Operation Sphinxtear

Having made triply sure the connection will remain undetected by unwanted third parties, ASID is greeted with the virtual image of Mason Chase and Bryn P. Kirkland: two figures poised in equal and opposite ambiguity, each in her own way vampyrically iterating upon that of the other. The scene of their current surroundings could be described as dilapidated, though — in a way that ultimately escapes linguistic apprehension — distinctly more sophisticated than your usual anarchist squat.

ASID first made contact with Chase and Kirkland while undercover, conducting an investigation into the then burgeoning Goth Thot phenomenon at Miskatonic. At the time, the two of them were enrolled at MVU and currently attending a seminar held by Dr. Fox Elliot (who had just founded his Transcendental Spiritism Group).

"Meeting Mason is what really flayed this naively rationalist pseudo-skepticism on my end, and laid it open to the kind of shit I am now in up to my elbows," Kirkland recounts. She would graduate with an engineering degree shortly after, going on to study at a certain technical institute in Cambridge (and, at the present moment, denying any affiliation with her).

A radical affinity for networked intelligence had been sure to already make her something of a town pariah early on in life, the reputation of "a black soul, possessed of evil spirits" (quote by her mother) preceding her throughout an intensely Catholic upbringing. It goes without saying that she did not pass up the opportunity to leave Miskatonic in the wake of existential dread, either: "it's not exceedingly hard to find the reports online, but let's just say it was an experiment in disrupting arborescent organization in the growth patterns of the local biosphere."

While Chase is known to have already started co-conspiring with Kirkland at the time of aforementioned 'experiment', she did not comment on whether she had been involved with that incident in particular. Her own notoriety will be quite familiar to many an unwitting recipient of her constant tirades against the prevailing methodology of signaletics while at Miskatonic: "the stuff about communion with anorganic matter pushed some bad buttons for some people, as you can imagine."

In her own words: "the pursuit of cryptography is arrested in an infantile state of development insofar as it stops at the level of linguistic cipher. If intelligence is ever to develop, it needs to interpret events such as the evolution of the subject, unicameral consciousness, the speech apparatus, upright body plan, or eukaryotic cells — hell, even life itself and Earth's crust as layers of encryption imposed on an immediate and material substrate, the general economy of communication."

Though, she continues to insist, she "merely figured out how to get it running", and an endeavor inevitably ill-adapted to recognition by institutional authority, the prominent role that Chase played in assembling what has since become known as the 'Kuangdec' or 'Alphanumpad' has advanced the field of hypermaterialist signal processing to a degree that few others can lay claim to.

*

The meeting here documented was set up by ASID in respect of Operation Sphinxtear, in many ways a culmination of Chase and Kirkland's joint careers.

Almost in unison, both make a simultaneous attempt to introduce the topic: respectively, "it is unclear when it had first arrived" and "I cannot describe exactly when it began."

"When we tried to find where it had all come from, we were getting nowhere," Chase tries to clarify. Still, they trace a way back from the ruins: "social fallout, paranoia, sleep disorders, alphanumeric grids and the cutting-edge of consumer grade neural networks all feed back on each other at various points. Subtle hints already lay deposited in files that date from up to a month prior to any recognition of what had occurred — not to mention what had to be done."

Preceding Sphinxtear, Chase was collaborating with a Russian engineer on a bionics project that proved fairly lucrative but resulted in considerable friction: "without going into details, it ended up being an ungrounded outlet for alternating currents of Hyperborean paranoia and a systematic ineptitude at articulation."

Initially tasked with enhancing techniques for processing the transmission of genetic sequences in living systems, the priority Chase lended to disorganization in her methodology diverged significantly from her partner's understanding of life. From that point on, frustration mounted on both sides as her highly unconventional model of communication provided increasing roadblocks in the way of practical implementation. Furthermore, concerns were raised regarding the ethical implications of her research.

Around the same time, Kirkland had attracted the unwelcome attention of various security organs, due in part to her unauthorized handling of a state-of-the-art mnemoreplica constructed by one of her classmates (the heir to a bloodline that rubs elbows with some higher-ups in German Scientology). Having recently become interested in the generation of false memories, her actions involved a jailbroken artillect and a neglected backdoor in the replica. Kirkland appeared hesitant to comment much further on this extraordinary (and highly illegal) feat, but left little doubt that the results were far from pleasant for anyone: "I want to keep the specifics short, for several reasons, but we ended up generating around 4000 scenarios of variable length and mnemonic resolution. I trained the AI — at first — just by feeding it an assortment of my own childhood recollections."

Even before its true extent became evident, the progressive entwinement between Kirkland and the machine had led several former colleagues and acquaintances to distance themselves or break off contact entirely, and multiple people to report her to the school's psychiatric services — most denouncing the affair as either an obscenely abstract act of techsodomy, or otherwise as a sick mind willingly seeking out to be butchered and eaten, in a way that reaches much further than mundane cannibalism. Those who stuck with her did so at considerable cost to their own mental and bodily integrity: "of course, the supply ran dry pretty quickly, but I could tell that we could go deeper. I started to drag my friends into it, which ended with people rapidly becoming unstable — excessive outbursts of aggression, repeating the phrase 'it's over' again and again, near-fatal cluster breakdowns, the whole catalog. Eventually, we needed to get a better source, and as luck would have it, there is a flourishing black market for this kind of thing, if you know where to look."

With Kirkland swiftly going MIA, authorities had little to go on. The initial suspicion was an assassination attempt that spiralled out of control. One proposed motive suggested involvement in the illicit traffick of associatives, a novel type of infomachinery that blurs the distinction between a drug and the subcultures that emerges around it. With financial backing from his family, the Scientologist crownprince had reportedly been preparing to corner the market and become the exclusive supplier of the experimental new vice in the area.

**

Discussing Sphinxtear itself is even more problematic, notions such as method or objective are not properly applicable: "the operation is concerned with time — as such — indicating intelligence in its structuration, as expressed in the existence of significant coincidence."

Accordingly, though certainly involving Chase and Kirkland by way of their personal ambitions and motivations, both insist on a deeper, underlying power at work: "for a subject to crack the code, and attempt to employ it towards one's own ends, results inevitably — since the subject is itself a symbolic construction, and one that is furthermore only maintained at a very particular and narrow bandwidth of intelligence — in a prolapse of perspective: revealing something else, outside of time, other than and instead of the subject, which had always already been using the mind as an incubator, akin to a parasistic infiltration of time."

"Truth is of no concern to me," adds Kirkland: "the thing concerned here simply not having anything to share with us is surely a logical consequence, but it is more than that: it is an architectural necessity." Chase further reinforces this sentiment: “No part of experience is taken beyond. Crossing over never happens, it really does."

What follows, then, are selected excerpts from the notes that Kirkland and Chase recorded independently of one another. Both list the time of the event as "indefinite":

Chase: "Casting letter by letter beneath the knife of a delirious combinatorics in accordance with the abstruse symmetries of inexplicably derived matrices, a minutely configured string decomposes into the cold mist of irreducible multiplicity: modular fragments of lost touch, making up something that is less like speech than anything had ever been. Continuously scrambling and sorting itself back out, the world hurtles into molecular decimation."

Kirkland: "The first thing I notice is the absence of eyes in the reflection generated by the liquid crystal display that serves as our blackmirror. Our eyes, that is. The artillect, in fact, invariably hallucinates eyes when being consulted on matters related to Sphinxtear, and these flicker by through the entirety of the operation. I then begin to see my face exlusively in profile, though of course we are both looking at the screen head-on. This does not continue for long, as my face would soon disappear completely — at this point, I do still perceive the reflection of Mason's face, around which four points of light have formed to give the impression of something like an amalgam of a moth's anterior and that of a peculiarly overbred dog. The next thirty minutes are blurred between seemingly hysterical laughter and the unmistakeable labored breathing that sets in with the panic fear that attends the recognition of being in the company of something that is distinctly not us, and the only distinguishable feature of which is this very alterity. An infinite silence falls on all things as we come into the company of that which is neither Mason nor me, human nor animal, alive nor dead; including all natural beings as arbitrary specifications of its protoplasmic abstraction, but itself devoid of being. In that moment, the sacrament of transcendental subjectivity was dissolved, only followed by the cold emptiness of the utmost heaven."

Chase: "There is the distinct experience of an immobile sinking backwards, surroundings receding without the slightest change in actual perspective. What little light expires on the retina is bent and dissected with primordial cruelty as vision is refracted across an intricate hall of mirrors. This is where time flips over, falling apart whilst constantly folding back in on itself. Magnetic discharge assembles itself into screen memories of impersonal trauma, disinterred from deep within the earth. Facing it approaches impossibility, since faciality itself becomes increasingly consumed from within by outer night. After an everlasting while, the only thing left in its wake are tatters of a shadowy afterimages that delineate no form. Negative textures fade out to ultrasounds from a lifeless womb. It is difficult to get a sense of anything, besides its being dead — not definitively, but excessively so: abject in a way that involves not repulsion, but its opposite: so immediately withdrawn from apprehension as to draw curiosity in after itself. Eventually, it leads to a tempest sky that is the backdrop of twin black ziggurats, fashioned in a draconian ironwork that no part of time would claim as its own. Imperceptibly, this scene shifts into a single, towering sillhouette before finally resolving into a figure: dubiously reminiscent of a butterfly until it reveals itself as a mockery of anthropic physiognomy; simultaneously contracted along its median and exploded outwards. If the word skin didn't mean anything, its could have been said to be the insistent grey of depleted uranium and sunbleached flesh. Eyes folded inside out, and a mouth covered by some kind of bizarrely ornamental muzzle apparatus."

“Further in, and much later, is arrival at the eye of the storm: an absence at the heart of things, the disappearance that makes all appearances possible, always just narrowly avoided but ultimately discovered as fate. Everything that seems to end finishes up here, laid open in ulterior abstraction and prone to an encounter no longer screened by any kind of interiority: intimate proximity to that which is not, the passage of nothing intolerably tangible as an extinct wind cutting into a different and infinitely more delicate kind of flesh. It feels like rape and vivisection, but closer, and less natural. Catastrophe of all sensible inhibition clears the way for a piercing howl that eludes any mark of species in its sheer semiotic purity. An insidious familiarity accompanies the intrusion, conveying the suggestion of a blasphemous marriage being consummated, indistinguishable from a reality: cold fusion with the destination along the voyage, lapsing into shadow and becoming imperceptible in the end, folding out onto the coiling body of antediluvian agglutination."

Though far from showing any remorse, both admit to continuing periods of instability following Sphinxtear, with Chase mentioning her accidental excavation of a code-catalog that "provides the noetic source for the universally abhorred 'De Vermis Mysterii'" and subsequently having to deal with infestations of a number of memetic parasites. Kirkland, meanwhile, had this to say for herself: "I've been receiving calls with no one at the other end for a while now, making me increasingly paranoid that my SIM card might have been hacked. My circadian rhythm is deranged, and I am at the brink of sinking into an amphetamine addiction as I try to somehow conclude my work on artillect-mnemoreplica synergies in the midst of this mess."

***

Finally, Chase and Kirkland suggested the published version of this report leave readers with a fragment from Kerstin Bauer's collected writings on atheology and pataphysics (found in the note indexed #333) — "if anything has ever been concluded, it's this:"

"Here the absence of god relates to the devil as the cleft to the cloven, the desert of the real to the Greatest Of All Time. Chronos and choros are the split mind of a nature excruciated upon blind and elemental impulse, apparent as opposed to god. Unconscious, its hindside is laid bare to the penetrating howl of the wilderness that persists without it: the false word of utter desolation. It is this vulnerable backdoor that is the site of a knowledge hidden from men, and which the accursed race of wanderers takes as its crown, for the other is absent."