HOT PINK ZER0 episode ONE: "SURVEILLANCE IS SEXY"
story, songs and sketches by Jason Squamata
song demos available for listening at:
(on the page labelled "MUSICALS")
featuring the vocal deliciousness of Polly Superstar
in your shadow gallery
where the forms escape their frames,
formulas flow, feed, and breed
and play their wicked games.
in your cellular library
where the numbers on the spines
indicate taste, shape, and fate
your index will be mine.
CHORUS:
i’m born again
every now and then
where my invisible friends
await a game of let’s pretend.
you struck me dumb
but where would i run?
when the world is just a womb
in your incubatorium.
in your dew-slick spiderweb
where your acolytes recline
in a blissful trance, the dust-motes dance
and fall outside of time.
in your coral abattoir
your meat meets mine at last.
my soul is sliced by the hungry eyes
of a mermaid made of glass.
CHORUS
BRIDGE:
i’ve gone beyond the fields i know.
where did all the lifeforms go?
they’re vanishing like footprints in the snow.
around the bend, between the scenes,
there’s a city where you weave my dreams.
receive me in your ruins, sweet machine.
in your incubatorium
where geometry comes to life
you engineer delirium
with red thread and a jewelled knife.
in your blue aquarium
where the sequined equations swim,
your crystal tears, blood, sweat, and cum
will marinate my sins.
CHORUS
...
It's a gunmetal gray Tuesday in the middle of the year 2???, and the sky is just ripping itself to pieces., A pentecostal downpour bursts in licks of liquid flame from a teddybear clusterfuck of boiling black clouds. The rain is so caustic its kiss will eat a layer of your flesh if you're out without a creamy coating of Viva Hiroshima extra-strength radiation block. The stubbly window-studded hides and carapace rooftops of Kakodelphia sizzle under this esurine spit coming in through fissures in a hopelessly frayed ozone mesh. Citizens scurry and shamble and shriek into the various hidey-holes the buildings grow in case of rain.
The buildings themselves are alive, in a sense. The biomorphic technologies at work in their interiors have formed electrofried neuro-networks, twitching nervous systems, and throbbing room-sized organs, of a sort. A few of the older skyscrapers have grown faces…ancient faces and baby-faces… clown-faces and geisha-faces.
They survey the cityscape like monolithic deathmasks, lit from within, their lcd eyes all aglow with static, murmuring things no architect can decode. Their eruption was sudden and disconcerting, at first, but a modern girl can get used to damn near anything.
So every building in Kakodelphia is a living thing, possessed of certain appetites and a complex intelligence. Some even achieve a kind of sentience, with all the neuroses and sleight-of-mind delusions that sentience is heir to. Buildings that have nightmares. Buildings that fall in love with their occupants. Buildings with their very own agendas. The structures have gone all soft in the centuries between my now and your then. It's like the city dreamt its own future and the dream melted. Subway tunnels uncoil in all directions and then contract themselves again into a clammy bolus. Again and again. Desperate inhale and exhausted exhale. Serene museums awaken at dawn and flex their exhibits into raucous menageries (forms escaping their frames and running riot in roaming perfumed clouds of ambience and bursting abstract splatterbombs of antic energy). Aquariums bleed into condominiums and multiplex temples splice their relics and fetishes with the wonders on display in the demented dioramas of labyrinthine shopping centers. Within the maths of every blueprint, the harsh angle has yielded to the organic tenderness of the curve.
Swarms of microcams and nanocams afflict the alleys and avenues like a plague of tweaking tinkerbells, fracturing every object, organism, and incident into the stuff of media. Animated advertising collages every available surface. Even the empty streets, sautéed by rain, have an orgiastic quality. Wherever you go, there's always too much to see and say and do. And screens, screens everywhere, like broken mirrors in hidden hotel rooms, screens half-sick from all the shadows they've seen, screens within screens within screens, rewound freeze-frames and fast forward frenzies, spacetime peeled by the needles of now and sloughed in a pay-per-view mobius striptease. Nature told the city to go fuck itself so it did and it hasn't stopped for a minute nor will it before this story does.
It's a gunmetal gray Tuesday in the middle of the year 2???, and the sky is just ripping itself to pieces., A pentecostal downpour bursts in licks of liquid flame from a teddybear clusterfuck of boiling black clouds. The rain is so caustic its kiss will eat a layer of your flesh if you're out without a creamy coating of Viva Hiroshima extra-strength radiation block. The stubbly window-studded hides and carapace rooftops of Kakodelphia sizzle under this esurine spit coming in through fissures in a hopelessly frayed ozone mesh. Citizens scurry and shamble and shriek into the various hidey-holes the buildings grow in case of rain.
The buildings themselves are alive, in a sense. The biomorphic technologies at work in their interiors have formed electrofried neuro-networks, twitching nervous systems, and throbbing room-sized organs, of a sort. A few of the older skyscrapers have grown faces…ancient faces and baby-faces… clown-faces and geisha-faces.
They survey the cityscape like monolithic deathmasks, lit from within, their lcd eyes all aglow with static, murmuring things no architect can decode. Their eruption was sudden and disconcerting, at first, but a modern girl can get used to damn near anything.
So every building in Kakodelphia is a living thing, possessed of certain appetites and a complex intelligence. Some even achieve a kind of sentience, with all the neuroses and sleight-of-mind delusions that sentience is heir to. Buildings that have nightmares. Buildings that fall in love with their occupants. Buildings with their very own agendas. The structures have gone all soft in the centuries between my now and your then. It's like the city dreamt its own future and the dream melted. Subway tunnels uncoil in all directions and then contract themselves again into a clammy bolus. Again and again. Desperate inhale and exhausted exhale. Serene museums awaken at dawn and flex their exhibits into raucous menageries (forms escaping their frames and running riot in roaming perfumed clouds of ambience and bursting abstract splatterbombs of antic energy). Aquariums bleed into condominiums and multiplex temples splice their relics and fetishes with the wonders on display in the demented dioramas of labyrinthine shopping centers. Within the maths of every blueprint, the harsh angle has yielded to the organic tenderness of the curve.
Swarms of microcams and nanocams afflict the alleys and avenues like a plague of tweaking tinkerbells, fracturing every object, organism, and incident into the stuff of media. Animated advertising collages every available surface. Even the empty streets, sautéed by rain, have an orgiastic quality. Wherever you go, there's always too much to see and say and do. And screens, screens everywhere, like broken mirrors in hidden hotel rooms, screens half-sick from all the shadows they've seen, screens within screens within screens, rewound freeze-frames and fast forward frenzies, spacetime peeled by the needles of now and sloughed in a pay-per-view mobius striptease. Nature told the city to go fuck itself so it did and it hasn't stopped for a minute nor will it before this story does.
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song: “LA POUPEE”
she sleeps in an elegant box
in a tutu and pink ankle socks
clockwork for a mind, the gears in her grind
they whisper and whine when she walks.
what the layman mistakes for romance
is a step in her dangerous dance
he's a slave to her rhythm, it slithers within him
her movements leave nothing to chance.
CHORUS:
la poupee pirouettes
the trouble she gets in
will never disturb her ballet.
pirouettes then forgets
all the lovers she lets in
she's dancing their graceful decay
la poupee la poupee
hair of black, eyes of gray
open your box to the cold light of day
who pulls the strings when you play?
la poupee, la poupee
she's left several wrecks in her wake.
dancing boys are so easy to break.
she's the love of your life.
try to make her your wife
and you'll find that you've made a mistake.
her suitors have all come unglued
without once seeing her in the nude.
that shrill effervescence they think is her essence
is simply another etude.
CHORUS:...
she looks like a victorian toy
they were all made to own and enjoy.
glass eyes blinking slowly, she'll never be lonely
so many men left to destroy.
every man thinks she's dancing for him
but there's circuitry under her skin.
she's a trap for the souls of those who'd control her.
the leashes she weaves won't wear thin.
CHORUS:...
...Slow dissolve to the penthouse playroom of yours truly and madly: Xenopia Zer0, Americorp's sweetheart, the poster-child for everything fresh and vivid in this skewered tomorrow. You'd know me if you saw me. These saucer-sized babydoll diamond eyes that almost burst free from their sockets when I see something I want and will have by any means necessary. These prehensile lashes that languorously blink and weave themselves into flytrap stitches when I'm sleeping. The augmented hi-res freckles on my cheeks. The silver stubble of my scalp, a network of coiff-modules just barely visible between skin and skull. At my command, the perfect dye and 'do for any and every occasion will ooze through the pores and frame my face just perfectly. You'll rarely see my hair in the same style twice. The only constant in my look is the logo tattooed on my forehead and most of my possessions, a hot pink heart with a "0" at its core.
Behold my surgically maintained pre-teen physique, the gilded ribcage, the spindly limbs, the complexion like moonmilk on the brink of expiration.
Behold the restless tattoo filaments that grafitti my flesh and migrate from skinpatch to skinpatch, reconfiguring themselves into iconic sigils and cryptic slogans that speak to any given moment with synchrosnickety accuracy, making a constant cartoon of me and an obsessive audience of all who see me.
Inhale the mesmeric miasma of the designer pheremones I exude at all times, making junkies of all who breathe me.
Behold the cellophane pyjamoid chemise that creases and crackles as I sleep it off and makes me feel factory fresh when I wake up to more of the same.
My bed is an Olympic-sized pink plastic oyster. Its belly is stuffed with jammy silver satin that conforms to my toss-and-turn like an ocean would conform to the tense trajectories of a shark. If there were any sharks left. The playroom itself, on the whole, evokes a maximum security nursery for the criminally insane. A glitch-riddled pixellating video game. A tranquilized psychedelic themepark. A congealing crayon candyland festooned with raspberry razorblades. Etcetera. It's a schizophrenic infant's idea of heaven. It's what all the "it" girls will be living in next year. By then, of course, I will have burned this particular paradise to the Ground. Figuratively or literally. By accident or by design. It's just so hard to tell sometimes/ the windows here are bulletproof membranes, tinted pnk. They shiver and sweat and steam and blister in the places where the rabid rain has kissed and licked and bitten them.
Another fucking lovely day in the life of Xenopia Zer0.
It's my world to love and live in.
The rest of you just struggle and die in it.
...
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song: “BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS”
celebutantes are running loose in new york city
high on stuff that is yet unknown on the street
they all look like cartoons, they're just that pretty.
their antics are making me misty.
they'll look funny when they're fifty,
but tonight they're the bright young things and i think it's sweet.
yeah, tonight they're the bright young things and i think it's sweet.
lindsey's got more money than you've heard of.
gwendolyn has done more drugs than you've seen.
every item applies to you on their list of turn-offs.
uma's new, couldn't be a day over sixteen.
their games get so outrageous,
we go crazy when we get famous.
we go blind like bright young things and we fuck like machines.
we go blind like bright young things and we fuck like machines.
like maenads they tear through every party.
like the wild hunt, they lay waste to every scene.
like barbie dream-dolls seen through a mirror darkly.
they play with their meat, then purge when they've picked the bones clean.
every rampage makes the papers.
they'll be coming down sooner or later
but tonight the bright young life is peachy fucking keen.
yeah, tonight the bright young life is peachy fucking keen.
they rock the house as the truth turns into quicksand.
they party hard with an apocalypse on every screen.
cross them, they won't bother to hire a hitman.
when they kill you, the crime gets reviewed in the best magazines.
they're wide awake and dreaming.
dimmer dolls would wake up screaming.
the bright young things are teaching me how to be mean.
the bright young things are teaching me how to be mean.
tonight the bright young life is peachy fucking keen.
we go blind like bright young things and we fuck like machines.
their antics are making me misty.
they'll look funny when they're fifty.
but tonight they're the bright young things, and i think it's sweet.
yeah, tonight they're the bright young things and i think it's sweet.
...
I quake. I shake. I stir. Just what DID I get up to last night? The memories fly together from great psychic distances, mingling with random hallucinations and mangled moments of questionable clarity to form a jangling jumble, coherent as a carcrash, mellifluous as a migraine. Anything goes and nobody knows in my frantic fly-by nightlife, but it can't have been anything natural. Synthetic lilies erupt from the halfshell headboard at my first flush of awareness, drooling a goo that teems with cleansing microbes, eating the crust from my famous gaze.
My genetically engineered and meticulously disfigured Chihuahua Azuquita hovers just a few feet away, like always, an infected zero gravity gland bleating in his belly, its swollen spherical anatomy palpitating in concert with every desperate breath, its implanted eyeballs bulging in innocent agony (bloodshot replicas of the eyeballs that fit so easily and neatly into the face of its mistress). Its mouth is a gaping, fang-rimmed gash. A flat pink tongue waggles out the rim and to the side, viscid with a patina of tubercular phlegm. Azuquita is ever-present in the background of my lurid misadventures, like a guardian angel who has flown too close to its client and fallen victim to my feckless cruelty, its ineffable brainmeat scrambled and lobotomized, its stained glass window wings tweezed and severed, its gold-soaked skin singed by serrated sunbeams that coalesce in my lenses to achieve the lacerating, merciless precison of a laser. The beast exists in a constant state of pain. I'm nourished by its pain, the little nubbins. By its confusion. By its grief. Azuquita always reminds me of how good I feel.
I sit up and stretch, elongating the elegant mannequin measurements that have launched a hundred million emissions, nocturnal and otherwise. My yawn might call to mind a jungle cat in the wake of an especially brutal feast, my hunger slaked, soporific and listless from my gluttony. The bed grows a hypodermic tendril or two, piercing my softest spots and shooting me up with an array of designer vitamins, mood-enhancers, and hangover remedies. I barely notice. Pinpricks and needle-nicks are part of my routine and no bruise (no blemish, no scratch, no track-mark) could survive the regenerative suppleness of my silky skin. Think of me as a Dorian Gray figure for a decadent future in which ethics are obsolete. There is no putrefied painting or Polaroid to act as index to my iniquity. These days it's safe to assume that anyone as obscenely wealthy and perfectly pretty and apparently young as I am has already explored and exhausted every kind of corruption you'd know by name. By the time you mimic me, I've already moved on to crimes you've never heard of. Crimes you can't afford.
But even here, in a heaven so harsh no hell could hold its horrors, there comes a reckoning, from time to time. Listen closely. Listen closely and bear witness.
I climb out of bed and I put my slippers on, spiky black rubber slippers with ruby-red screaming skullboy heads at the toe. This maneuver calls attention to a strange protuberance on my torso, just between my left armpit and my left nipple. I lift the arm and I coil into a yogaesque configuration to get a proper look at the growth. It seems to be the tip of a thumb and two whole fingers, sticking out my side as if they've been there all my life, wriggling anxiously, catching my wakefulness.
The fingers look familiar.
It's all coming back to me in a skinstorm of images and associations. Predatory party prowling with Ethan Mandible and his gang of shifty surgeons. A club called "the Incubatorium". Recreational Ebola. Painful liquification. Ecstatic oblivion. Reckless re-constitution. Fuck. Heavy metal memes are shredding my vectors. The upload can't be thinned, edited, or diluted, but I can mentally slow the flow of memory and engineer a tranquil filling in of blanks while I adjust to my injections and take in the view. I peel off the cellophane chemise. I tickle one of the fingertips and feel nothing.
"These are definitely not my fingers".
...
I quake. I shake. I stir. Just what DID I get up to last night? The memories fly together from great psychic distances, mingling with random hallucinations and mangled moments of questionable clarity to form a jangling jumble, coherent as a carcrash, mellifluous as a migraine. Anything goes and nobody knows in my frantic fly-by nightlife, but it can't have been anything natural. Synthetic lilies erupt from the halfshell headboard at my first flush of awareness, drooling a goo that teems with cleansing microbes, eating the crust from my famous gaze.
My genetically engineered and meticulously disfigured Chihuahua Azuquita hovers just a few feet away, like always, an infected zero gravity gland bleating in his belly, its swollen spherical anatomy palpitating in concert with every desperate breath, its implanted eyeballs bulging in innocent agony (bloodshot replicas of the eyeballs that fit so easily and neatly into the face of its mistress). Its mouth is a gaping, fang-rimmed gash. A flat pink tongue waggles out the rim and to the side, viscid with a patina of tubercular phlegm. Azuquita is ever-present in the background of my lurid misadventures, like a guardian angel who has flown too close to its client and fallen victim to my feckless cruelty, its ineffable brainmeat scrambled and lobotomized, its stained glass window wings tweezed and severed, its gold-soaked skin singed by serrated sunbeams that coalesce in my lenses to achieve the lacerating, merciless precison of a laser. The beast exists in a constant state of pain. I'm nourished by its pain, the little nubbins. By its confusion. By its grief. Azuquita always reminds me of how good I feel.
I sit up and stretch, elongating the elegant mannequin measurements that have launched a hundred million emissions, nocturnal and otherwise. My yawn might call to mind a jungle cat in the wake of an especially brutal feast, my hunger slaked, soporific and listless from my gluttony. The bed grows a hypodermic tendril or two, piercing my softest spots and shooting me up with an array of designer vitamins, mood-enhancers, and hangover remedies. I barely notice. Pinpricks and needle-nicks are part of my routine and no bruise (no blemish, no scratch, no track-mark) could survive the regenerative suppleness of my silky skin. Think of me as a Dorian Gray figure for a decadent future in which ethics are obsolete. There is no putrefied painting or Polaroid to act as index to my iniquity. These days it's safe to assume that anyone as obscenely wealthy and perfectly pretty and apparently young as I am has already explored and exhausted every kind of corruption you'd know by name. By the time you mimic me, I've already moved on to crimes you've never heard of. Crimes you can't afford.
But even here, in a heaven so harsh no hell could hold its horrors, there comes a reckoning, from time to time. Listen closely. Listen closely and bear witness.
I climb out of bed and I put my slippers on, spiky black rubber slippers with ruby-red screaming skullboy heads at the toe. This maneuver calls attention to a strange protuberance on my torso, just between my left armpit and my left nipple. I lift the arm and I coil into a yogaesque configuration to get a proper look at the growth. It seems to be the tip of a thumb and two whole fingers, sticking out my side as if they've been there all my life, wriggling anxiously, catching my wakefulness.
The fingers look familiar.
It's all coming back to me in a skinstorm of images and associations. Predatory party prowling with Ethan Mandible and his gang of shifty surgeons. A club called "the Incubatorium". Recreational Ebola. Painful liquification. Ecstatic oblivion. Reckless re-constitution. Fuck. Heavy metal memes are shredding my vectors. The upload can't be thinned, edited, or diluted, but I can mentally slow the flow of memory and engineer a tranquil filling in of blanks while I adjust to my injections and take in the view. I peel off the cellophane chemise. I tickle one of the fingertips and feel nothing.
"These are definitely not my fingers".
...
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song: EDIE EDIE EDIE
edie edie,
let your love die in me.
this heat that feeds me,
you treat it like it’s a disease.
you want to be relieved
of the things that keep you sweet.
what i love in you
could get you killed on the street.
CHORUS:
edie edie, you’re a slave no one can set free.
edie edie, you’re a slave no one can set free.
edie edie,
your misery loves company.
you haven’t been alone since june of 2003.
you turn every table.
every guru falls to his knees.
you’ve been studying oblivion.
get ready to receive your degree.
CHORUS
edie edie,
they’re building a factory
where they make millions
of edie facsimiles.
she’ll appear out of nowhere.
she’ll seem to be just what you need.
just when you think you deserve her
she pauses and makes you say “please”.
CHORUS
Through the shuddering smeary surface of a brutalized picture window, through sluicing sheets of heavy weather, I can see my Kakodelphia (my garden of delightful dissipation, my dicey dancefloor, my gamey gameboard, my unholy hunting ground) sprawling in directions that cannot be pointed to, jeweled here and there (almost everywhere, in fact) with my reflections. Images of me in various states and scenes and situations, on billboards and screens and hovering holographic adverts for pills and films and fashions and magazines. A child of the universe, the teen of tomorrow, born to inherit a future that never quite came to pass. Sometimes provocative, but always virginal, always idealized, superficially sinister but somehow utopian in my allure. In a more rational age, millions would thrill to the perils of the pretty things, packaged parables of girls in trouble, but in a puerile world of pure peril, beauty blooms under glass and it's lit just so, so you'd never know that the shadow it casts is death.
Scandal slithers into every public profile, of course, but considering the depths and degrees of filth and fever I have tasted and disseminated amongst the simuloid scum I run with, it's an unfortunate miracle that my image as some alien princess (lost in a wicked world I never made) is intact and as tight as an alibi.
Or so it was before last night.
All my little mirrors go dark at once.
For a moment, the Zer0centric universe theory seems to be in question. There's a ripple on the surface of my blasé nature. The vestigial fingers from last night's frolic (Mandible's fingers? Ruby's? Kali's? Fabrice's?) grope at the flesh of my upper arm. Wherever my image was, out there in the outside, there's a generic ad featuring some waifish wannabe who isn't fit to lick the buttons of my ladybug. The strange faces of the skyline seem to see me. They seem to scowl in judgement. "What the fuck?"
As if on cue, a school of televisions floats in through the room's largest and most yielding orifice with the slo-mo elemental grace of jellyfish, each tuned to a different frequency, forming a disjointed oval of infotainment that circumscribes my radius. They do this every day, but pain makes Azuquita forgetful. It seems to mistake them for death machines of some kind.
Look how it anticipates an impending end to its discomfort and pisses itself with relief. Sadly, before retiring, still under the influence of whatever, I drugged my puppy just for jolly and I laced its catheter in such a way that a quart of urine is now filling its lungs. No human tongue could articulate the shock, the nausea, the terror of it all. The best a puppy can manage, in this case, is an urgent, boiling "Yip!"
I remember my whimsical prank and I manage a lascivious giggle or two before the screens tell me everything I don't want to know. Last night. Where were we? Ah, yes. Reckless re-constitution. From primordial liquid to sassy solid again with a few drops of someone else in the mix. Post-Ebola vertigo. Fine to drive. No, really. Whose car is this, anyway? Who cares? Where are we going? Who cares? Is that a schoolbus? Who cares? I think it was me driving. I ripped through that bus full of babies like a razorstorm through dolphin jelly. And I just kept on driving. Now the body count is unspooling on every screen in graphic detail. Sometimes surveillance is NOT sexy. There might actually be such a thing as "bad publicity". I feel a little sick. My brand is in jeopardy. My ladybug celphones are dialing Daddy of their own accord.. There are armed police pigs in airborne battle blankets surrounding my penthouse. Something audibly bursts inside Azuquita, hurting it badly without being lethal. But I'm not giggling now, am I? I'm scheming, taking deep breaths, doing urgent algebra in my head.
The piggies speak in eerie unison through vocoder megaphones:
"We'd like to ask you a few questions, Mademoiselle Zer0."
Slashing membranes. Flying piggies in my playroom, dribbling sulphuric splooge from the steely sky on my coral carpet.
This hot pink penthouse suddenly stinks of the deep blue sea.
X: "I'm not saying anything until I see my spin doctor!"
A phone-sized ladybug settles against my cheek.
Daddy's distant hiss says: "Princess."
X: "Daddy? You need to fix this. You need to fix this RIGHT NOW."
I'm stamping my spiky slipper and I pout very fetchingly, but no one who matters is watching for a change. This may very well be the worst day ever in the life of a hot pink zer0. Welcome to my bubblicious nightmare.
...
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song: AFTER THE ACCIDENT
our days were like the pages of a magazine
flashy, but paper-thin, with such a glossy sheen.
with interviews and scented sheets stuck in between
commercials for the latest love machines.
our days were like the pages of a magazine
flashy, but paper-thin, with such a glossy sheen.
with interviews and scented sheets stuck in between
commercials for the latest love machines.
our nights were kind of like late-breaking exposes.
investigations of the latest craze.
you revealed your sources to my penetrating gaze.
was that passion just a passing phase?
CHORUS:
i feel like half a person since the accident,
like i lived a day, then passed away,
like the lilies that you sent.
a memory this precious
can feel like punishment
when you can’t remember where the good times went.
each rendezvous was like a grisly motorcrash.
slick collisions in a cloud of broken glass.
nothing that we promised ever came to pass.
who knew that little kiss would be our last?
every time we say good-bye i die inside
this bliss is so efficient with my glitches stitched inside.
i’m running out of holes where my humanity can hide.
when i said “i don’t do love” i guess i lied.
CHORUS
when the bandages come off, i’ll look like someone new.
i’ll begin again, pretend i never messed with you.
there’s no right or wrong, no black and white,
just black and blue.
i’d get the joke if you were broken, too.
sometimes i read the bloody braille you left on me.
my perforated skin spells out our history.
is happiness an accident of chemistry?
is there a pill that makes things how they used to be?
CHORUS
TO BE CONTINUED...
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