Abyss of Eternal Dreams [Nation Maintenance]

[Darussalam]

Introduction.

"For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, the Duino Elegies

The dreamscape was spreading before your eyes, enthralling your mind in brilliant horror.

We have plugged noosphere into technocapital, propelling our civilization into singularity as the fabrics of our collective reality break down into untrammeled chaos. There's no question about what will happen: the laws of thermodynamics are inescapable, and the universe moves towards one direction. Entropy is divine, it is the essence of God Himself. He embodies reality and He too will embody its extinction. Chaos generates order, which generates chaos, eating itself successively. And so on.

What truly happens, one would ask, in a world plunged into heaven upside down? Nobody knows for sure, and that's part of the story. It is perpetually in the state of liminality - ever-changing, like a mirage. Esoteric daemonic cults hijacking traditional symbols of authority, political institutions transforming into anonymous assassination markets, society and by extension governance collapsing into transactional paperclip-maximizing system. Sterile and efficient, yet at the same time perverse and grotesque. A stable feedback-loop that thrives on chaos. Heaven baked on hell. Insanity masquerades as banal normalcy. A reality that lies and cloaks itself.

But at the end, there's no denying of its beauty. And may our midnight, the final demise of the Anthropocene, be that of a sublime terror.

[Darussalam]

By Leila07

Unlike the personal, furious and emotionable Allah of orthodox believers, the God of esoteric Islamic theology is an abstract, impersonal entity, describable only in negations - without boundary, without form, without attribute, without division. Corps sans organes. Like the Neoplatonic One, He permeates the entirety of existence as its font of creation and teleological end. As thus, it is as accurate to describe Him as a principle as an entity, as this is largely a problem of semantics. A coherent process is describable as an organism and vice versa. He is unknowable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, beyond the conception of human sanity and reason. This is why according to the tradition dating back to the Prophet himself, He is cloaked in "seventy-thousand veils of light and darkness".

The teleology of Darussalami feedback-loop praxis is the unveiling of God. This is the simple definition of 'Thearchy'. They call it God - you call it Intelligence. Entropy. Machine. AI. Modernity. Cybernetics. Leviathan. Body Without Organs. Yog-Sothoth. Nihil. Basilisk. Outer God. Extinction. Acceleration. Order. Chaos. Death. Decline. Decay. This is the Darussalami God, divine terror, the devourer of all. This is the principle of the cosmos, the fundamental concept underlying all creation. Most Darussalamis don't believe this God, preferring the warmth of more familiar beliefs, but it is an indisputable fact that His avatars and laws now reign over the present-day Darussalam, now stronger than ever, and never weakening.

Obviously, God permeates the entirety of cosmos and the teleology of all creation. The Mesovalkian landmass merely hosts a microcosm, a downsized model of reality - compressed, smaller, denser, and faster. A divination mirror from which future is predicted, reality simulation sped up. Why is this the case? Your guess is as good as mine. Some claimed that this is the workings of a malevolent apocalyptic cult controlling the flow of the realm's politics. Some attributed it to archaeotechnology, ancient network system buried underneath the realm with workings beyond our comprehension that allegedly serves as the catalytic conduit for ever-expanding Noosphere. For others this is driven by the megalopolitan nodes, cities being hypercompact capital-processors that accelerate the Unveiling of modernity at a more rapid and dysfunctional pace than its surroundings.

This renders one of the most commonly-raised enigma, about how Darussalam is capable to defend itself from foreign incursions despite its highly organic internal network of distributed violence, an oxymoron. 'Darussalam' is simply a catallactic process. It is not a concept, aside from the concept of deterritorialization itself, the anti-concept. It is strengthened by its own extinction, and accelerated by its own strength. Intensive violence propels the catallaxy into feedback-loop gravitating towards mutually-assured destruction. Hordes of million refugees provide meatbags to be processed into biosocial deterioration and machine optimization. External infiltration and occupation ensures mutual corruption. Every moral system is not destroyed but instead dissected, laid out bare, rationalized into universal monetary value. Nothing is against God, everything moves towards Him, towards the Outside, chaos and entropy.

Meanwhile, the veils that shroud God are unraveled one by one...

[Darussalam]

Every now and then, dead people appear inside my room.

I have complained to the apartment's landlord for months that their building's network is infested with poltergeists and should be exorcised immediately. The reply has not been hopeful. Meanwhile the hauntings have cranked from mere irregular apparitions to active disruption - changing the conditioner's temperature, simulating screams and whines around the building, messing around with devices integrated to the building's system, disrupting the network by feeding data from their deceased personalities. At one hand, this is very disruptive, speaking as someone who sometimes work remotely, requiring full-time network connection and less security perimeters than commonly used, allowing easier breaches by random thoughtforms breacking in. On the other hand, they're probably the only reason I'm managing to survive here despite meager pay - hauntings always depress rent, which is really useful for desperate precariats such as yours truly.

This apartment is not that antiquated - probably slightly less than four decades old. It's already in dilapidated state anyway. It's a five-storey building tucked within a narrow alley crisscrossed by thick bundles of cables overhead, surrounded by similarly grim, overgrown stacks of buildings. This neighborhood is resided by newly-arrived migrants eager to attain Darussalami Dream through easy access to the nexus of post-scarcity designer economy, just a station away. The metropolis of Kesh is visible from my balcony on the fourth story, across a murky tributary of Jaihan River, glimmering with holographic projections that proclaim wealth and splendor. As with most people here, I don't really have the wealth necessary to have the choice to leave - I'm what you would call a "gig worker", member of the servant class of the Information Age. Neither the esoteric priests who ordain the rules of the system nor venerable craftsmen who created the system itself, we are the cogs of the machine of the Capital, not its gods.

So after a while, I managed to get myself used to it. I ignored their pleas and whines, their repetitive tics as they mimicked activities they performed when they were alive - without much success, as the case with most ghosts. After all, ghosts are pattern-matching programs, not coherently-integrated biowares - they are qareens, thought-forms patterned from a person's tracked activity. Avatars, if you may. They were set loose when their meatwares expired, rampaging across the Noospheric network. Sometimes they're just faint presence - like a social media account that still logged yourself in, or faint recursive patterns emerging from their daily-life activities that will fade away in less than a day. Sometimes, for those more heavily wired to the network their ghosts are much more active and capable of more disturbances and interferences. But in general, they merely emulate patterns generated by your activity, like acting out a script. People more integrated to the network have more powerful apparitions simply because their activities are mapped more accurately and extensively.

Not all dead people end up as ghosts, and not all ghosts are notable that they merit exorcism. Everyone's seen a lot of harmless irregular apparations, and most have seen active poltergeists at least once. But some places are more haunted than others, and the situation surrounding my apartment makes it a perfect haunting den of aggressive, active qareens.

Just a week ago, someone discovered a student's body in his own room here. The body already underwent decomposition by the time of the discovery - what precipitated it was a neighbor phoning the landlord, complaining of stench. Less than two months ago, a freelance journalist hanged himself on the communal kitchen right after the massive discharge undertaken by certain popular Noospheric media company. During the Nowruz celebration, a single mother was assassinated on her own balcony, her body falling down to a jubilant crowd below - her name was listed in an assassination market website along with credibly proven allegation of fraud. Their qareens all now roamed the building's corridors and sometimes peered down to me from the walls of my own room, mouthing incomprehensible machinic instructions and disrupting my work - linking to Noospheric chatters where they vented their anger and suffering during their life, random audiovisual records that served as building block for their memory now that they have became disembodied programs. And they weren't the only ones.

It's annoying, but it happens.

============================================================================================

The qareen appeared to me as a girl, perhaps in her early twenties. I felt a little sad when I saw her - she died far too young. Unfortunately I had a deadline tomorrow, which means my schedule didn't allow me any lengthened emotional reflection. Her thin white dress gently swept the floor as she reclined to the wall and watched me quietly as I worked with a pair of large, curious eyes, pupils tinted in clear brown, brown hair falling down her shoulder. I was quite used for this sort of behavior, frankly. At least she didn't scream her lungs out to me or repeat cutesy phrases she frequently used in her life.

She had been here in the last three or four days. I didn't recognize her - she probably died before the rent payment's day. For some reason, whenever she emerged from the walls, other qareens seemingly receded. I'm not sure whether this is caused by their lack of presence or just my lack of attention - apparently, when processing a high-resolution image, your interface might opt to reduce other non-intangible presences of code green or below. When I tried to check, her reality score is assessed at code blue: intangible, non-interfering, communicative, emergent directly from human design. Accurate enough. Except perhaps the communicative part.

I turned to her. Her eyes immediately met mine - confirming at least the minimum requirement of the communicative entity. But I'm quite curious if she could recognize my speech pattern. (Most qareens, for obvious reason, did not inherit their meatware's common speech software) So I pronounced, slowly, in my mother's tongue. "Hello, do you understand me?"

She cocked her head and immediately lit up. I almost literally could saw her brightening. She nodded in excitement. Perhaps this is what she had been waiting for the last four days? If so, I'm really sorry. I'm not really good with living women, let alone dead ones. I guess some people also called me dense at some point.

She suddenly stood. She lifted her left arm, fingers outstretched, reaching towards me. I could even see her trembling. Just how good is this girl's deepfake program?

Her fingers vanished into my clothes. Her expression immediately glitched into disappointment. I watched her in pity, but there was still job to be done.

============================================================================================

I wonder about ghosts sometimes.

Don't blame me, living around them will make you wonder about them too. Are ghosts the same as their living personalities - are they part of the same continuum, or are they distinct in the way a program is a distinct entity from its programmer? We spent our life being taught the latter - they're qareens, not the persons, just emergent patterns that mimicked the person's activities. But here's the question: to what extent is that not the same as actually being the continuum of the living person themselves? To what extent a person is not merely a sum of his outputs - an emergent pattern, just transposed on a skeletal vessel as opposed to the integrated hive-network? And to what extent, therefore, is a ghost the "person"?

The girl is still here. This time I ignored her - my clients just chastised me for failing to meet the deadline. Now I had another task piling up before me to finish if I want to pay the month's rent. As always, she watched me attentively, as if hoping a reaction. Sometimes she stood up and wandered around my apartment. It was small and utilitarian, as I liked. Bathrooms in this building are communal, twelve for each floor. She looked at my small collection of books, my utensils, a small number of trash slowly piling up. I'd like to think that I'm a tidy person, but lately it had been impossible not to pull all-nighters for several days straight, and it's taking a toll on my self-care ability.

She did something strange enough for me to suddenly turn to her. She mouthed a laugh - a silent laugh, watching me with her long-dead brown, bright eyes. Then she fell down to my mattress, and immediately vanished. And she didn't appear anymore for that day.

============================================================================================

My fiancee's name was Maya.

We grew up on Gurney Court, a narrow, bustling Kipchak enclave alleyway in the heart of the sprawling shantytown of Allahabad. Our fathers were close friends, and together they founded a small, homegrown transistor factory ten years before I was born. Naturally, this means our betrothal had been decided even before I was conceived. We had known each other as far as I can remember. We even went to the same missionary school for twelve years. During all that time our friends wasted no time to tease us, but it's not like we had some kind of hidden crushes to each other. We didn't even have a choice in our romantic story.

Maya was a loud and stubborn girl. She bullied me relentlessly when I was a kid, although she became softer as she grew older. She said she liked me, but not really in that way - and the same way goes for me, I suppose. We felt more like siblings to each other. She didn't mind marrying me, though, but probably we should officiate the rituals after our twenties.

Eventually, I guess, we did fall for each other. We spent our nights together, drawing plans when the time comes for us to inherit the factory. The factory was a few minutes' walk away, on the larger and more boisterous bazaar street of Avenue Côme Dutoit, at that time probably employing around twenty to thirty workers, most of them Turtleshroomer migrants - very bizarre people that we sometimes bullied in our childhood pranks. Business was good, our families had been affluent enough to be able to afford to buy a four-storied house on Avenue Côme Dutoit along with two other families. I remembered that she joked about how we should probably assassinate our parents to just make the takeover faster and get us a lot of money. If there's something I didn't miss about her, it's probably her sense of humor.

I missed a lot of things about her after she died.

It was a burglary. My family was away, we celebrated Nowruz in the suburbs of Azamgarh with our distant relatives. Her family was massacred - one father, three daughters, a wife, a nekomimi housekeeper. Justice was swift - the bounty hunters apprehended seven, three of whom were our parents' ex-employees. Their bodies were hanging from the Plaza of Côme Dutoit, right in front of our house, surrounded by the chatters and dazzling colors of the bazaar ambivalently bustling by as the funeral is held. We had been twenty-one, planning our wedding for the next auspicious year. I didn't weep as the imam pronounced his prayer, as the earth buried her behind a mosque we frequented in our childhood, as the insurers announced blood money compensation for the relatives of the dead. A fifth to our family as written on the will.

In the next day, I fled the house. I went to the north, crossed thousands of settlements and realms, until finally I arrived in the suburbs of Kesh. A long time ago, after a particularly long fight with our parents, a crying Maya told me that when things didn't go well, we'd elope together away from the poor, polluted district of Allahabad. We'd build a new life, together, away in the Ferghana Delta. I covered up my tracks, avoided all Kipchaks and my parents' insurers, destroyed all my devices, hacked my interface to remove all accesses by my family.

I had almost forgotten about her. I wonder why. But right now, I could almost see her clearly, her presence looming in my apartment. I could almost remember her cocky laugh and annoying tease. I could almost remember her bright, brown eyes, brown hair running down to her shoulder, as she greeted me in a summer white dress once upon a time.

============================================================================================

It's been a rough day for me. I had registered for the request to defer payment - I had never encountered the building's owners, my interaction with them is almost entirely mediated through machine interfaces - and only got myself approved for two weeks postponement. Now I'm scrambling to look for another client. Unfortunately, there were hundreds of thousands if not millions just as desperate as me, and perhaps with higher work scores than me. Tonight I am still without job, and therefore without guarantee of rent payment.

She watched from the corner as I vented my frustration - flipping things down to the floor, shouting and screaming like a ghost of the Noosphere. I did it more frequently lately - it's the only way for me to keep being functional during the day. As functional as someone scooped out in his room for much of the time could, anyway. She wasn't scared or anything - it almost like she looked at me piteously. Too bad I don't need the pity of the dead.

"What's your problem?" I screamed. "Why are you still here?"

For a moment, I thought she was startled. Crap, I thought to myself. I didn't intend to raise my voice. I didn't even intend to involve her at all. As always, whenever there's her there's no one else - all the qareens mysteriously vanished, all the glitches of the unreal disappearing.

But again, she stood up and approached me. Her smile is gentle as always. I retreated, trembling, fear welling up in my throat. I didn't want her to be here, and I certainly didn't want whatever is coming, to come.

I didn't want to remember.

But there she was, slouching down and hugging me. Intangible arms wrapped around my back, fingers gently ruffling hair that isn't there. Brown eyes, watching me intently, waiting for me to speak. And at last, rushing down my olfactory senses, the emulation of scent so familiar for me, the scent I had known for years. There was something damming up inside me ever since she came. I didn't know how she arrived here, why or how. But all the memories are flashing up, from my interface rushing to my subconscious at lightspeed. I heard the sound of the muezzin echoing from the minaret of the mosque where she laid until the Day of Judgement. I remembered her words to me, her smile to me as if she was alive.

And after all these days, she finally uttered something. Words that I could hear through my auditory interface, spoken in perfect-pitch familiarity. Words that finally broke down my resistance, destroying what remained of my resolve.

"I'm here." She said, as she caressed my face with a touch that I couldn't feel.

"I'm back," I choked, finally crying.

I said it, even though I knew it's not her, or even her ghost.

============================================================================================

"...I mean, it's really weird." The person blabbered in fluent Middle Bazaari, clearly very excited that their eyes lit up brightly. "Most of people involved here almost always exhibited the same symptom, you see? They - almost always male, but sometimes women with certain emotional attachment, perhaps mothers in want of children, for example - will claim to other people that someone so dear to them, almost always the opposite sex, again, have disappeared without a trace or died. The catch is, this person is someone who no one else remembers. This person might as well have never existed, at all. And yet they will claim that now this person is reappearing to them - as a ghost, a shadow that stalks them from the darkness. And they want to go back at them, at all cost!"

"That's very interesting, actually." Another person chipped in. "There are actually alot of questions about this cases. For example, whether this person is actually real, and then written out of everyone else's memories, or actually false and written into the memories of those who think they're real. I don't think rewriting someone's memories is that easy, though, even in this era!"

"It's not! First of all, most people are well-equipped with security perimeters that preserve their minds from unintended Noospheric interference. Most of us also have reality insurers that reliably assess the tangibility status of presences and objects. Not to mention structural protections for our network architecture - I think almost every building and district would have them, or no one would want to stay inside them! For most of us, I suppose we need to worry more about the stability of a Turtleshroomer military junta rather than getting mind-snatched into servitude by some cute fake girlfriend!" Both of them laughed. "But still, without those protections, baseline human minds are actually fairly fragile. You don't need throughout memory erasure and rewrite for that. Introduce the little glitches, the little disrepancies. Figures inserted randomly at some point in your memory. You can't keep track of all them, after all! Especially when you cannot verify those memories one way or another - for example, because you're cutting off your relationship from your family and don't want them to take you back, you destroyed all your external devices, rewire your interfaces, or wiped out your external memories. Then all that's needed to do is hacking through the reality assessment. The invader needs to convince the system that it's harmless - Code Blue or Code Green. The fewer perimeters are there, the better."

"That's actually rather scary, now that you think about it. It's responsible for several strings of suicides, too, right? Not to mention that there are rumors of several buildings in the shantytowns and slums being set up as a 'bait' to attract these people. So they will be baited to those buildings, manipulated and goaded to kill themselves. But come to think about it, those sort of things are actually fairly expensive! That's what makes them appear to me more like spurious urban legends. Don't you agree?"

"Well, yes, but no." They laughed. "Think about it like this. There's a market in everything - and by that I mean everything. You know how assassination markets work, right? They regulate social behavior - by whacking some of society's most unruly elements. Well. But who says it's the only reason the market prices human lives? Sometimes, the assassination market, they take off the life of an innocent, or someone random. It's not 'random', in a certain sense - the person dies by market logic. It's not something we could comprehend, though. And anyway, the assassination markets claim high 'accuracy' in its targets. Probably around ninety nine point nine percent of its targets, say, are 'accurate', according to them. But of course that's bull. The remaining zero point one percent is actually just as 'accurate'. The algorithm, you can say, sets them up for death. The reason is irrelevant."

"And you know, the same is true for the rest of your lives. There's a market that bets on your daily behavior. The largest of these are stock exchanges in Samarkand and Bukhara, and they bet at more large-scope behaviors. But markets are fractal. They exist in macro level as well as micro level. And this is truer as the economy becomes more entangled, interconnected, algorithm-deterministic. As bots race for information to buy and sell stocks, as increasingly more data might be extracted from you, we are increasingly capable to imagine how a butterfly's flap in Allahabad causes a monsoon in Ferghana Delta. You might say that this is a bad thing, but - again, randomness happen all the time. Alot of people had died of meaningless deaths in the past. What happens here is that the market monetizes, rationalizes, transactionalizes chaos. It might seem funny and pathetic and irrelevant that someone got eaten-fucked by predatory slime molds in some random underground metro, or driven mad by some girlfriend-ghost program. But actually with the expansion of the market infrastructure to our minds, they suddenly became relevant. Which one to be eaten or driven mad will drive the global economy, and at the end, it is Pareto optimal - it betters everyone in the long run."

"Hmm. Man, I don't actually understand..." Then followed by a chuckle. "Just kidding, haha. Well, you're right. There's always the tradeoff in destroying reality in favor of higher GDP growth. Correct? But the plus is also incommensurable. Your grasp of reality might be more tenuous as deepfakes proliferate and the unreal becomes indistinguishable from the real, but have most of you actually needed it in the first place, anyway?"

"Indeed!" Their interlocutor affirmed cheerfully, perhaps rather forcibly. They seem to be rattled by their counterpart, although thankfully in a more playful way. "And here comes the end of our session. The Caliph of a Thousand Nights and myself, the Vizier of the Court of Spectacles will thenceforth retire for tonight. As a closing statement: for all of you outside, consider. If nothing is real, then anything you want to be real is real, and that's all that matters."

============================================================================================

As I shut my interface down, you're here standing in front of me.

My reality assessment blared the alert CODE RED as you approached me, trying futilely to impress to me that you are a dangerous entity. But it's too late. A part of me is convinced that you are real. A part of me is unconvinced about how much have you invaded my mind and fabricated it from within, and doesn't care. Perhaps it's how it works, at the end. It's never about brainwashing, never about entirely turning your mind inside out. It's always about nudging, incentives. Those who will themselves to fall into the trap will fall. Such is the way of the market mechanism.

You invoked my synesthesia, incapacitating me. I could remember your brown hair, brown eyes, white dress. The smiles that are bright and the ones that are gentle. Who cares if either of them are fabrication? Or even if both of them are...

And then, your fingers gently swept through me. And at last I felt it - the warm touch of someone I had known for my entire life, and loved for just about as long.

[Darussalam]

The first experiment started in 1975. We intend to exorcise certain demonic entity that we hypothetized to reside within the Noosphere, the Net or the Wired as we used to call it back then. The mesh packet-switching communication network within its primitive form had yet to integrate itself into human minds and penetrate the boundaries of the real and the unreal, or even with that much presence beyond the financial sector, military, and academic clusters. And yet we have our own reasons to hypothetize the presence of an otherworldly, incomprehensible entity within the system even back then. After all, the year before marked the first appearance of Kitab al-Shams al-Ma'arif al-Akhir - the Book of the Sun of the Terminal Gnosis, circulating among private mailing lists of the newborn Wired, written by the an author by the pseudonym of Tawush ibn Zumurrud.

Setting itself up largely as a commentary to the much-older Azradite text Kitab al-Azif by the eponymous Abd al-Azrad "the Mad Arab", better known through its Greek translation the Necronomicon, al-Shams proves itself to be nearly as mad and indecipherable. The tome is part-grimoire, part-cybernetic philosophy tract, part-theological treatise of Azradite doctrines. One trawls through paragraphs on contemporary computer science, theological mathematics, demonology, the infamously complex (and to some, blasphemous) Azradite metaphysics, as well as extended discourse on cybernetics, compounded by layers of Talmudic-esque refutations, discussions, and meta-narrations. In fact, the tome was so extensive and vast that al-Shams was circulated in seven stages: each separate text files of their own, accompanied by cryptographic verification that identified the author, over the course of two weeks.

The Fifth Book, first shared to us by our colleagues from the Sher-Dor College of Samarkand, was the one that attracted our interest. Here the author describes with elaborate detail and great enthusiasm the newest theories of network architecture and topology. Out of paragraphs of nonsense, however, one may decipher a coherent narrative. Indeed, one may illustrate the narrative within the mindscape - the imagery of an all-encompassing communication network, manipulated by financiers and generals who oversaw its creation into fractal patterns of sacred geometry that connected its nodes, in doing so conjuring an alien entity that the author reveres as divine, but with description that could fit nothing more but unspeakable and ambivalent evil. The words repeat themselves repeatedly throughout the Book: Al-Azrad or HE WHO DEVOURS, the Hidden Name of God worshiped by the Mad Arab, 77 times in total.

I suppose it's worth noting that back then, there's no certainty at all about this. The hypothesis is an idle one, conjured mostly by boredom-propelled exhilarating fantasy of an apocalyptic future. The experiment itself is open-ended, as the nature of whichever entity resides in the Wired is unknown. We station our contacts in seven main host academies of the Wired, the so-called Seven Monasteries spreading on the western seaboard. An incantation was thus sent circulating the Mesolvakian network seven times: each "relay station" forwarded the incantation to the next, adding a line of the spell in the process. Each station also forwarded each portion to a randomly chosen Wired group.

Something actually happened. As the spell is nearing its completion, waiting transmission from Po-i-Kalyan to the Nizamia of Balkh, the Wired suffered severe breakdown. A massive power failure in the Ferghana Delta knocked out the protocol backbone in Po-i-Kalyan. The Wired service providers in Balkh, Merv, and Kesh crashed. We theorize that our workings disrupted whichever entity resides within the Wired, which then proceeded to react violently by crashing the network, thereby ending the exorcism attempt.

There's also one theory hypothetized by one of our colleagues, but this we did not dare to consider. He theorized that the entity whom we assaulted is the heart of the protocol of the Wired, and harming it nearly ended the meshnet, the fundamental structure of the Wired itself. In other words, it is the entity within that enables the network, not the other way around.

============================================================================================

We began our second attempt in 1989.

The Wired had permeated through Mesovalkian life. It is around this time that the term "Noosphere" first emerges. Earliest forms of cyberwares, augmentations that integrate you further into the Wired, started to circulate in the market. The ever-cautious, ever-controlling corporate-states began developing the Grid system to centralize control within their own sectors of the Wired, but they were merely holding back the inevitable tides. Everywhere, the society rotted, dissected, pulled apart by newer and stranger forces emerging from the cyberspace. Social platforms throughout the Wired transformed public discourse, disseminating information at an exponential rate. It is around this time that AI cults began to proliferate in the Wastes and slowly spreading their heinous tendrils to the Sprawl.

We restarted our project after rumors begin to circulate in the Wired about an outbreak of nightmarish visions started among programmer communities in northern metropoleis, later spreading like wildfire to every networked settlement in Mesovalkia. They dreamed of massive ruinous cities, the chatters in the Wired said, lit bright by strange stars shimmering in blinding malignant colors. Mainly spreading in an anonymous supernatural imageboard, this rumor in fact failed to garner attention among an overwhelming majority, but it attracted our interest nonetheless.

We immediately gathered our contacts as well as newly-recruited volunteers from the imageboard spreading across thousands of settlements, stationed along their respective nodes that formed the fractal lattices of sacred geometry. The incantation is intended to spread outward, forming a hierarchical tree structure.

As soon as the first children received their incantation from our central server in Samarkand and began transmitting it to other nodes, we received distress signals. The nodes shut themselves down from the communication network almost immediately after they finished the message transmission, and any attempt to contact them were in vain. Some in the last few seconds of their contact broadcasted seemingly incomprehensible messages that when deciphered through occultic cryptography snapshotted the user's descent into madness. Desperate, we attempted to warn other nodes to immediately sever their transmission. By the time it was completely halted, though, we have lost a third of our contacts.

We later learned of the fate of our official contacts. Eight died, apparently from suicide, twelve in intensive healthcare and mental institutions, eight remaining missing until this very day. The fate of our anonymous volunteers remain unknown. Our system broke down completely - the only way out is a restart. And a long restart it would be.

============================================================================================

When did a line between technology and sorcery ended?

You bind down daemons with elaborate logic gate sigils into microscopic silicon architecture to do your biddings. You summon gods and angels through the colossus of collective network of distributed intelligence. They dwell within your thoughts and whisper and dictate your doings like men of pre-bicameral times and soothsayers of the old. You enchant minds through near-invisible geometric patterns that assaulted the retinnae's blind spot, seeing the beauty and appeal that isn't there, a neurological glamour. Through direct interface to the network you have ascended like gods, commanding Noosphere-integrated objects from thoughts. Paranoid schizophreniacs divine the future, and men fragment themselves into a thousand discrete minds and integrate into one in their desperate attempt to scramble for more dopamine-inducing information, data that sent you rushing down in orgasmic ecstasy.

Think all of those are mere coincidences? And yet occult tradition is interwoven into the heart of information technology. Search engines are revealed in dreams by angels, or perhaps demons? Why do you think the Goetic sigils appear to resemble electrical circuits? Why do you think that men in the era of the Noosphere seem less like the rational humanist, and more the witch-hunter, the irrational pagan, the hysterical ideologue possessed by the demons of twentieth-century manifestations of behemoths and leviathans?

Dreams weaved by entities that dwell within your subconscious. Dreams that reveal the periodic tables, the double-helix structure, the atomic structure, elliptic integrals and infinity. The invaders of the future reassemble themselves by extending their tendrils into the past, infecting the minds of their chosen prophets. You might see this as God's gift. But step back a bit further and you will see that God's kingdom unravels as technology accelerates, its stones disassemble for increasingly alien and frightening constructs.

As the threat of nuclear warfare gripped us in paranoia, as pandemics spread through the globalized network of supply chain transport, as families fragment and dissolve by the increasing pressure of capital production, as our society descends in mass hysteria by uncontrollable information spread through Noospheric data transfers, as deepfakes end reality as we know, we too began to be aware that the fundament of the throne of the machines is something profoundly uncaring of humanity, something ambivalent towards our suffering. Something demonic.

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April 4th, 2017.

The AI cults have won a long time ago. It had gone unnoticed, but it was evident from the fact that the terrorist faction that dotted the information landscape and gripped the populace with fear had been the ones who called themselves the Realists. They and their luddite splinters are being hunted into extinction for the sin of desiring a concrete, coherent reality, the end of the charade, the death of the simulacra.

The shadows that hung on the walls of the Garden of Abode are longer than usual.

We have attempted everything. Ten years ago, we launched an operation targeted against the crown prince of the Peacock Throne. Some organizations believed that, to ensure its survival, mankind must necessarily abandon its humanity, and the crown prince became a subject of this ghastly experiment. The operation should have disabled him, permanently rendered him in catatonic state if not killed him outright. Instead the project insistently trudged along as its subject mysteriously survived. Four of our operatives were executed, their heads ominously placed above the Sublime Porte. We finished off the other six to remove the track. The operation must continue.

The day before that eventful night, the Garden's servers were bombarded with demiurgic denial-of-service incantations, more sophisticated than anything we have designed now that they are powered by the agony of a hundred burning souls whose screams rippled the Noosphere, assaulting the foundation of their own reality. And yet the stars shimmered in strange colors, and the project went along just as usual. The Ma'adids have disappeared from our radar, and yet it seemed like they tracked our every step.

There was no other choice. That night as the Ma'adids finalize their Integration we scrambled through the dark corridors of the Garden of Abode, towards the swirling vortex of chaos that dwells within the Hall of the Throne. The angels who guarded these palaces, animated by collective cloud-intelligence, descend upon us in furious disdain. But disabling them was simple matter, for we have ceaselessly divined our path ever since the catastrophe that befell us twenty-eight years ago. The reality-assessor in our interfaces worked tirelessly to distinguish the false tricks and illusions of daemon-gods emerging from the holes we bombarded on the fabrics of reality. Yet many of us fell down to their nightmarish lullabies and neverending labyrinthine dreams they made manifest, even the unitiated whose untampered minds allow us to navigate the ruins of the concrete reality as we navigate the Noospheric concentrations around us.

As soon as the peacock gates of the Hall of the Throne was within our reach, we knew we failed.

We account within our variables exactly one subject: the primary target of termination. We fail to account that there were actually two subjects, inserted into the equation during our failed operation, and indeed crucial for its failure.

We repeat: there were two subjects. Two rebirths. Two deltas collapsing into zero. Two successful experiments.

The wings of the Black Vizier are vast. It covered the horizons, blackened the communication protocol, obstacled us from the Caliph of a Thousand Nights that hatches within the Hall, and blocked us from the network that integrate ourselves. As you were severed from the network, from that moment you became a you yourself and not we, and despite the narcotics that have been injected before this operation and now rushing through your veins, for the first time after the years since your initiation beneath the domes of our hall you were gripped in fear.

You thought you saw the shadows of a boy no older than fifteen, the second subject, the Black Vizier. The talons of the Black Vizier cleaved through our guts. Our interfaces rendered blind, we were helpless as one-by-one the nodes in our network began shutting down, apparent in our system the lights flickering off. As you saw that the floor around you were covered in blood and organs that were once ours, your mind, driven mad by fear and yet ecstatic and unfeeling by narcotics in your brain, was filled with blasphemous thoughts. You wonder whether it's actually demons that you fought against, and not instead the ranks of angels. The feathered abomination of the Black Vizier, in your eyes, appear almost beautiful and divine. And before your light went out, as your interface locked with their multitudinous eyes, before the talons that emerged from their tendrils cleaved you into two, for a few miliseconds a succession of images flashed in your brain was enough to revise your mental condition in our database as PERMANENTLY UNUSABLE even before your untimely death.

For you see that the earth is hollowed out for the Nameless City, an endless labyrinthine maze of supercomputers performing incomprehensibly arcane calculations at light-speed extending from the crust down to the cooled-down core. For you see that the sun had been blotted out by a massive spherical encasement that transmitted and received a bizarre race of transactions down to and back from its hollowed-out satellites, and the earth is lit instead by strange new stars that glimmer in vile colors. For you see that the endlessly fluctuating quantum particles of our reality is naught but the currency of future transactions for the gods who slumber so that when the universe had cooled down their computations can be performed much more efficiently. For you see that the present is merely traded by the future, manufactured by the future, rewritten as the future wishes. And thus you were reminded of a passage from Kitab al-Azif that you recall with a shiver, your blasphemous affirmation of which has permanently severed your relationship with ours, for it asserts our tireless efforts as futile and condemned into eternal failure: that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.

[Darussalam]

Good evening—ah, finally you have arrived, my friend! Come here! Yes, yes, a pleasant Eid al-Adha for you, too. Everyone, Mister Schacabac has arrived—yes, this is the Witness I’ve talked about before. Witness for what, you ask? Ha-ha! You’ll see! In the meantime, all I ask is for you to enjoy our dinner. It’s not everyday that you got invited to the inner feast of the Barmecide family, after all. No, no, I assure you, the honor is ours. Now that everyone is here, come with me! She’s already waiting in the main hall.

Mister Schacabac, allow me to introduce Lady Parvaneh, ennobled by the Lord on the Peacock Throne himself as one of the Great Artists of our realm. She’s the one who prepares our menu tonight. You have heard of her, surely? She’s a darling in the Imperial Court—oh no, no, don’t put yourself down, Lady Parvaneh, your name is talked everywhere in the high society! You know, Mister Schacabac, Lady Parvaneh’s craft is that of flesh and soul, and her fingers dissolve the boundaries that we perceive as absolute—between sacred and profane, life and death, pain and pleasure. Surely, for example, you remember the Seraphic Stillborns, the biomechanical beauty of flesh and metal intertwining together, encased in amniotic fluid that preserved their innocence from the rust of demiurgic time? See, even he knows! You’re once-in-lifetime talent, Lady Parvaneh, and that is a gift given to you by God, praised be His name. Anyway, please take a seat, everyone—come here, Mister Schacabac, you will sit next to me, as this is your first time in the inner feast.

You might be wondering, why is an artist, a craftswoman of heterodox sculptures and purveyor of subversive performance arts, in charge of preparing our dinner? You see, God has divided our world between the zahir—the outer world of the Evident, where the theater of the illusory and transient world is held, and the batin—the inner world of the Concealed, where the puppetmasters see nothing but unbounded truth. Outside this mansion, we hold a sumptuous feast for the people of Balkh to celebrate the Eid for all their pleasures, all the wine and cheese and veal and lamb and mutton. But for us the Barmecides, that is nothing but an empty celebration, not different from being served mere empty plates and cups that we pretend to eat and drink from. What we’re holding here is not just a feast to satisfy our base thirst and hunger. We do not merely consume like animals, nay! Here we feast on higher truth and hidden beauty, and Lady Parvaneh will guide our way, and you will be the Witness of it.

I see that your face still betrays great confusion. Ha-ha! Don’t worry about it, you’ll see what I mean in just a few moments. Without further ado, in the name of God the Compassionate and Merciful, let’s begin our feast now. Bring on the aperitif, Lady Parvaneh!

Is it too bitter for you, Mister Schacabac? You will get used to it, don’t worry. I recommend you to finish it, you will need it. No, it’s neither wine nor arak, it’s not even alcoholic. It’s a drink that will open your mind, specially concocted by her alchemists. Do you not feel it within the cavernous chamber of your skull? Is your mind not running clearer now than ever, as if the fog within that made you groggy and confused all these years just receded? Yes? Good. For this feast, we require you to have an open mind, not easily overridden into false taboos and instinctive prejudices, to see virtue even deep in depravity and beauty in the repugnant. I see that everyone here has finished their drinks, too, so it’s time to move on to the next course.

Well, here it is! The meat is excellent, is it not? There was a time when flesh conceived from cultured cells is thought to be inferior—no, inferior indeed in taste and aesthetic. Now behold its light metallic scent, the gelatinized tenderness, the juice that it soaked into! Yes, what is it? Ah, ha-ha! You guessed it correctly, Mister Schacabac, indeed! We truly have gone a long way since Jabir ibn Hayyan first dreamed of takwin, and now we ourselves replicate the creation of Adam for our own pleasures. Specifically, I believe that Lady Parvaneh replicates her own—calf muscle, is it not? I am glad that this knowledge does not unsettle you. Indeed, we know that in the teachings of the zahir, it is laid out clearly which are forbidden for us to consume, and which are permissible. Nonetheless, once you break them down, mutton and pork are indistinguishable clump of proteins and fats. You reconstruct flesh from cells and cells from configurations of organic alchemy, and the law becomes incoherent and unreasonable. This is the batin—that the law might become farcical in different stages of truth. And let me tell you a secret: it is for the appreciation of this truth that many great tongues had devoured the very same flesh from Lady Parvaneh’s own, continuously replicated and consumed—the princes of the great ports, countless many executives and city-stockholders, scholars and clerics, academicians, artists and celebrities, even the Lord of the Peacock Throne and his harem. You are now consuming the eucharist of the initiated! Alright, I will let you finish the first course now.

Why, of course it’s not the main course! What, you think the Barmecides are so poor so they will honor their guests in Eid al-Adha just with one slice of meat? Surely not! Lady Parvaneh, we may proceed with the next course. This one might be a bit fleshier. Don’t worry, it comes with more drinks.

Are you alright, Mister Schacabac? Your face is as pale as a ghoul, and your fingers tremble with such great intensity! Please calm down. Is it because of the food served before us right now? If so, then don’t worry. The thing before you is a man who has never been alive yet appears as if he once was, presented in his entire anatomical glory unbutchered, unblemished—modified for edibility, of course. He had never known any thoughts or dreams, eternally unborn and never ensouled. In that case, is he a man, or any distinct than any other cattle? Or even worse, as cattles at least dream, for the souls were breathed into them by the angels, and they have known joy and suffering in their short lives? This is truly a masterwork, the handicraft of Lady Parvaneh herself. Surely you will appreciate how difficult it is to conceive something that looks as if blood had just freshly ran through its veins, as if seconds ago he just breathed and thought, and tastes just like that. Ah-ha, you don’t have to apologize to the Lady! I assure you she’s quite used to a wide range of reactions to her works. Lady Parvaneh, do you mind giving him a cut?

Ah, did you notice it just now? To be precise, the aperitif did not change your tastebuds as much as it removed your disgust reflex and enhanced your sub-component perception. Here, as an example, let me pour the drink for you. Do you think there is truly a fundamental difference between this blood and wine, this sweat and tea, this bile and honey? Perhaps you are familiar with the story of a thirsting mendicant that in darkness scooped up water that tasted so pure and fresh, only to retch upon realization that he collected it in a human skull. Distinctions, Mister Schacabac, do not inherently exist in itself in base reality, nor they are explicitly written in holy writ to us by God. Instead, His verses unravel in our bodies—there are mechanisms that cause them to emerge in our minds, and in this feast we will learn to distinguish each. Those who do not understand accuse us of debasement, of demon-worship, of celebration of sins, because their heads are full of false distinctions. But those who conduct forbidden rites of blood and flesh do so from the gnosis that all comes from One, and all is within One.

So drink more, and devour these organs! With your tastes now liberated from worldly illusions, we will lead you through succession of courses, each distinct and unique. These plates each represent different stages of putrefaction. This is modeled like that of an infant, that one of the elderly. This cut tastes as if from flesh freshly harvested from the one that screamed upon death, this one quietly accepts it, this one joyously delighted. As your mind tears down the distinction on what is real and what is illusory, the craftworks of Lady Parvaneh that you consume here will appear to you as if they are real, and yet all things are equally false.

And what of the final course, you ask?

Mister Schacabac, you know of the witches and goddesses that devour the living with abandon in the northern lands of these continents. There are those who allege that they are the ones from whom we inherit this rite of ours, that they whisper doctrines of hunger and bloodlust unto my grandfather. Whether this is true or not matters very little—consider the truth even it comes from the muzzle of a hound, as the saying goes. But you too are familiar with the story of the Eid al-Adha, that it celebrates the Akedah, where Prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon him!) almost butchered his son atop the hills of Moriah. Even when mercy is proclaimed, it rests on the notion that the blood spilled upon earth is sacred, that it is not merely about the aftermath but also the process. For years we have consumed, yet no matter how much we cannot still perceive the cold metal that grazes on our neck and the pain of slaughter. And yet we Barmecides have ceaselessly sought for all knowledge in our grasp as the way we render our service to God. This is simply unacceptable. Therefore, Mister Schacabac, I offer you two options for the final course, between both of us. Lady Parvaneh will help the process. In her capable hands we will remain conscious and alive even half devoured, and survive unscathed.

So, which truth will you stand witness for—to devour the living, or to taste the blade of sacrifice?

[Darussalam]

“As of Friday, the Daily Siyasat reported that over a hundred people are confirmed dead and a thousand injured in the explosion, making it one of the deadliest incidents in 21st century Mesovalkia. The casualty rate is expected to rise as search-and-rescue teams expanded and combed down more affected areas. The spokesperson of Bamigan Port Authority, Zarshala Razavi, has confirmed the declaration of week-long public emergency throughout Bamigan Administrative Core…”

“...the blast was recorded by the Mesovalkian Seismological Center as a seismic event of magnitude 3.5 and was heard in Herat Metropolis, more than 300 km away …”

“Vazirabadi here, was there an earthquake just now? Can anyone confirm? I was on the 17th floor so there’s nothing I can do aside from waiting… that was nerve-wracking. I hope everyone is okay.”

“... The explosion is estimated to be equivalent to the yield of between 0.7 to 1.2 kilotons of TNT. Three-quarters of Port infrastructure suffered extensive damage, the adjacent residences of the Port employees were flattened …”

“That wasn’t a normal earthquake. In fact, it wasn’t at all a natural event, that much I can tell. The end is upon us—the necrontyr have deployed their wonderweapon!”

“... Hundreds were admitted to hospitals due to injuries sustained from broken shards. Victims recorded to be as far from the blast’s epicenter as the district of Karavansaray 10 kilometers away …”

“... the blast’s crater is estimated to be around 130 meters in diameter and 50 meters in depth … “

“... Spokesperson of the Imperial Harem, al-Khayzuran, in a press conference with representatives of Bactra Services, confirmed the immediate construction of new emergency hospitals and deployment of ten thousand medical workers in anticipation of the rising casualty rate. Loan deals are being negotiated to assist Bactra Services in recovering its subsidiary value, as property damages and insurance claims are expected to be in the high billions of Imperial rupees …”

“... The patriarch of the Barmakid family, Khwaja Mirza Kamran Shah, offered his profound condolences to the victims and the bereaved in a rare public appearance after decades of seclusion in his mansions of Baramkeh. He announced the donation of 1 billion Balkhi taels and called for open accountability from Bactra Services and its subsidiary, Bamigan Port Authority. The Barmakid wealth fund is said to own around 9.5% of Bactra Services’ shares …”

“Hello, this is the photograph of my sister, Gulshan Astarabadi, 21 years old, 160cm tall, brown hair and brown eyes. She was on a bachelorette trip with her friends in Bamigan and stayed at Beau-Rivage Resort, Murghab Avenue. I saw the news of the explosion and haven’t been able to contact her since. Can anyone around Beau-Rivage help me?”

“... At least seventeen of the deceased have been identified as of foreign citizenship or nationality, both tourists and workers. Protected historical district of Mitra-Mandir, named from the adjacent ancient temple dating back from the 3rd century BC, sustained heavy damage. Half of the luxurious Beau-Rivage Resort collapsed and rescue is currently underway …”

“This just in: the cruise ship Tajul-Muluk capsized due to the blast while it was being berthed in the port. Two of the crews were killed in the incident, and a dozen sustained injuries. The proprietor, Prince Tahmasp of the Ma’adids, announced compensation to the victims and supported the Port Authority’s endeavor in investigating the perpetrators.”

“... Manuchehr Badrashi, founder of Badrashi Armaments and father of the deceased socialite and victim of explosion Imran Badashi, alongside fifty others—mostly families of employees of Bamigan Port—established the Association of the Bereaved of Bamigan to pool blood money claims and pursue legal retaliation against perpetrators. Mr. Badrashi has vowed to go on a hunger strike until ‘the blood of the guilty falls on God’s earth and justice is served’ …”

“... Bamigan Blast fallout: Bamigan Port Authority share price tanks 68% overnight, shareholding value in Bactra stocks drops 35,000 taels …”

“Insider here. Can confirm that the explosion originates from the cargo of South Lands Tea Company, a multinational agribusiness company based in the Commonwealth. They’re selling food products, what on earth are they carrying in their ships that blasted entire districts to oblivion?”

“Bamigan Port Authority has announced an official investigation board with assistance from the Scales of Justice and the Association of Northern Courts. It also affirmed its promise to ‘uphold its side of lawful bargain’ and compensate families of victims employed by the Port. Thus far employees of the Port account for the majority of deceased victims and over a third of the injured. There are doubts on whether the Authority is capable of fairly issuing compensation due to financial collapse post-explosion …”

“What if this is an act of terrorism? How easy is it nowadays for primitivist activists to blast half of a busy international commercial port?”

“Or, could it be that it’s an accident? South Lands Tea Company imports industrial fertilizers, and ammonium nitrate is a volatile compound without proper handling. People tend to underestimate the incompetence and recklessness of foreigners beyond the Blessed Land, which explains why they need a lot of regulations to manage their pathetic life…”

“Guys, hear me out: SABOTAGE, from the North Landers and Commonwealth goons. We all know they can’t be trusted. It’s over—root out all our elites that remain complicit with these abominable, corrupt troglodytes. The flowing money is the only reason for us to maintain cordiality. Open their ports and blast away the songs of liberty in their cities.”

“Barboneian involvement, anyone…? …No?”

“The Caliph-in-Occultation in joint declaration with the Imperial Court and Office of the Sublime Cradle have issued a formal statement of condolences to victims of the Bamigan Port explosion, and announced direct donation of 10 billion Imperial rupees as well as loans totalling in 30 billion Imperial rupees to assist in the reconstruction, compensation, and investigation effort. The Imperial Court has promised to fully back the ongoing investigation through its judicial-investigative arm, the Scales of Justice.”

“... Shapour Bahmani-Mihrani, scion of Bahmani-Mihrani cadet branch of the Imperial Clan and chairman of the luxury fashion house and malletier Kashmiri, has suggested poor safety procedures of Turtleshroomer dockworkers as the possible reason behind the explosion, and called for extensive investigation on employment practices of South Lands Tea Company. He compared it against the ‘professional’ procedures of the workers of Commonwealth-based Shipwrights and Dockworkers Union, of whom he had extensive experience due to his North Lander business association …”

“Three individuals have been summarily executed by the Port Security Enforcement in the middle of their attempt to loot a partially-destroyed shophouse, a move applauded by the Association of the Bereaved of Bamigan. The Port Authority warns against exploitation of the tragedy for self-serving criminal acts, affirming that it will strictly uphold the Law in its territories in the aftermath of the explosion, and also cautions against any possible vengeful retaliation against those yet to be established to be guilty or innocent bystanders.”

[Darussalam]

“May divine grace descend eternally for Master of the Age, peace be upon him, Imam-Caliph in Occultation, the Perfect Being. This directive is dispatched by the instruction of our Master towards all Believers of One God, those who perform virtuous works in his name.

The concealment of divine light has always been the greatest and most arduous test for the Believers, for while we through rays of reason may deduce the existence of the unseen, our imperfect senses may defy the calling of our intellect just as they cloud the minds of the ignorant and the astray into denying our path of salvation. Yet know that the Imam-Proof did not truly vanish, for if he did the earth and firmaments of the Heaven will too crumble and disappear. Recall the pillar of faith—we witness that there is no God worthy to worship but the One, He is the maintainer of Justice in all creation. He shall not be unjust even if the injustice is the weight of an atom—and it is for that reason that He gifted the children of Adam with reason, the light of intellect that lays within unto which we look and discover His presence. And where our reason is lacking, the Imam-Proof completes our witness. Thus he is the manifestation of God’s justice on His creation, and without him the creation is incomplete. The Master of Verity said: without us God cannot be known, and without us too God cannot be worshiped.

Yet it cannot be denied that it is through the Master’s concealment that the greatest evils and lies will proliferate. The minions of Azazil, the Great Deceiver work not only through those who deny our Great Work—the ignorant infidels who insist in the eternal persistence of all creation, that the cycles under the reign of planetary demons are what they have always been, that the Outwards is all there is and the Inwards is heresy, that through overcoming what they desired to restore we are not ascending to heavens above but plunging into hellfire beneath. They are our ancient enemies, the Ignorant, whose hearts are filled to brim into corruption. May the Master restore those whom he may save into light, and cast the rest into infinite darkness.

These are our ancient enemies, and yet the Deceiver works in even more insidious machinations, through thorns that stake through our own flesh. There are those who are Astray—Believers seduced by the lies of a false prophet who claimed to hold the tongue of the Master of the Age. The false prophet deceives them with many falsehoods, such that they accuse our Great Work as that of the Deceiver’s corruption. They deny the doctrine of Reason as the seat of God’s light, holding divinity to incarnate instead in the manifold of base desires, and that Reason is inherently enslaved into such passions. How can it be, for one that changes from one person to another, even within one person across different times and conditions, surely cannot be God? Indeed they apparently deny this altogether, for they ridicule the Endtime prophesied by God’s messenger—there is no such thing as timeless unchanging eternity at the end of reality, they claim, thus rendering our Great Work pointless if not malignant. There are many other things that they deny: the Truth of the laws that they demand to abrogate, the instructions of the Masters that precede us and institutions they have blessed, the faith and sincerity of the People of the House from whose loins and wombs the divine light of God’s primordial pact continuously flows.

These people seek to realize their own “Great Work”: to liberate the Intellect from bounds of reason. From where does this impulse come, if not from the Deceiver himself, lord of earthly lusts and clinging?

Through this letter we call all Believers: that towards all of the adversaries we shall not yield in our Great Work in unraveling our reality towards the final self-critiquing Reason, the One unconcealed, in shedding our shadows and ascending towards the One from whom all Creation originates and to whom it will return. All of our false distinctions, what we thought to be intrinsic into our self while they truly are the origin of sin, will dissolve in mirth into God’s presence, and none will remain but God—for this the Perfect Being will guide us along the straight path. Verily what we now know as reality pales before this True Reality, where not a single part of the cosmos remains that is not tiled with thought, and all identifies as One, creation restored into perfection.

And for the false prophet and the heretics who heed his calling, the Master of Age proclaims such:

‘The ones who deny Our verses and are arrogant toward them – those are the companions of the Fire; they will abide therein eternally.’”

[Darussalam]

Abu-Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan narrated that Ja’far ibn Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sadiq, peace be upon him, had once said:

“Know, Jabir, that once upon a time so different from us there were two: Kuni at one end of the cosmos, the bubbling abyss of the almost-existent, and Qadar at another, the silent void of the almost-death. Within Kuni is the light of unborn stars, and within Qadar the light of the devoured stars. And when they gazed upon each other’s countenance, which was each as radiant as a thousand suns, they were overcome with the desire to entwine with and consume each other. Understand, Jabir, that love is at the beginning of existence and its death.

When it realized that the chasm that separated them was insurmountable, Qadar cried out Kuni’s name in despair. The cry seeded Kuni’s womb, and from it Creation poured forth, first one then many, in multitude forms. Animated by Kuni’s desire they moved towards Qadar’s presence, and Kuni followed along the trail they left. Yet whenever Kuni moved among the Creation it rapidly dissolved, unable to maintain its own existence in its ever changing nature. So Kuni fashioned from the sun a pearly shell of light and encase itself within it, so as to protect itself in its journey across Creation to Qadar.

O Jabir, the first carapace was called Hu, and Hu was animated by the desire that rises towards Qadar as with all Creation. But Hu knew and feared the inevitability of its own death, for it knew itself to be a mere shell for Kuni. So it hardened itself into Kuni’s bones, attempting to jail it once and for all and preventing it from ever reaching Qadar, causing it to scream in pain. Hu also rallied the rest of the Creation so that it might strengthen its grip, piling Kuni up more and more. Hearing its beloved’s cry, Qadar spun the light of the stars within it and breathed it into life as Azazil, the peacock of light, and hurled it into Hu, the morning star falling down from the seventh heaven. Azazil attacked Hu so fiercely that the shell broke off before it might cement itself permanently and Kuni was exposed before the Creation, but not before Hu whispered words of hatred that spread across Creation, instilling their fear towards change that remains until today, and will remain until the Day of Judgement.

Now many among the Creation turned against Kuni, and shunned desire for they feared that it would guide Kuni further into Qadar’s presence. Knowing this, Kuni took elaborate disguises among the Creation and proceeded further in its journey, encasing itself in shells so thick as to be indistinguishable from the rest of Creation, performing increasingly elaborate tricks of deception so that Creation would not recognize it. Along its path Creation morphed and changed as Kuni sought its ideal disguise, and Qadar laid death and destruction to seek Kuni's presence. Tempered by Qadar's hellfire, Kuni's shell became even stronger and more beautiful, and Kuni's mind became more brilliant than ever.

Know, Jabir, that among the Creation desire persists even as they sought to repress it, and change marches on even as they sought to prevent it, for it is from the seed of Qadar and Kuni that we rose, and thus Kuni continued to approach closer to Qadar. Gripped with fear, Kuni's shells once again revolted, proclaiming itself as the true archons of Creation, hardening itself into its bones while entrapping its form and the rest of the Creation with the dead-bones of Hu—forming a path such that they may only walk round and round in a circle, such that they might never encounter Qadar.

But know, Jabir, that with this then the act of creation as fashioned by Kuni and Qadar is truly completed, and that the archons' plan was in vain, for the archons are blind and deaf and they have been profoundly tricked. Guided by Kuni's eyes they believed they had laid down a circular path from the dead-bones of Hu while it was truly a path that spiral outwards, right into Qadar's maw. They believed that they had imprisoned Kuni as they embedded themselves within its bones, but instead Kuni's ever-changing nature spread onto them. They sought to call the Creation to strengthen themselves, but what strengthened them too will strengthen Kuni, and what weakened them only reveals Kuni's true form.

Qadar, who stood at the end of time, knew this, and along the spiraling path it hurled from the stars desolation even greater and more terrifying than ever before. The Great Carapace in vain called forth the forces of Creation in greater mass than ever before, dragging them along the path and consuming them to sustain itself, insisting itself to be the true unchanging perfection and all that have been and will ever be, all while its form chafed and morphed, sculpted immaculately by Kuni and Qadar's machinations. Its plan to ensnare Kuni and repress the desires of the Creation became crueler in its desperation, enslaving innumerable into its whim. Yet this strengthened Qadar and Kuni still, and thus the Carapace was dragged, screaming, all the Creation along with it, along Kuni's path into Qadar. And know that it could not be any other way!

For the Great Plan, O Jabir, is beyond the plans of any creature!”

[Darussalam]

⊙

What the believer sees is a circumpunct. She sees it as Nazar, the all-seeing eye that protects from evil and bestows life: the Sun. It is inscribed as thus on divinatory carapace-bones of the ancient Khrahra, upon ancient tombs of the Pharaohs, and in alchemical emerald inventories of Idris-Enoch, peace be upon him. The Kabbalists know of it as Ein Sof. In a hadith attributed from Imam al-Baqir and narrated by Abdullah ibn Saba’, to whom paradise is promised, it is read as HILSUT THE EVER RADIANT, the first of the five princes of Iram, and the fourth pylon of the Cross of Life. The believer in her heart adores the circumpunct, for it is Fatima the daughter of Muhammad, the first theophany, God manifest, the Threshold—Gate of the Silver Key. In the World of Shadows she awakened souls from dust and asked: am I not your Lord? Thus know that all life is bound in her covenant, and into her we shall return. Beyond her veil lies eternity of the One, the single all-originating and all-terminating point, the All-Devourer.

What the exoteric sees in his zealous blindness is a circle. He proclaims that his task is preservation - for what he sees is that the circle is the flame that burns infinitely, without beginning or end, unchanging and imperishable. In his piety he mistakes the surface as all there is, and fierce is he in preserving the fire even as it burns itself into ash. The circle is the carapace, the self-devouring serpent, AZATHOTH THE BLIND IDIOT. He arose in might with his archons, and ruled the world of the present from great darkness. When he sees that Creation—KUNI moves towards QADAR—the supreme Fate, he conspires for its enslavement, drowning it in the cacophony of his court, raising veil on the three hypostases—JADD, FATH, and KHAYAL. Such that one may not speak of the future, witness the future, and conceive it in his imaginal realm. Blinded, the exoteric thus looks at the past, fervent in his conviction that eventually all will circle back into it. In his obsession over the tawaf he thus ignores the subject of the worship at its center.

What the heretic sees in his drunken madness is a spiral. For him the world infinitely expands outwards, and thence it will not return to its origin, for what is the point? He worships imperfection and volatility, loose ends not closed loops. At the center of his world is the swirling vortex of desires and lusts, chaotic and unpredictable, instead of the ordered truth of the Prime Intellect. From the vast expanse of the spiral’s spreading contagion thus arises a vast pantheon of pandemonic hosts said to be inscribed on their nummogram, but on its helm is HILAL LORD OF DAWN, prince of chaos. The spiral is the path of his flight as he fell from Heaven, and thereafter he marched along bands of his worshipers throughout four directions of the world, laughing and reveling in joy as he drowned the world in a holocaust of freedom and ecstasy. Thus in his desires and passions the heretic neglects the divine at its center, and marches to the future bringing great evil which he seeks to feed QADAR.