— Your waiting is a loaded gun, Hakim. Yes, you’ll tell me now that caution is masturbation and bla bla bla, whatever your program spits out, but still — be careful, count it as friendly advice… What the fuck are you wearing for — sport shorts over track pants?

“Theorema” — cyborg-friendly working-class pub. One mug of mazut and two hard-drive sauces — freshly scooped from a heated motherboard.

— Zaza, I have only one life left in the account, that too, half spent. Poorly spent, no bonuses, no social capital, no love, nothing.

— Wait, what did you just say? Love? <Zaza chokes, spraying crumbs.>

— That hotel erases six months in a single night.

— Alright, don’t bow your head now. So what, it’s fine, six months here, six months there — doesn’t change much. Ten lines of ‘Amnesia’ in the vein and it’s as if those months never happened. Or why do you even need Amnesia, you signed up for that, for that program… what’s it called?

— The winter-sleep…

— Yeah! The winter sleep program…They’ll lay you down, look after you, you’ll sleep through till spring, and then with new strength, start to set your karma right. I’ll send you flowers. Don’t we all live like this? Why do you complain the most?

— I don’t deserve this.

— Does anyone deserve what happens to them on this planet? Go on, tell me, Hakim.

— Go fuck yourself, Zaza.

A dawn designer is considered a high-paying profession, but this pay depends on the company and coverage area; if you serve big cities, the pay correspondingly is high, but Hakim’s company only does dawns for the growing number of Tbilisi graveyards, small towns and farms, practically — template dawns. The majority of the poor distinguish themselves with creativity only in matters of survival; everything else: aesthetics, enjoyment — matters only insofar as it is functional.

On farms, worse: no dead, no living who would enjoy this dawn. Farmers ask only for enzymes and lighting enough to make animals want uncontrollable sex. Reproduction. The municipality’s lighting standards — no one gives a damn. In fact, it’s only the possibility of deviation from these standards that makes him and his colleagues more or less happy; everything else is just a magic turned routine.

— We must not forget that the hygiene of the day’s beginning is important, comrades, says the boss at the meeting –  It sets the tone for the whole day.

All workers stand silently in front of the office. Colorful uniforms. They resemble flowers.

— The day of these citizens dies out long before it’s over, boss.

— Who said this? – The boss looks at the flowers.

— Hakim said it, boss.

— Wasn’t me boss. I mean, my PSP…

— Oh, this Hakim.

— Boss, Hakim adds nice things in dawns, says another worker and smiles.

— For what?

— For insects and ants.

Summer is declared officially over by the government, autumn will last only 6 hours; the next day Hakim has his last chance, his last interview before winter sleep, so now sleeping would be a waste of time: it’s better first to get rid of the program-mandated visit to the doctor, then maybe endure autumn somewhere in a club, that’s better, they say — a face exhausted by reincarnations works well at interviews at the “Samsara Plus” company.

In the shadows of the apartment blocks, everyone is boring and armed. Through the holes of the night, cold wind comes in, over the hills of virtual snow birds crash into each other in the sky.

— The barometer of loneliness is at maximum. Your neuro-antennas now only catch melancholia – says the doctor, staring at the client with a third eye.

— My radio head doesn’t catch grief waves. It generates those waves, as a sedative  for enduring — said a foreign voice from inside Hakim’s head.

When Hakim is too lazy for dialogue, instead, a Personality Simulation Program (PSP) bought second-hand answers the outside world. Beginner neurodevelopers, like beginner writers, love epicness more than functionality, so often Hakim’s program says cheap epic nonsense. At first this annoyed Hakim, later he got used to it. Somewhere in some part of his heart he even loved it: nothing beats watching a conversation partner’s confused face when communication exponentially loses meaning but it is still a day. And now people are hiding silent in their own depths, and their chatbots from the surfaces of their own depths swap phrases in front of each other’s faces. Many call this friendship.

— Aggravated electromagnetic allergy — the doctor concludes — mm… and this PSP… Did you order it tailored to you, or is it mass production?

— Pirated, local.

— Where did you buy it?

— In Tsereteli avenue’s second-hand.

— The one that’s two stories? With American second-hands?

— Yeah.

— Omg, boy. Get it reprogrammed somewhere. Often, when the PSP does not match the personality’s character or ontological stance… personality splitting, tripling, and a thousand unfortunate psychological problems can be caused… or what if someone hacks you?

— Who would hack me? Look at me, doctor.

— That’s why I’m telling you, anyone, whoever wants to!! With an antivirus that old and that innocent charm you’ve picked up at the cost of ontological safety cuts, even my grandmother would hack you, transfer herself a few years, stretch her life a bit. What, you think old people don’t want to party like you do, or what do you think? Seriously, buy a licensed one. If you want, I’ll write you a prescription, or if you don’t have enough money, at least get it reprogrammed, there are ads in every elevator: “Personality reset and installation,” is twenty lari too much for yourself? You think your cheap bare vulnerability is some kind of fashion statement? You think you Sayat-Nova? You cool? This is not a game, young man! Then you ALL come running here with trembling hands and trembling voices: “doctor, this,” “doctor, that”… Doctor what?! I ask you, what? What kind of patients are you anyway, who even are you people?? What do you want?? You want to make me crazy and drive me out of my mind??? You won’t live to see it, you fucking young cockroaches…

The doctor shouts so much that his jaw falls onto the work table and continues articulating, and before, from the drawer, he pulls out his service pistol to start firing, fortunately, the orderlies make it tie up, inject both his jaw and the doctor with a dinosaur dose of sedatives and take him away.

— Out of order again, says the orderly.

— It happens — confirms Hakim, and the scene dissolves in the sweet clouds of an electronic cigarettes’ brand that lets you inhale the real cloud from some nice country.

The Gnostic Jihad movement hacks the banners. Now across the whole city their new product’s advertisement is running:

“New tablet ‘Melancholia’, now already with lowered BPM: buy at a discount without a doctor’s prescription – for those bored in the city, because there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. For the forgotten, for those who meet New Year’s alone against the background of galactic fireworks. 

But we are on the side of those who die alone and not on the side of those who sleep carelessly in the quiet flowers of exhaustion

and do not remember the future.”

Every gnostic communique as every normal society has always demanded of you to pick a side.

Evening’s approach is announced by the biological clock.
Here comes the time for entertainment. On the hotel’s mined roof, a party of pregnant girl-boys, one wrong step during the dance and organs and blood scatter in 360 degrees. The pregnant greet the explosions with ovations, intestines wrap around the dancers like exotic snakes. Some say this might be how and why dancing was invented: to enjoy the danger.

In the casino, Russian roulette championship, group or tête-à-tête with the young croupier, jackpot – three lives, without impact on karma. “If a person has even a little brain left, why are you showing off in such a place, just sit down, who lets you win in the casino,” says the man with a bullet hole in his forehead to his friend with a hole in his temple outside the casino and, staggering, tries to stop Hakim’s taxi.

— “Instead of events, we attend apocalypses,” announces DJ Cherubim from the driver’s turned-up radio.

Mercury “Subtropic” with pineapple aroma for little children. Beacons of insomnia, blurred silver bracelet. And the sounds of the outside world, pooled in echo, like they are heard by the dead in graves that are not dug deep enough.

Swamp of dreams. The fall of morning like a ceiling.

— “All this is the alternation of numbers – immeasurably great numbers, immeasurably great alternation, immeasurably fast.
The river of numbers-events passes through your brain. Don’t try, from these numbers, to extract meaning.
The program works blindly, do not try to understand its ‘meaning.’
The dead are your best friends.
The living are your best friends,”

— sounds the message planted by the trip designer, at the peak of 2-(3-methoxyphenyl)-2-(ethylamino)cyclohexan-1-one, in his mother’s voice.

In a few hours: small doses of little death with valerian extract.
Seraphims on call, like delivery.
Summer always ends like a boring movie, in the middle of which you fall asleep with blissful carelessness, and someone wakes you when the credits are already on screen.

— Quiet, Aunt Subutex has come, — voice from the room’s corner.

A hundred unemployed of the cities of the night: all are your relatives, all are your lineage.

Genetic robot with broken functions. Last cigarette vs the long night, bets are accepted.

— Eat snow, eat snow. Eating snow is better than eating shit, — shouts a bum with a stolen megaphone. As if he does not notice that for 200 years already, “no snowball has come together.”

— “How is it, to be so formless, like this sky? How is it to be alive, like a thousand times dead?” — from every speaker, the chorus of the new hit song.
“As the skyyyyyy”-echo disappears in the glimmering skyscrapers’ twinkle on the Khrushchevkas’ rooftops: free show for poor children, their parents from the flicker frequency of these lights divine the future.

Walk slowly, as the clouds change shape – after every meter, strictly changes the character of the light.

When you go quietly, but attentively, you hear what kind of sounds these buildings have around you, and you realize: from this soil of this city, different kinds of buildings could not have grown. What you sow, that you shall reap.

Strange quantum narcotics, which no one yet has tasted on the planet, first journey from Chinese laboratories, where beside Mao they have Shulgin’s portraits in the IT group’s offices, comes directly into your rented one-room in Vazisubani – the city’s divine outskirts.

From slices of radio, during news bursts, frequencies of star explosions are heard live.
it is New Year’s. Hubble’s eye is open and families together are watching the black infinity in soft televisions, the DJ addresses the telescope toward the Andromeda galaxy, which at full speed is coming toward us, and someday our galaxies will crash into each other, will dance around each other but none of us will be there to witness.

But now —

In the club, is heard the animosity of distant suns, silence with short switch-ons from lunar cemeteries, the trajectories of rogue bodies without a planetary system are drowned out by the calling of black holes:
— “to this music we dance.”

— There, where this block stands, before was Eden’s garden, says the owner of the apartment, when Hakim hands over the key.

— Our interview approaches its end and I will ask directly –  the office plankton of the “Samsara Plus” company glanced at the thick dossier spilled on the table with six eyes — pirate, cockroach, dildo, inspector… your reincarnational CV and dossier are impressive… with such determination, you can receive one-month Nirvana packages from the state at 50% discount… Why specifically our company, Hakim of Vazisubani?

— With the state bureaucracy considered, to reach absolute emptiness, I will still need at least ten more lives, sir. I cannot endure so many dreams and autumns. All of this is too personal, and I’m shy. In your company, I believe I can escape the cycle of births and deaths much faster.

— All right, your dossier will be considered by the higher-ups and you will be contacted in the near future.
Next!

Another failed interview. Last night in the hotel “Eternal Love,” in the suite. Before sleep, again the same frame:
Wet little towns along the railway.
Alone. Alone.
And the train stands, the towns move.

From where is this sliced-off emotion? From childhood? Or maybe from another life? or another’s life?

Intravenously injected foreign, absolutely foreign memories —
for getting through the nightmares of December nights, when the sun shines so briefly that plants do not manage photosynthesis and perish, to ward off the dark dreams where heroes cannot withstand the world’s repeating cycles. And they say, with coffee in hand: this is a nightmare.

Unfinished architectural sketches –  as tattoos.

Listen how trains go toward the seaside towns, while we sleep, how grass grows on the walls.

Snow you have for a blanket in this room. Familiar sparrows fly about the bedroom.
When you sleep in this room, on the 107th floor, practically in the sky.
And so, every following autumn, until the new sleeping time comes —  

Unwashed sleep, bear’s sleep, whole-winter sleep — with falling stars in hands.

---

Zura Jishkariani is a writer and multimedia artist living in Tbilisi, Georgia.