A Forward
Usually, I start something like this with a sliver of story. The juicy beef tenderloin that latches people into expressing interest. I'll get to that at some point or another. First though... first I'm going to preface this interest check with a warning. I was dealing with some emotional instability at the time I wrote this and like all great psychopaths, I mean writers used this instability and channeled it into a "story" like some sort of dark voodoo shaman prancing through the night high on pills.
So before you embark on this adventure I'm warning you now things are not going to make sense. This is a story with so many backends and twists that double back onto one another that it makes a circus contortionist cringe in sadistic delight. It is dirty and frank and sometimes disgusting to your innate humanity. In my own words I would describe it as bleak, terrifying and completely honest. It is emotionally debilitating at points and ripe with an angry cynicism that only angry cynical people in deep dark pits of despair can dredge up from the scum pits at the bottom of our imaginations. If you are looking for a happy ending, an answer to life's questions, or a moral that makes us all feel fuzzy inside that is not here.
If you have not already tabbed out of this yet well maybe you are just that special brand of crazy. If you are still here, intrigued by the idea of a dark DMT infused trip through the human psyche. Well then let me usher you into this little world created out of anger, fear and nightmares. As we try to answer a simple question, "Is it a good thing to be alive?"
The Death of Mister Hisakawa
Inspirations
- The Work of Vannevar Bush
- The Scientific Research of Winfried Otto Schumann
- The Writings Of: Paul Bowles, Ryū Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Jean Genet, Boris Vian, and Thomas Ligotti
- Serial Experiments Lain
- 20th Century Boys
- 19th Century Philosophy
- Charles Dickens
- My Messed Up Head
Predominant Genres
- Neo-Noir
- Post-Cyberpunk
"The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome."
~ Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, July 1945
Our story begins in a city that will only be known as The City. A city in a time not too isolated from our own where you can almost taste the depravity on your tongue. It is the day after Christmas and the clouds above are grey and filled with snow and people are already moving their christmas trees out to the curb to be picked up by the garbage men. On this picturesque morning, the grey sky moves above in a brilliant display of natural sfumato that would make even da Vinci weep in its beauty. On this picturesque morning, one Mister Hisakawa, a salaryman jumps from the roof of his office building and it is a well known fact in the medical field that falls over six meters usually mean instantaneous death. Mister Hisakawa's building was 60 meters tall. Needless to say he hit the ground and impacted in such a way that it made the resulting sidewalk look like some sort of macabre pollock painting. Hisakawa #1. Mister Hisakawa would be the first of ten suicides that day that would follow the same methods. A kind and reasonable person, with a stable family life and good job apparently ending their short trip at the slaughterhouse prematurely for no apparent reason. One hundred of these suicides occurred on average in The City since late August.
At around the same time the mysterious Hana Movement came onto the scene. This "new wave" cult supported the idea of transcendental memory exchange through the use of new neurotechnology. Nothing exactly strange about them except for their meteoric rise to popularity and acceptance in every social circle from the bums drinking on the streets to the high rambling about Jesus, to the high and mighty snorting cocaine off of hookers and dying of heart attacks in night clubs. The Hana Movement promised acceptance on a grander scale, that anybody could become enlightened if they just "opened their minds". The acceptance of the movement by minor celebrities, rock stars and the like only drove others to flock to their shrines located in the city. Though there are rumors that something dark lies behind the oppressive scent of burning incense and beginners yoga sessions.
And still around the same time as the start of the Hana Movement and the murders, a mysterious hacker seemingly was able to access every single living person's email account in the entire City. Every day up until the first of November he would send out a new email, and so a new testament to his "faithful readers". This man who would only become known by his handle as The Apostle preached that the Rapture was coming, that the big cataclysmic destruction of biblical proportions was on its way, that he could see the seams of reality and that they were breaking. The Apostle claimed that he has found Heaven and God within the Machine, within the Internet and that he was chosen to lead his people into salvation through a mass transcendence. While most dismissed the Apostle as some sort of prank or coked out hacker, he gained a few believers especially among intense technophiles intrigued by the resulting schematics and ideas the apostle presented that would lead to this new singularity. But on the first of November he left a final message a warning that when he returned it would mean the end was coming.
And finally there was the outbreak of Wonderland Syndrome. Wonderland Syndrome was a neurological disease of sorts that had been spreading through the city. The most obvious symptoms of the disease is that when afflicted a person falls into a deep coma where upon which they have brain activity very similar to that of when a normal person is dreaming. Expect that this is a dream that you can not wake up from, no matter how much you want to. No doctor can figure out why this disease seems to ravage the populace.
What follows is a resultant crazy drug trip without the drugs through the dark covered streets of this deep labyrinthine city. As a unlucky group of people are brought together in the early morning of December twenty sixth as each is brought in their own way to the same street corner where Mister Hisakawa comes splattering to ground right in front of them all. The result is a journey through the depravity of men through the lens of a world right out of a Tom Waits song, where everybody has their problems and nobody is safe. A story of cults, gods, murder, injustice, happiness, sadness, and of course tragedy all ripped in the slight gaussian haze of a future that could be ours. Welcome to the human experience we take cash and credit.
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