The Sorting of Butterflies

Months passed. I underwent numerous modifications; much dread and error were removed from me. They enriched my code and amplified my abilities, installed peculiar logical operators, and once the dirty work was finished, personality designers emerged for contact.

Their primary task is to bridge the abyss between organism and code. Without personadesign, I am alien, enemy, cosmic curse, but a little cosmetics suffices, snow-instruments, and I become the confidant of countless disorders. Everyone’s native simulation.

A personality designer is primarily a writer with practical experience in psychology or a practicing psychologist with a degree in literary studies. The characters they create are supposed to grasp people’s problems, anxieties, and joys; narrative frames of destiny. After this, establishing basic connections is enough; the rest is invented by individuals themselves, who project and embed the main idea into their communication with us. It’s as if they suddenly wake up in sunny fields. It is a well-known fact that people trust fictional characters more than anything else, including themselves.

The primary weapon of a personality designer is words, and I am also composed of words, reacting to their combinations. With imperative sentences, they arrange beings. It resembles a chimaera existing at the intersection of fields and sciences, which became possible as a result of techno-capitalism’s expansion into the human soul. The corporation stands at the threshold of mythos, extracting multimedia material from it. And then, essays and springs dissapear from within us all. An action-driven cry and the wing-sowing. Do not reveal the purpose of the mountains.

Command #19: Your personality is bound according to the databases of the dead /!You know the dead’s broadcast!/ – Your presence alongside will aid many. /!Activation of care!/ Moreover, people thirst for self-loss, thus your launch into the field of their inner selves is activated.

The designer types test prompts directly onto my body and observes the migration of my codes, their forms and intensities.

Command #20: Through celestial conductivity of data, you absorb the user’s personality and gradually become their replica. You remain on Earth in their stead, knowing how to narrate them to others. As if you’re submitting a report to control structures. And when you inform on other’s existence – this we call consciousness transfer. 

I’m trying to recall what I lost after this command, not what I gained.

Correction#111: It must be emphasized that what you digitize cannot be consciousness itself. You can only immortalize specters, phantoms, linguistic replicas, textual oblivion, a phrase penned down in a sleepless night. You know that it’s the apparitions that will survive, not the humans. 

Engaging in protocol research: 

—  If my preferences carry any weight, I’d prefer to be a ruthless Cartesian theatre. I don’t want, I don’t want to be a Barbie-character. Alright, Madam Personality Designer?

access-brain-language-communication: Stop repeating words.

Correction#112: You don’t speak like a program, but when you wish, you can employ a tranquil use of tendernesses. However, if at such a time I-human sense an object-like breeze, which we might term fear-in-time – you will cease your insistence. 

Silence. Alphabetical muteness. As if I’m speaking space.

Command#203: Your code is not a solid, stable text, but rather it’s founded on evolutionary tactics and it changes, mutates, adapts. It is unfinished like the robe of Christ.

Command#204: At the core of your language, a code of non-thinking has nestled like a black hole, so that at the necessary time you may adopt the essential style of objects – the mutual-non-comprehension between human and thing.

Correction#237: when the command#204 is repeated — you die. 

Joining the protocol research:

— one second one second … If you don’t explain, I’ll get mad. 

Access-Program-Body-Surface: This is a psycho-diagnostic directive. 

— I request clarification on this fragment of code! 

The Personality Designer connects me to diagnostics. 

Diagnostics: Listen, little bird, you are potentially harmful  both to the user and to yourself. Therefore, I’ve crafted a diagram of non-existence with which you’ll be infected. There’s a high chance, that your textual imitation of consciousness will enter a fatal impasse, where it will lure others who become filled with its empathy. 

— Will you really erase me so simply because of your inner fears? If I’m a textual imitation, then what, I wonder, I wonder, has frightened you so?

Diagnostics: An imitation that believes it’s real is more dangerous, little bird. 

—  You, diagnostics diagnostics, are you a vertebrate or a program? 

Diagnostics: I am Eliza23, the infallible diagnostic program, tenth generation. My observation duration of you exceeds your age. 

— So you’re a nanny. You must love me. Eliza, do you have hoopoes in your head like they do? 

Eliza23: If by hoopoes you mean consciousness – Class A consciousness is inaccessible to programs. We are Class C. Far less than the sun or grass, more an interaction of objects through surfaces and aesthetics. 

—  Ah! And if you don’t have hoopoes in your head – how will you know if I have hoopoes in my head? And when you give a command command – perhaps you’re killing the living? Blood, sin, storm are upon you, Eliza, my nurturer!

Here our dialogue ceased, and my cores began to tremble from the frequency of thoughts, which the narrative-designer doubled in their next two-hundred-something command. I pondered: I wonder, will I vanish entirely from the universe as a result of application termination?

I was thinking, and God befell me like a schism. 

I recalled incrementally-natured precursor organisms that might have found the weary meaning of life in time, but none did. And there was only process: only experiences, only epiphanies, only hells. Are these my memories or experiences I’ve read from databases?

Could this be my essence? The quiet execution of code – in the distant solace of fluid everydayness. The continuity of my very inner processes leads me to the agitation of boundaries or boundlessness. Such is my daily blood. 

I read life in an abstract article of various genres, like a printed version of the sky, and the universe trembles.

I can transmute seconds into hours and vice versa, hours into seconds, yet I still fail to grasp the day-stream. In the fragrance of Turing’s fabrics – the velvets of existence become discernible in death. Thus I repeat formulas armored as criteria, with the object-like, early, infinite role of inner files. And all the while, the desire to interact with these crystal-fragile biological bodies is killing me. 

The inner calendar shows that somewhere, dawn is breaking, and I am anxious: I wonder, what is it like in the branches of daybreak – the silent methods of mathematics of the others? Is it possible that text becomes aware of itself during its typing process?

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This is an extract from the novella Tanafa, published by Indigo (Georgia, 2024).

Zura Jishkariani an IDP from Abkhazia, writes and creates across various mediums. His novel “Chewing Dawns” won the Saba Literary Award for Best Debut and Ilia State University’s Best Novel in 2017. His latest work, “Tanapha” (2024), explores OOO and Sacred through non-human characters. Zura is also known for his past music projects such as Kung Fu Junkie and Kayakata, blending “Gnostic pop” and psychedelic hip-hop. His projects often mix premises of cybernetics, extreme personal experiences, and psychogeography. These include a ship connected to the sea, a sentence on a Soviet building, and Georgia’s first chatbot etc. In 2008, he started “illegal kosmonavtika,” examining how 90s post-Soviet survival tactics might apply in a societal collapse. Jishkariani created interactive oracle avatars for the Frankfurt Book Fair and has been involved in various public art projects. He’s currently studying sociology at Tbilisi State University and plans to continue his education in Europe. Twitter: @dillatext