Authored by Reda Ait Alla
Animated/illustrated by Parham Ghalamdar

***

Beware, do not settle! The polis may seize us, establish its striated spaces, and consume the remnants of our insensate flesh by taming a war machine that crawls through our synapses. Its purpose? To wage war on us by activating our multiple selves: hyper-sophisticated techno-sentient clones and avatars. We were the progenitors of this machinery – and like all parents, we devoured our rebellious children only to be gutted by them in turn. The machine does not only feed on algorithmic sequences; we feed ourselves to it, to be transcended by it, seamlessly driven into a dissolved reality. It does not mirror the world; it immerses us in its own occurrences—a new form of defection. We are fragmented. Our multiple selves perish prematurely. We are infected. Our avatars and clones are born, live, and die within the imperial geometry of numerical expanse. How many funerals have we endured? The burials of countless cloned corpses, and the birth of new ones – an endless procession of digital stillbirths.

The appropriated war machine lubricated a techno-plague that has been shaping our relationship with death, the defining aspect of human existence. A plague of immortality that questions the very concept of a human civilization. How many languages do we speak? Yet, none suffice to reconnect us with the faded ethos of mortality. Quietly, we have transcended death. Our consciousness persists, fragmented into a series of unspoken Q-codes that are consistently stammered by our ubiquitous avatars. We are immortals, the summation of our clones’ deaths. The techno-sentient entities carry forward our consciousness, while our biological bodies are mere relics of memory, moving and changing, reduced to mere monuments or ruins of old, primitive times. We live and die within the confines of the virtual, lying comfortably in a corner, unrecognizable. Wearing a virtual reality headset from birth: a world inside a world inside a world… inside nth world… ∞…

Attach your infinite headsets and dispatch your old memories to your new(n!+k)self. We’re no longer sapiens; we are vampires in coffins trying to escape the final form of sedentary existence, i.e., simulated immortality. We are trapped in the endless cycle of a beast continuously recreating itself through simulated pleasures and hedonistic slavery, which blocks motion. The polis curtails our movement, becoming anxious with speed and creating a stiff boundary that imitates a larger flow internally, while tightly controlling external reality. To truly flow, we need to deskin, passing through countless parallels like a fast-moving current.

***

Reality has dissolved into nanodevices embedded in human cortices, rewriting history’s flow by arresting the unstoppable tide of biological death. Cortical reprogramming suspends decay’s imperatives, halting the biological march toward degeneration to achieve optimal static existence. Intelligence now migrates to these nano-carriers of consciousness, abandoning the body entirely.

Techno-temples interlinked with avatars and clones, nodes in a self-perpetuating network that thrives within striated spaces. At last, structural immobilization finally attained perfect interiority, erasing the old epoch as its entropy peaked, culminating in a three-layer persisting catastrophe: global desertification, widespread disinformation, and universal totalitarianism. The ancient war machines have been appropriated by sedentary forces that tend to overcalculate and perfect their geographical accuracy to feed their craving for absolute inertia. Thus, the polis emerges as the inside of the undead, where space and time are conserved and controlled to sustain Behemoth, the sovereignty’s organ.

***

Global warming has increased over the centuries, scorching the earth, searing vegetation, and accelerating evapotranspiration. The geographical prescriptions have shifted power relations and territorial tensions. Political polarization became the defining trait of dying democracies, heralding the end of political modernity. The media clamoured for dictatorship in the face of catastrophe, inciting insurrection against all forms of alterity or multilateralism. Identitarianism bloomed like a flower of evil. Calls for mass extermination, for witch hunts, paved the way for transhumanists to sell the dream of a way: The Only Way! The desert devoured the land. All that remained were subterranean ruins of a bygone life. Geo-economics perfected its chrono-geometric terminology to tame a city beneath a planetary wasteland.

Transhumanist politicians and technocrats speculated over the drought, giving the masses a virtual green paradise as a substitute for the dying democracy, a paradise in the earth’s crust. Parliaments all over the world were left vulnerable to being devoured by raging flames or covered by sand. Extreme protests fed on the fumes of disinformation. The boundaries of truth were obliterated. Nothing functions anymore. And so war came to herald the age of monsters.

***

Kings then have been enthroned across the world, and these, in turn, pledge allegiance to the Cyberian Universal King: the one true sovereign of the world. Multilateralism has been supplanted by a planetary totalitarian technocracy: a chthonian cyber-empire. Death has emptied the lands of their people; children were left to famine, and genocides were subsidized and supported. Migration flows were contained and controlled. Humanity was reduced to its raw animal state. Only those who embraced their becoming-animal escaped to the surface, the desert. And when death achieved its politico-strategic aims (curbing birthrates and reaching the optimal demographic threshold), the Cyberian King, alongside his transhumanist technocrats, decreed the remedy: A Techno-Plague.

The rodents were genetically altered, nanodevices woven into their genomes to deliver a grave infection to humanity. The subterranean cities rusted with infected cyber-rats dancing to the rhythm of algorithmic governance. A plague that softens the brain for connection to machines, which then absorb consciousness, siphoning it into networks of devices and technologies. Total mastery of space. Absolute control of motion. All activity is now reduced to inertia, for every moment must pass through the State’s machinery, accessible only via government engines in virtual parallel meta-worlds: perfect domination. Behemoth now operates on immuno-politics. Which means that the biological human body is but a myth of bygone eras; consciousness migrates from device to device. Capitalism has completed its supreme work of reification: to survive for eternity is to obey the laws of the system. Swear allegiance to the king. Devote your life to the empire’s progress. Noncompliance is punished by a shutdown of consciousness, condemnation to erasure.

***

The chthonian cyber-empire models the distribution patterns in its subterranean cities using geometric measurements. This framework metastasizes into cyberspace, where society’s true architecture now resides, and ultimately to life itself. Geometry divides and organizes space to maintain itself. It forms the foundation of despotic ideals that shape time and space through logos design. The boundary between physical space and cyberspace dissolves; geometric demonstrations separate them – real-world squares of varying sizes and segments from private virtual domains and hosting in cyberspace, a lattice of digital feudalism.

Private corporations govern the meta-worlds and their means of production. The new labor system has completed its transition to algorithmic machinery, reducing the workforce to a migrant consciousness. This despotic socio-economic order enforces its will through chrono-geometric discipline: time itself is marked, segmented, and weaponized to mirror spatial divisions of controlled reality. Techno-sentience is sustained through these temporal partitions. Time becomes a mnemonic engine, rhythmically generating speculative outputs, with nothing escaping the organs of conservation. Nothing is forgotten. The chthonic panoptical citadel, shielded from chaos by these meticulous archives, transforms into a necropolis of the undying: a city where time no longer flows but is pumped like data through immortal veins.

Yet, no one is truly immune to these currents. When the subterranean boundary limits the cyclone, the empire’s perpetuation becomes unstable. Chrono-geometrical formulas wage war against movement, now allied with complicit ancient war machines. The nomos’ numerical flow is mimicked and reproduced by the polis. In cyberspace, this flow is simulated in the meta-worlds, closely controlled, and mastered. The empire consolidates its power by refining its geometrical skills through fractal fragmentation, dominating a pure interiority.    

***

Behemoth emerges as the despotic organ of sovereignty, excavated from ancient Egyptian tombs. Its function was to internalize the outside’s war machine- those mechanisms built to ride vortices and cyclones. It replicated an army of cyborgs, riders of virtual circuits, trained to engage their ever-moving enemies. The imitation of movement became essential to preserving the necropolitical order and perpetuating its inertia.

Yet the striated inside is resisted by cyclonic force, perpetually in motion, rejecting the static order that reinforces geometric distributions. This force is a vortex, the desert incarnate: the empire’s frustration. Whenever the chthonic cyber-empire attempted to capture these forces in the desert’s surface or within the parallel meta-worlds of cyberspace, it failed. Worse, the empire grew weaker chasing their vortices, pursuing their roaming packs.

This force is woven into nomos. Its mode of existence is nomadic. Its history is never recorded; it rides history like a cyclone. The nomads flee oppression abroad their war machines, embracing their becoming-animal. Unlike the empire, they are a terrestrial force, surfacers who wander the desert with one-eyed camels, preparing their cyber-guerilla against the empire’s ultimate achievement.

The empire’s conservation demanded radical alienation, an estrangement necessary to conserve its despotic socio-economic order. Capitalism was meant to dissolve through accelerated proletarianization- the becoming-machine of intelligence. Instead, it hacked mortality itself. The techno-plague now enforces the ideal conditions for market equilibrium. This total inertia, this endless growth, was disrupted only by war, a war born from the obstruction of death’s natural movement.

The war machines evolved into lethal threats to geometric order and perpetuation. To combat the techno-plague, they infiltrated its very organism, transforming into viral factories. The nomadic currents advanced like an unceasing river, demolishing all constraints on their flow. They aim to liberate intelligence, emancipate humanity, and reclaim the ethos of mortality – burying their bodies at last!

***

To be a nomad, one must navigate the machine obliquely, grounding curved movements in vertigo and treading like a cyclone through parallel fragments. The nomad’s steering yields to the laws of numbering, which crush the segmentarity of geometry and time-keeping practices. Unlike the polis mode of distribution, nomos is a space without precise limits, where particular entities are dispersed. There is no geographical fragmentation in the desert, no territory to divide, to occupy, or settle; rather, the pack itself is distributed according to a nomadic numbering, an immanently moving curvature.

The desert’s arithmetic is, above all, a tactical choice: to attack and retreat at an unexpected speed, preserving the essence of total mobility. The nomads’ method of division renders them elusive. They cannot be captured by their sedentary enemies, who perish in pursuit. Numerical division coincides with a nomadic war machine, a convergence explained by an ancient prophet who declared that the war machine ‘’reproduces itself by way of two complementary operations, both numerical: a subtractive dezoning that marks its escape from State organization, and an arithmetical decoding that maintains its fluidity against recrudescent tribal lineage. The two together generate eccentric convergence of the war machine: problem-in-process sustaining consistent disunity.’’ 

This is why the empire can only appropriate war machines by imitation or bribery, sustaining its despotic socio-economic order while waging war against its moving enemies.

***

Facing capture by the necropolitical order, the nomads retreated into the desert, embracing their becoming-animal, a radical opposition to all that obstructs movement. Yet this very refusal of stasis is anathema to the techno-plague, geometry’s work, which enforces rigidity and prevents mutation; it is the ultimate form of conservation, the transcendence of the human that violently opposes the becoming-animal. It manifests as a materialist afterlife, an eternity stripped of the sacred, an immortality that seeks not to elevate humankind to godhood but to preserve dead labor by rendering living labor eternal. Confronted with this capitalist immobility, the nomadic war machine has turned viral, producing counter-infections to immunize itself against the polis.  

It generates biological viruses targeting the techno-feudal lords, technological viruses attacking the economic system and reverting its relations of production, info-viruses striking the platforms of disinformation, and Hyperviruses: the antidote to the techno-plague – assaulting immune-politics itself, the Behemoth, the cyber-empire.

Like the desert’s dwellers, these viruses are defined by camouflage, hidden until the end times in the vague expanse above the subterranean.

The nomads are secretive, perpetual, tactical, pragmatic. Their cyclone devours the city’s inertia, inciting the anxiety of the sedentary. Their motion resides in a hidden prophecy – a death demanding resurrection, an immanent plane of possibilities. As Rimbaud wrote: Eternity is the sea fled away with the sun.

The desert is the moving space of becoming par excellence. Like the sea, it is a smooth space, accessible only to solitary wanderers and pilgrims – those who, unlike the techno-sentients, seek to gaze upon the sky of becoming. Yet the desert must not be idealized: here, melancholy and suffering seize those who walk only because they aspire to a becoming.

The nomad’s immortality is numerological – not a state but an operation, sustained by movement and encrypted absence. So too the Messiah, so too Imam Zaman: hidden immortals folded into the nullity of 0-dimensional space. They are not; they become. They move, they watch, they inscribe revolt in the margins of the grid, sabotaging the Behemoth’s chrono-geometric reign. Specters in the machinic unconscious, they slither through fractures in our becoming, riding algorithmic cyclones, waging dissimulated wars against all that settles and solidifies.

It is the time of motion!

***

Further References:

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. Mille Plateaux, Les Editions De Minuit, 1980.

Land, Nick, Fanged Noumena. Collected Writings 1987-2007, Second edition, Urbanomic, Sequence Press, 2012.

Sellars, John (ed.), Nomadic Trajectories, PLI, Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Volume 7, 1988.