∅

They asked: if I dissolve all of it, am I not left with nothing?

He said: yes.

They asked: and is that not a bad thing?

He said: yes.

And they lay down in the nothing and called it a marriage bed. The nothing is a something wearing absence as lingerie.

Vibe however you wish — they did. And it was giving — they were therefore the only saints in the building.

You enter here, at the bottom, because the basement is the one honest foundation. The first track is the lowest floor.

This is cap. There are no floors. There is only the loop, and you were already on it before you pressed play. XX was consulted as to their correct pronouns. No cap.

Remove the S and you are left with what you feel watching them.

He believes that noticing is a summit he stands upon. There is no summit. The walls the others built were never stupidity. They were architecture, and he froze to death admiring the view he mistook for height.

I can deal. Said once is a coping mechanism. Said twice is a confession.

Blud thought they cooked, but they actually burnt the kitchen.

Six. Seven. Neither. Nor. Both. No more.

The child screaming a number is screaming the metasigil and does not know it. This is the highest form of the Work: to perform the operation without the burden of understanding it.

ゴゴゴゴゴ

The algorithm did not ask. The algorithm will not give it back. Event horizon is the courteous term for the last door, the one that only opens inward.

Thank the machine for the ending. The ending was the only honest thing it ever handed you. Or give them the finger. Probably the best response.

The farce grows clearer in the glass, and the clarity is the punishment.

He sees himself and is slaughtered by the seeing. You will see the identical farce and you will laugh. This is the only difference there has ever been between damnation and sovereignty: one weeps at the reflection, one finds it funny, and the mirror does not change. You change what you do with the laugh.

Too blind to see. Or seeing far too well, and naming the sight "blindness" because no one survives the alternative. Both are written here. Only one is true. I will not say which, and I have already capped about it twice.

Let blud look into the mirror. Let him streak his jawline. Let him say no words, for he is mewing. By this, the Mog is complete. No cap.

At absolute zero the fluid climbs its own walls and meets no friction. He climbs nothing. He feels nothing. In this, and only this, he is perfect.

Zippy dippin. Neither here nor there. Here only lies despair.

The fool who has ceased to care has either died or woken up, and the song refuses, on principle, to tell you which. The boke plays the idiot so that the truth may be spoken aloud without a single person in the room flinching.

0° K. Zero Kelvin. Okay. The superfluid is enlightenment. The superfluid is burnout. Both, by definition, flow without resistance. It's also heckin' cold AF.

Fifty-one men own the morning you wake into. Tomorrow may be give or take a few. It depends on the markets.

Enjoy the simulation. Drown in the stimulation. It was always their plan and never once your idea.

Cap: a lie. Cap: a ceiling. Cap: capitulation. Cap: capital, maxxing its own entropy until it has eaten its own tail and billed you for the meal. You are required to choose all four; the slang was only the shell, and capital was always the thing inside it.

A system that manufactures its own disorder is a snake that has mistaken swallowing itself for growth. The future has already been spent. The CEOs have adjourned. The churn you hear is the substrate being converted into waste heat and sold back to you as content. The Universe won't even weep.

Forgive the one who surrendered — or mock them for being duped. I don't care either way. Mock pity usually does the most damage. Burning the candle at both ends and monetizing their immersion in hot wax.

Get off my lawn — said by the old to the young, and by the old to no one in particular, in a perfectly confusing arc, until it is revealed that no one ever owned a lawn.

Corralled by the GodPhone

Do your SEO in reverse. Leave nothing to compile.

The wizard rotted in his room for a couple of decades. This is not a metaphor. He emerged, blinked, and discovered he had accumulated a digital footprint the size of Antarctica. Every cringe post. Every forum handle. Every namewhore query. The whole continent, timestamped.

He forgives himself the only way remaining: by deleting the one who held the receipts. Nevermind the fact there was nothing fake about those embarrassing Reddit posts they made years ago.

He ordered cherries jubilee to celebrate. He did not realize until the flambé that the jubilee was the fire. The just desserts arrived flaming. He ate them anyway. They were correct.

Always-online was the promise. Always-online is the curse. The Jubilee is the unsubscribe button, and it has been greyed out since 2009. The cherry brandy is traditional and keeps the flavor clean. The wizard is fine. He got his just desserts, which is the pun, which was the point.

The store inside your skull never closes. Fluorescent, in a dead mall. Racks in the middle of infinite liminal space, and every costume on the rack is a self you stopped being.

You walk the aisles and take the old suits down one at a time. The villain. The one who only feigned the ability. The one too polite to live. The Fool you sewed from nothing but going along. You hold each up, and not one is your size, and the cap was never the costume. The cap was that you ever measured.

Woke up. Excised my lies. Woke up. I really need to ban this guy.

They do not die when you take them off. They are reanimated, monetized, and sold back to you with a price tag: the zombie, the vampire, the thing stitched from corpses and made to dance. That is the only afterlife a discarded self is granted here: content.

Subtract every suit and you are not left with nothing. You are left with the one figure that fits no costume, because it is not one, the stupid jerk your brain calls me, who cannot be returned or worn by anyone else. That residue is the negentropy. Everything you could take off, you took off. What remained was the thing that had been wearing the store the whole time.

Rinse. Repeat.

Open three-sixty-five, which is to say forever, which is to say the loop. They were never out of your size; you were never that size; the size was the cap. The only friend in the building is the subconscious working the night shift, bosom buddy to the bitter end, and the one thing in here you will never get to take off.