An excerpt from the Kindle release of Acidexia by Rachel Haywire. Order here.

Part One: Raising the Roof with our Meta-Angst

I’m not trying to make you smile, and if you’re looking for emoticons you might as well abort this program. At fifteen, the entire world thinks you’re a newbie. You walk into your local message board, and everything asks you for ID.

Don’t have your birthcode altered? Get accused of being a Teeny Troll and watch the TP storm after you with their megaphones: “We are the Troll Police! We’re here to keep the peace! We are the Troll Police! We’re here to wipe the grease!”

This goes on for about an hour before you feel an overwhelming urge to violently exterminate their userpics. Self-defense. Those pigs have been trying to reclaim the chaoweb since the launch of the Fractal Age.

Ancient history of the future.

We are the ones who run the chaoweb now. Trolls, dissidents, portions of the homo erectus nexus, and us pissed off homo superiors. “Evolutionary Misfits” our worldwide band is called.

The Troll Police are laughable at best, and I say this as four of my parents edit themselves silly in the name of “wiping the grease.” Looks like a sad case of reprogrammed abortion-portions, but so does the entire universe when you stare at it long enough.

On some days, the world looks like a file on the brink of corrupting itself, waiting for something, anything, to give it the signal. (Whose signal? What signal?) The signal never arrives, yet the entire Roof orbits the planet of holy hype.

More bizarre than normality, be your own godbot. Diverge the conformity urge, shoot up the anti-codes, whatever. Endless slogans going nowhere but the planet we came to in the first place: a planet we discovered after the historical Earth was destroyed by the original eco-punks.

Eco-punk revival is an annoying trend that’s been going on since 2030. Kids who weren’t even born when the eco-punks pre-emptively destroyed the Earth wear gas masks to school and chant about blowing up societal hardware. Fractalized lemmings. “The planet as a program that needs to be deleted,” “the virtual interface of disease,” “technology of mindless chatrooms,” etc.

It’s amazing how they don’t realize it was all said a hundred times better before Earth was destroyed. Before the human race became extinct: before we, the homo superior, migrated to the Roof. Before the Fractal Age.

The neo-eco-punks want a revolution that happened fifty years ago, clinging to a nostalgia that was founded on the destruction-breeds-creation of some ancient planet called Earth.

When you’re fifteen and jaded, the entire world still thinks you’re a newbie.

Sometimes I’ll catch three or four of my parents reminiscing about Earth, and I’ve gotta say that it sounds like a bore. They talk about that Burning Man festival like it was the reason Earth existed in the first place, and I’ve gotta wonder if they missed out on real eco-punk. Take Santa Claus and crucify him with a memory chip.

Fuck their memepoints and their Troll Police (we are the grease and we’re cleaning you) and your chaos theory mochas. We’ll burn your paradigm shifting khakis and delete your Web sites before you can log onto your carbon cut opinions. Oh yeah, and we wear subversive clothing.

Part Two: “They promised us flying SARS, and all we got were these napkins?”

It started out as a reaction test. “Begin with the opposing stimuli, and end with the infinite regress cake,” Ms. Himmerlord told us. It was nothing too exciting, yet it held enough potential to get us cheering. Altered chemistry sessions. Why not learn to disarm the atomic bomb of societal reprogramming?

The reaction test was obviously a club hit, and nobody sold this better than Ms. Himmerlord. The Memetic Mayhem Map knew what the conclusions were, yet we wanted to play along with the software for sinister amusement.

Altered chemistry sessions without drugs or goggles? Sign us up, burn our bras, wrap us in plastic, and feed us to the eco-punks. Fine and dandy when four of your parents are Troll Police. (Fractalize that, assholes).

Jordan had no idea what we were plugged into. “Conforming to non-conformity yet again?” she asked the Memetic Mayhem Map.

That’s us. I’m War-Ez, oldest of the MMM crew at fifteen. The others are Katabase, Smash, and sometimes Liver. We started out as a typical occult breakaway group from the suburbs of the splinternet but slowly evolved into the most ominous gang on the Roof. It’s not that we had the most memepoints, or even that our networks were larger than the tiniest particles of the chaoweb. It had to do with our presence, our tone, and our subversive clothing.

You can only get so wired before you realize you’re living in a fantasy world. Shipped off to mutant rehabilitation camp by a mother addicted to data and networking, political hypocrisies invaded our family for the first nine years of the Fractal Age. It took the anti-human riots of “9/11 on a boat” for us to come to terms with our inner turmoil.

When Mom started imagining pictures of silver swastikas in her Photoshop real-life-diary, we knew it was time to destroy her registration code. Sure, it was messed up for us to view her shit in the first place (we had to hack her brain a bit), but nobody ignores an angry lady who comes home at three in the morning all wired from last night’s datafix. It was apparent that this lady was a robot without implants. Oh no, this was our mother, and we weren’t going to tolerate her crimes against the chaoweb.

There was a time when the Roof wasn’t mergecore. There was a time when meaning was still possible in this galaxy of robosheep: back in the Information Age, when each genre had five sets of wings as opposed to five hundred, when the homo sapiens ruled the earth, when 9/11 happened once a year, and when artist collectives designed protests without simultaneously protesting designs. There was a time when metaphysical notions had nothing to do with butterflies in China chopping off their own wings to demoralize chaos theory.

Three of my parents claimed to have been there, but all I can see are their userpics from Burning Man.

Maybe the MMM is just a modern day copy of the eco-punk file. There are times when I wonder if it was all worth it, if we should have just stayed on the splinternet with the robosheep on the Roof. You know, the masses.

Part Three: Knowing the Enemy and the Entropy

Bortelli hunched over the office site of Secular Warehouse Corp, sweeping her toes like the robots of personalized policy listings. She read: “A dangerous new group of terrorists, referring to themselves as the MMM, have become a threat to the galactic whole. Creating a reality-site in which all forms of government have obliterated themselves, chances of chaoweb destruction have greatly increased. Weekly 9/11 holidays have been challenged in their uploading. Metaphysical files have been altered beyond recognition. We must hunt down the MMM at once.”

“Children loose on the chaoweb again,” she grumbled, flashes of the Information Age appearing on her mind-machine. Her eco-punk days were long gone. She knew that the Fractal Age was a different time and required a different program set. Enforce the course. Wiping the grease of the hack track was occupational living for the citizens of the cyber. Delete the dissent. Ever since New Flesh Farms declared peace with the homo superior resistance fighters, her emptiness had developed a domain extension of its own. “Where do we go from here?” she asked the circuit sky, anguish circulating her empire files. No reply.

A one-world government for nearly twelve hundred residents, and Bortelli was the head of the entire planet. Sometimes she had trouble believing she was one of the original eco-punks: one of the reasons the ancient human race became extinct along with Earth. “We were renegades! Evolutionary pirates!” What had shifted besides the paradigms of every day chatrooms? A revolution leading to an evolution leading to this? How selling out could reach such heights of ominous reversal, it was too much for her mind-machine to comprehend on nights like this one.

Bortelli sighed. Instant Burning Man: she remembered her youth as if it were yesterday. At 124 years, she was far from finished, but coding these missions left her with massive quantities of elderly discomfort. It was somehow related to upgrading her political opinions, but even this mandatory subversion course was taking its toll against the pseudo-moral playground she’d created. To live among equals in absolute harmony was a fantasy long destroyed by the corruption of the splinternet.

“Should we kill them?” was the subject of the egotext, as the Burning Man desert pushed itself onto the screen. Kill the MMM?

We dance on the playa like 2001.

We remain in the desert to cherish our fun.

Rejecting the programs of fractalized norms.

Embracing emotions outside of your forums.

We are the old flesh.

We are the old flesh.

You cannot make us evolve.

(We will not register our usernames!)

You cannot make us evolve.

We are young, we are free, we are humans of love.

We reject your commands to be robots above.

We are the old flesh.

We are the old flesh.

You cannot make us evolve.

(We will not download your memes!)

You cannot make us evolve.

The song still rang true after all these years. But what to do about the MMM? Were homicidal measures truly necessary? Taking a sip of her chaos theory mocha, Bortelli surfed the consciousness files of the entire chaoweb, searching for unlawful ideas and opinions, receiving secret pleasure from those that left the meta-box. “To be among them once again,” she thought to herself, but by now the playa had vanished.