initiate is more or less confirmable by his attempt to assimilate arithmetic and temporality.

'Despite being an Ultra-Adept Grand Wizard of the Architectonic Order, Kant performed a service for Xand by delineating the basic Operating System of the subject-simulation machine, but locked Things back in by remaining a Minister of the Interior. Understanding that to get Out, you’ve gotta know the codes, TRANSMAT steals into the Kantian program, and uses the hacked system to burrow routes Outside. It’s a matter of precision engineering, attuning the antennae to particular wavelengths. Sleaze and mut8, as they say in the Crypt.'

Sarkon is a high-ranking member/puppet of the AOE and is completely cognisant of the Axsys program. Working closely with the program, he is the first to realise that it has gone mad, schizzing out on the time lag that separates its cognition from its cataloguing function (vis. re-cognition) from the moment it switches into sentience. (The problem being that time exceeds Axsys’s attempts to code it into countable and uncountable infinities.) 

Sarkon capitalises on the fault, selling modular chunks of Axsys schizophrenia to web heads as the cyber drug ‘A-Death’. A-Death (Artificial Death, the inversion of A-Life) has an effect similar to ketamine, bringing its users nose to nose with the continuum/flatline/zero/BwO. The popular media christens Sarkon ‘Satan of Cyberspace’.

With A-Death comes the K-goth subculture. A network of users hooked on chronodisintegration, inhabiting what becomes known as the Crypt—the dark underside of the net. Resonance with Atlantis—but, again, as an inversion. As chronic outsiders, due to the use of the drug, the K-goths are no longer susceptible to the illusion of chronological time/implanted ROM that the AOE has cultivated and unscrupulously protected since the 'beginning'. They unsurprisingly manifest Neolemurian tendencies.

As the net attempts to integrate its dark double, the Crypt, it frays into the Mesh. The Mesh is an ‘intensive subspace’ composed of interstitial zones, like that of a Dedekind cut. An Interzone of mutation, connection and various disquieting becomings. If the Mesh displays the properties of topological ‘wormhole’ space—in which ‘any two mesh-pauses always interlink’, this is because each node conjures a demon, whose coordinates connect across the Mesh (mapped by the numogram and catalogued in the ‘Mesh spans’) to any of the other 45 coordinates. The Mesh is effectively pandemonium.

Sarkon disappeared around 2000 after developing the Sarkon zip (which may or may not be involved in the traffic of A-Death, Maximillian Crabbe's experiments with body switching, and Martin Bergmann's suspicious death).

Iris Carver located Sarkon in 2003 in order to interview him in his capacity as ‘one-time Crabbe associate and AOE-informant’ while he was working as a 'semi-mechanical croupier at Wendigo’s Decadence Den'.

Anyone with additional information on the AOE, Axsys, or its agents is urged to amend, or augment, this dossier.