Human Cube

At a gathering of New York socialites one stands at the end of the table and starts to speak:

“They should just put everybody in a big fat box. I’ve seen the math, you could easily do it. Wouldn’t even be that big – one cube one point one kilometers on each side this guy reckoned. No challenge at all if governments worked together properly for once. Imagine the beauty of that. Millions of people crammed into perfect conformity, sweating, pissing, and shitting all over each other. And soon the stench of death would be everywhere. Obviously you’d want to be near the top – don’t you always? Its trickle down architecture, and the less you’re trickled on the better. I imagine most would always be trying to squirm their way up. Wriggle through the tangle of limbs. Bite some fucker when he won’t get out of the way and always kick off the sod beneath you. Making it would take guts. You’d have to gleefully eat whatever fourteenth-hand nutrience graced your gullet and be ever ready to gnaw through some corpse that’s been rude enough to croak above you. I guess neither the human form – nor that of most animals – is particularly fit for that challenge though. The centipede and the worm – those stereotypically lowest of creatures – that’s what you’d want to be. And it would be the most centipede and worm-like of people, in both body and spirit, that would make it to the top then. The ascension process would change those who excelled at it anyway. That’s just selection – I always had a soft spot for Lamark. As you rose you’d descend. Arms would fuse to your side – or maybe just drop off completely, the thinner the better I reckon – and your muscles would recalibrate from the bipedal stride to the undulating rhythm of the slug. You’d want to sweat as much as possible too, grease yourself up good enough and you’d be practically swimming through the human compost. It goes without saying that eyes would be completely useless.

“But imagine what it would feel like to finally break the surface of that heaving mound and feel, for the first time in who knows how long, ​emptiness ​against your skin in that small voided section between pile and roof. Or to then lurch up and feel the metal ceiling against your nose. The alien tingle on your tongue, the pain on your teeth when you try to bite it – I’m not certain the higher form of life we’ve imagined would find any comfort in this. Yes, the smell is slightly less intense up here, and refuse is purer, yet to acquire the distinctive taste imparted by many cycles of filtration, but the more this creature thinks about it the more it realises it liked that taste. And the smell, and the heat, and the comforting press from all sides. Why did it want to get up here anyway? It can’t remember. I don’t think it would be long before it turned around and burrowed back the way it came.”

– laughter fills the room –

“We could blast the whole thing off into space as a monument and final testament to the glory of human civilization. With any luck we’d crash on a primitive alien planet and emerge to be worshipped as gods.”

Gunshot – four walls origami fold inward. Year 7000BC. Spacecube crash on PIE peoples and clammy man-worms emerge. “Whoopie Teddy! Smell that prime grade shit over there!” (that the celestial joyriders speak with a comical 40’s American accent is unfortunately lost on the progenitors of modern civilization). Lacking a common tongue, the visitors instead utilise a basic pictogrammatic communication method to shape the rapt early agricultural society to a form of their liking, slithering together into diagrammatic representations of the concepts they wished to convey. Here some figures stand over others – there concentric rings inform strata of centrality. The new gods were kept secluded in a damp central chamber under the village waste pile, and talked only to a select caste of chosen confidants who, in turn, secured this privilege through comport with thugs. Control incubates at the centre of the centre – special bodies of armed men arise from the dictates of the armless.

Fast forward to Çatalhöyük: a partially realised alternative zone; smooth ecumenopolis-section semi-instantiated in an Anatolian river basin. Every building is an unspecialised modular unit with fluid function, grafted directly onto its neighbours. ​Their interlocking roofs form a bustling common space where communal fires, surrounded by revellers, layabouts, and bare faced liars, burn through the night. The residents cultivate a plant with pink flowers which are dried, ground up, and snorted. Protracted disputes are rare, and the few that are proven to be otherwise intractable are resolved through recourse to ritualised non-lethal combat with baked clay spheres. Around 6300BC PIE warband appears on the horizon with lethal weapons. The sharper Çatalhöyükians immediately recognise that spear trumps ball and escape through time alongside their favoured flower. Those that remain quickly fall into the new way of doing things. The submission is marked with a parade, led by a lone worm on a palanquin, across the city rooftops. Construction of Çatalhöyük’s first dedicated temple begins immediately. Event stream locks in. Crystallisation runaway.

Back in New York the socialites sit in silent stupor, surrounded by rubble. Industrial clangs and warbles pierce the howl of a wind which drags petrol fire smoke across Fanta sky. Off in the distance the Cube dominates the horizon, abuzz with motion even in its almost-completed state. Four metallic talons, the Cube’s lid suspended from their tips, half-clasp around it. Armed men appear. The speaker is waving his pistol and shouting commands. The guests form a line. On the sounding of the pistol the guards begin to herd the gaggle cubewards.

Look at the Cube. A ramp supported by scaffolding spirals up around its exterior, the base of which marks the point where uncountable world-spanning human flows converge and merge into a single ascending stream that rises up up up until ramp end meets Cube rim and stream becomes fleshy waterfall, spilling downwards into grey depths. ​This close it’s impossible to ignore the sweaty heat emanating from the inside. It – truly – stinks. Here and there a few strays have clung onto the inside edge and shimmied to something like safety – though the guards, for their part, seem mostly unperturbed.

The socialites are nearing the end of their journey now. To their great displeasure, they had, the whole time, remained accompanied by the after-dinner speaker, whose unceasing proselytization, already unhinged to even the most charitable listeners among them at its beginning, had only decreased in coherence with every step forwards. Now, at the zenith, their ecstatic ejaculations have reached fever pitch: “… Up! Up! Get in there you sorry assholes! Don’t you love humanity? Don’t you want to meet your makers? Or become like them yourselves? Don’t you crave that in you which is ancient? Come on! Show some spirit you goddamn apes! This is the first day of the rest of your lives! …”.

The waterfall sputters as the stream peters out. Impatient, the speaker helps the final few stragglers over the edge themself – then, for the first time in a long time, stillness. That unique emptiness, the kind experienced only when huge life-consuming projects begin to near completion, is starting to set in. Stave off the melancholia by shooting a guard in the back. Focus now. Give the signal with shaky hand. The lid is released. A few ledge-clingers react in time and swing themselves up over the side and down to their deaths. The rest are crushed instantly. Launch sequence begins – thirty minutes till blast off. Scaffolding begins to detach from the Cube’s exterior as the whole thing shakes from the arhythmic impacts of the giant clamps which now slam shut to secure the lid in place. Rats swarm out of the many nooks and crannies they’d made their home during the construction process. One exodus precedes another.

Amongst all this excitement the speaker, now back on ground-level, is entering a tunnel that will birth them right into the centre of the Cube’s underside. Finally they allow themselves to feel some sense of satisfaction. It was really happening. The Cube was real – and it was their privilege to start from the bottom.

–

Five billion gallons of liquid rocket fuel ignites, incinerating the few guards that had been left outside, and the Cube starts to hover off the ground. Soon enough it will breach the upper atmosphere. It’s easy enough to see where this is going; we were always the Human Cube – you knew that from the beginning.