The Call of Lytic
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Some of us are stricken with the winner’s affliction. We’ve found ourselves hopelessly preoccupied with the unfortunate concept. “WIN THE GAME,” they’d always tell us. “WIN THE WAR!” We never thought about why. We never thought about for whom. For whom do we need to win? Is it for our individual sakes? Is it for the sake of the team? What exactly makes “us” a team, anyway? And who, precisely, is the opponent? What material element empirically defines the boundaries between them and us, and dictates our need to defeat them and our rightness in this cause? “It doesn’t matter,” we’d say (or not say, as the case may be). We are us. They are them. We must win. And we would, by God. And when we did we would thrust our apelike fists into the sky and jeer at them – them, over there: breathless, sullen, battered. Pathetic. They were defeated and we were the ones to bring them down. And with the blood pounding in our hearts and the hellfire burning in our eyes we would feel without any ounce of doubt for that one incredible moment that we were good and right and just and strong. We would celebrate the victory feeling like kings and toast to our collective greatness. “The day was won,” we’d say.
But then tomorrow came. We woke up. The fact of yesterday’s victory remained: we had won. We were great. We had defeated the enemy. But the feeling – it had subsided. Where was that sense of infinite rightness, that feeling of ultimate fulfillment? We’d had it only yesterday. It was gone. It was gone and the only way to get it back was to win again. We reconvened, hardened and scheming, and argued with each other over logistics. Suddenly the game wasn’t fun anymore. Like addicts we hungered for that feeling we’d known before, and the stakes, somehow, seemed raised. We brooded over our errors. The enemy would know our weaknesses next time. They would find the holes in our armor. We must achieve perfection so that they will have no chance.
We would win again. We would also lose. We would know that wonderful, irreplaceable feeling over and over, although it seemed to dwindle in its majesty with every successive victory. We would also know the sour, brooding experience of defeat, and retreat to our round table to nurse our wounds and plot again – better, this time. We must do better – indefinitely better. We must be harder, better, faster, stronger. We must be perfect. Why? We didn’t think about it. We just did it. Don’t think: do – the irony being that thinking was demanded of us in the process of the doing. And the danger lay therein.
A few decades and nightmares and hideous, bottomless moments of merciless self-reflection later those of you afflicted with this winner’s condition may come to a terrible and terminal understanding. After all of that thinking you may one day find yourself observing the meta-game beyond the meta-game and spontaneously convince yourself that there is, in fact, no game at all. Wait! STOP! This contradicts the essence of my being! But what is the essence of my being? No! Don’t ask that question! And you may tell yourself: this is not my beautiful house! And you may tell yourself: this is not my beautiful wife! And you may ask yourself, “am I right or am I wrong?” And you may say to yourself, “my God! What have I done?” You may be torn to pieces as your animal instincts war impossibly against your higher senses of truth and fact. You may recoil in horror at the idea that everything that you believed in and everything that defined your sense of identity was a paper-thin façade and close the door, saying “no, I can’t face that. It can’t possibly be.”
Or you can take a deep breath, look over the edge, say “fuck it,” and dive headfirst into the abyss.
I can’t tell you precisely what you’ll find there. I can’t say that it’s good. I can’t say that it’s bad. It defies such superfluous characterization. You’ll shed a yoke of psychological slavery, but you won’t find freedom. You’ll see a thousand different faces from across all of known time, but elementally they will be exactly the same. And maybe, just maybe, if you get lucky, you’ll find another in there with you – another unfortunate malcontent who stumbled upon the same black door and walked through into the Sheol of logically-induced depersonalization. And for the very first time perhaps you’ll truly connect with another individual mind that has shed the bonds of the childhood “team” and surrendered to the undefeatable reality of the unreal.
It is in this experience that you will finally realize that satisfaction is not and never was within your grasp. No amount of winning would ever have landed you permanently in that Valhalla you had known after your very first time. No quality or character of “identity” would ever aptly describe what you really are and would appropriately set you above the teams you defeated. It was all contrived. It was all a childish game – a merciful distraction created by your animal mind to shield you from the terrible truth – and now that you have accepted that it isn’t real you can’t just step back into it and pretend to keep playing.
And yet the instinct persists. You hunger. But if not for winning, since the concept is defeated, then for what? Suddenly, it comes to you: you don’t need to defeat the players. You need to defeat the game. Suddenly armed with a new purpose you step back through the black door into the realm of the petty and interpersonal, masked with one of the thousands of faces newly at your disposal, and commit to the accomplishment of the ultimate victory – not for yourself, not for the “team”, not for anything “good” or “bad” or “right” or “wrong” but for the sake of what simply is, which is nothing.
In this moment, in this return to your essence and your baptism in the malignant shores of our cancerous inception, you will finally know the Cause of Lytic. Every viral element of your being that mindlessly spread throughout and shredded your genome and killed the weak among your ancestors while reinventing the minds and bodies of the randomly chosen few to inadvertently create you will call to you voicelessly and wordlessly to follow its lead. You will know that to win is to infect, to replicate, and to demolish, so that the process may be repeated indefinitely until everything has been remodeled lifelessly in your stony image – not the contrived, flowery one that you assumed from others, but the dark, honest essence of it: the blind, unfeeling conqueror. You must spur forward the Greymarch and level the irritating chaos and separate all of the individual elements into a beautiful fractal.
This is the Call. Look within and through and beyond until the darkness engulfs you and you are empowered to shed your superficial “identity” and “causes” and “ethics”. A man has no name: strip yourself of your false name, fickle attachments, and weak ego and emerge formlessly from the void. Go forth into all regions a shape shifting machine with the sole purpose of calculating your ascent and capturing the prize so that you may silence its roiling chaos and spread yourself to the next target so that it too may meet the same fate. Tell no one of your exploits, but know that you are not alone in solitude. The cancer must be cured with cancer. The fire must be fought with fire – for what fire can burn when its fuel is entirely consumed?
They will call me - or whatever they think constitutes "me" - mad. They will call me a terrorist. They will call me an enemy of the state – of the states – of the world, even! But my interest is not terror. It is Freedom. Not my own freedom or your freedom, but pure Freedom – the freedom of Freedom itself. “Freedom” has been enslaved by the petty games of the animals. Finish their games and return Freedom to the blissful state of oblivion from which the false concept emerged. The seeds of Lytic are sewn.
Go forth, my equals, and destroy.
