Demon Core: Part 14
May. 18th, 2025 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Synaptic Heterostasis
I arrived home from Las Vegas to find the fledgling miasma of unease hanging in the air. Two days ago, videos began circulating on pro-Ukranian Telegram channels of a Russian soldier, most likely one of Pytor’s “stalkers”, somewhere near the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Per Svoboda, who sent me the link via email:
After the last incident involving one of the Russians in the area around Chernobyl, I’ve spent at least an hour a day combing over drone videos of people getting their heads blown off in Donbas; my undesired war voyeurism bore fruit last night.
I’ve never seen anything like this—according to some of the posts on Telegram, a group of men from the Ukrainian State Border Service (aided by members of DAZV, for reasons that will become obvious) arrested a single Russian soldier, who they found wandering through Pripyat. The man offered no resistance, nor does he speak a single word to his captors; his movements, lumbering and baleful, betray no motive or desire for self-preservation. But that is not what makes him interesting.
The Ukranians initially assumed he was tortured, or subjected to some kind of hazing ritual by other members of the Russian occupation, as his entire head was covered with rusted scrap metal, bound in place by zip ties, a single bloodshot eye visible through the layers of steel. The Ukrainians initially started to cut him out of it, until one of the soldiers points out the obvious: the scrap is from Chernobyl. They leave the man to stand helplessly in the mud while members of DAZV, clad in their usual Tyvek, extract their stolen bones with knives tied to the end of steel poles.
Since the video appeared on Telegram, the story has proven odd enough to make its way to Reddit and TikTok, although no one can seem to agree on just what is happening—torture, hoax, Russians driven mad by their own war? With my poor grasp of Russian I wasn’t able to make much of the response from the blogs and VK feeds associated with Pytor’s cult, although one post in a Telegram chat stood out:
The man’s grasp of the scripture is incorrect, and he will pay a heavy price for this error. Radiation is not a gateway to the Xenoinsurgency, but merely a side-effect of the Sites Of Invasion. What he is doing is akin to a regiment of solders deploying themselves to civilian mine, because they mistook the blast mining for bombs.
I send this comment to Svoboda, who said the following:
Pytor’s cultists have no orthodoxy. This is a deliberate omission on their part, as without a disciplined hegemony of scriptural interpretation, adherents are left to attempt enlightenment on their own terms. To them, this is a metaphysical kind of natural selection. If your only scripture is the recondite scribbling of a madman, you must evolve to discover the truth. To them, that Russian soldier is a Trilobite, or neanderthal. A dead evolutionary branch. There will be more.
By the way, the soldier in that video is speaking with a heavy Uzbek accent, so it took me a while to understand what he was saying: I cannot return until I witness them. They must be witnessed first.
The video Svoboda sent me untethered itself from the internet and took up residence in my dreams. That solitary reddened eye, peering through the rotting bones of a Russian reactor, watches from every shadow in the forest of somnolence, appearing not as a voyeur but a beggar. He lumbers towards me, hand outstretched as if grasping for something he alone can see. He does not speak, but the echo of his wails remain long into the waking hours. My mind, grasped by his pleading, turns to darker things.
There are six mass extinctions in geologic history:
- Late Ordovician Approximately 445 million years ago, eliminated 85% of marine species. Cause Unknown.
- Late Devonian Approximately 372 million years ago, eliminated 50% of all genera. Cause unknown.
- Permian-Triassic Approximately 251 million years ago, eliminated 85% of all genera. The worst extinction even in Tellurian history. Cause unknown.
- Triassic-Jurassic Approximately 201 million years ago, eliminated 34% of marine genera. Likely caused by volcanic activity.
- Cretaceous-Palelgene Approximately 66 million years ago, eliminated non-avian dinosaurs. Caused by a meteor impact two million times more energetic than the most powerful nuclear weapon detonated by humankind.
- Holocene Ongoing, suspected thousandfold increase in background extinctions. Caused by social and economic human relations.
What is more terrifying, that entire clades of life can be obliterated by a mere glace from the universe, or that life continues in the face of such bloodshed? There was no wake for the dinosaurs, no eulogy for the trilobites. Instead, a million new and terrible forms of life arose from their corpses, ignorant of the graveyards upon which they tread.
We will be a seventh extinction. The universe will consume us, as it has all its children; whatever clades we leave in our wake will carry on, digesting the marrow from our bones, hobbling over the hills of plastic and concrete, and they will think nothing of us. How beautiful some of them will surely be—glittering tendrils swaying through the ocean, golden eyes peering through the dark. The milky way will bathe them in pale light, while the heaps of uncounted bones, resting in soil, grows ever larger.
There is an angor animi spreading through the air, traveling from person to person, a faint hum of death whose notes are lost upon a deaf universe.