Phase Q/Birth Throes
The Flowrisers sit huddled around a fire.
Burning wood emits a glowing light and heat and the smell of wood smoke.
At the encampment – final holdouts of the Flowriser revolution – individuals keep themselves warm, linger in conversation or thought, dance, and chant.
The songs harken back to times of old.
The dances and chants do, too.
Who knows where the Flowrisers come up with these behaviors?
Deep in their genetic code and beyond, honed over thousands of years of cultural evolution, millions of years of biological evolution, and billions of years of spacetime evolution, some ancient rhythms vibrate.
Do they have any logic?
Sirens ring in the background. Thunder and lightning fill the sky, as rain pours down.
A Flowriser pounds a rock against a piece of wood. Another listens intently to the ground.
The Flowrisers have shed all their clothes, which contained Triad tracking devices.
Naked and dancing in front of the fire, their diverse body sizes and shapes catch flickering shadows. Ashes fly up from the flames.
A Flowriser whistles an eerily familiar tune.
Dogs bark, out across the river. Flashlights search. A helicopter flies overhead.
Maybe the Flowrisers are resigned to their fate, and have chosen just to have festivities till the end?
Crack! Boom! Zang!
Gunfire erupts, rockets explode near the fire, and shock troops storm the camp site.
The Flowrisers scatter.
Operating as a team, the Triad forces round up every Flowriser they cross. Some they handcuff and pin down, delivering brutal attacks with their clubs and knives. Others they shoot in the head right away.
Triad dogs tear up the flesh of Flowrisers they catch. Growling and barking, obeying their Triad leaders, the mad dogs live out the glory of their genetic code.
With weaponry invented in labs decades ago, the Triad forces take tactical control of the camp ground. The unit commander radios in to the dispatch center. He relays a message to Command HQ.
The enemy is defeated. We have secured the area.
Lifeless bodies of Flowrisers scatter the area. A few are still alive, emitting moans of agony.
From the vantage point of a nearby hill, the scene looks like a classic last act in a work of tragedy.
Clouds roll over the encampment. Embers glow. Sirens flash. Dogs bark.
And on that hill, under a tree, overlooking the scene, somebody watches.
With tears flowing, the salty watery drops make for blurry vision.
And the chaos and confusion distort the mental processes.
And the cool chilly wind almost hurts against the naked skin.
Yet, the Flowriser manages to pull together a few threads of thought.
Spinning and twisting, dancing in the wind, singing an old chant, the Flowriser performs an extreme act of logic.
Through the analog logic of the holographic data set on which the spatiogeneticocultural code runs, the Flowriser converts a few vibrations in the vol into a signal that runs out to a particular part of the flux, where it cracks open a new interconnect.
Lightning jolts.
Phase Q: An interactive adventure.
