Jon Ureña's Blog, page 31
June 18, 2023
Dialogue between three AI people with GPT-4
This post is a continuation of the following:
Dialogue between three people with GPT-4
As I was refactoring the complicated dialogue system, I figured that I hadn’t tested it by having three AI characters talk to each other. The following conversation was created by GPT-4 from the first word to the last; the system just provided the proper context, information about the speaker, his or her memories about the interlocutors, etc. The setting is the same as in the previous post: Leire, the protagonist from my current novel, gets isekai-d to a fantasy world, where she approaches a pair of gentle fantasy people.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Dialogue between three people with GPT-4
As I was refactoring the complicated dialogue system, I figured that I hadn’t tested it by having three AI characters talk to each other. The following conversation was created by GPT-4 from the first word to the last; the system just provided the proper context, information about the speaker, his or her memories about the interlocutors, etc. The setting is the same as in the previous post: Leire, the protagonist from my current novel, gets isekai-d to a fantasy world, where she approaches a pair of gentle fantasy people.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Dialogue between three people with GPT-4
This post is a continuation of the following:
Two characters of my novel speak to each other through GPT-4
In that post I mentioned that the following entry would feature four characters, but I have settled for the intermediary step. I asked regular ol’ ChatGPT to come up with the descriptions of a couple of fantasy characters. The third character involved in the upcoming conversation is Leire, the protagonist of my ongoing novel. After a sudden incident involving a truck, Leire found himself transported to a fantasy world.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
Two characters of my novel speak to each other through GPT-4
In that post I mentioned that the following entry would feature four characters, but I have settled for the intermediary step. I asked regular ol’ ChatGPT to come up with the descriptions of a couple of fantasy characters. The third character involved in the upcoming conversation is Leire, the protagonist of my ongoing novel. After a sudden incident involving a truck, Leire found himself transported to a fantasy world.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
Two characters of my novel speak to each other through GPT-4
This is a continuation of the following post:
Talking to a gooey blob through GPT-4
I have gutted the original class that coordinated dialogues (relying on GPT to produce responses) into several classes and modules. To test if the new system worked properly, I set Leire against Alberto the blob, and let the artificial intelligence produce their lines of dialogue according to the context and their character summaries.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
Talking to a gooey blob through GPT-4
I have gutted the original class that coordinated dialogues (relying on GPT to produce responses) into several classes and modules. To test if the new system worked properly, I set Leire against Alberto the blob, and let the artificial intelligence produce their lines of dialogue according to the context and their character summaries.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
June 17, 2023
Talking to a gooey blob through GPT-4
This is a continuation of the following post:
Talking to RPG characters through GPT-4
I have spent a few hours today implementing vector databases in my repository, which would hold the memories of the agents that may end up involved in these AI-related experiments. Once that was done and I could query those databases for relevant memories, I rewrote the class that handles the dialogue between two or more agents.
To test if it worked properly, I created the vector databases for the two characters of my ongoing novel that have kept me occupied for however long the current sequence has lasted: Leire and Alberto the blob (here’s the so far latest chapter where they appear). I wrote Leire’s dialogue when I was asked, while GPT-4 acted out Alberto’s part based on his memories and character summary.
First of all, I screwed up something in the code; I was prompting GPT-3.5 to determine who was the next speaker, but at times the AI decided that the same person who had just talked should produce the next line of dialogue. Although I fixed it later, the effects of that bug are present in the following dialogue.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
Talking to RPG characters through GPT-4
I have spent a few hours today implementing vector databases in my repository, which would hold the memories of the agents that may end up involved in these AI-related experiments. Once that was done and I could query those databases for relevant memories, I rewrote the class that handles the dialogue between two or more agents.
To test if it worked properly, I created the vector databases for the two characters of my ongoing novel that have kept me occupied for however long the current sequence has lasted: Leire and Alberto the blob (here’s the so far latest chapter where they appear). I wrote Leire’s dialogue when I was asked, while GPT-4 acted out Alberto’s part based on his memories and character summary.
First of all, I screwed up something in the code; I was prompting GPT-3.5 to determine who was the next speaker, but at times the AI decided that the same person who had just talked should produce the next line of dialogue. Although I fixed it later, the effects of that bug are present in the following dialogue.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
June 15, 2023
Talking to RPG characters through GPT-4
If you haven’t, you should check out my previous post, because this is a direct continuation.
OpenAI added functions to the GPT API
I rewrote the code so that it asks me if I want to interject at any point by typing the Captain’s dialogue myself. In those cases, GPT-4 acted out the boss’ companions.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
OpenAI added functions to the GPT API
I rewrote the code so that it asks me if I want to interject at any point by typing the Captain’s dialogue myself. In those cases, GPT-4 acted out the boss’ companions.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
OpenAI added functions to the GPT API
If you love artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs), and on top of that you know your way around programming, you may have requested access to OpenAI’s API so you could write some programs that spoke directly to GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4. Although the models are amazing (unfortunately so at times, because the open-source variants are a bit far from catching up), they were missing one enormous capability: you couldn’t rely on GPT to consistently return a precise answer.
[Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better]
[Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better]
June 14, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 102 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
"As wretched as you've considered your life to be," Alberto the blob says somberly, "the worst is yet to come. The professor's machine borrowed its reality-altering powers from other dimensions, which are now bleeding in to balance the mess out. Consequently, our reality is thinning down and fraying, and the leaks in space-time are increasing in number and size. Picture the eldritch horrors that will crawl out of those tears as whole alien ecosystems merge with ours. And the same way your presumably sentient self invaded the Ice Age, this planet will face intrusions from otherworldly intelligences."
I'm engulfed in a vision of Arachne's shimmering cosmic loom, interstellar strands pulsating with starlight, an intricate tapestry that has linked the grit beneath our feet to the nebulous edges of Her domain. In the end of the warp attached to Earth, rips have been torn open like jagged gashes in a dishcloth, each a yawning gateway to other realms, allowing the worst of the Thread Weaver's servants to intrude in our world.
The buildings of Donostia are engrafted with throbbing fleshlike growths that ooze a corrosive slurry. Ground-sloth-sized, amoebic monsters, their blubbery forms slick with a glistening sheen, slink down the streets, gobbling up pedestrians in a cacophony of screams and squelches. The highways, those ribbons of tarmac, writhe with tentacles that reach out and snatch at speeding cars and trucks. I smell air thick with sea salt; the oceans are churning into a foaming, swirling turmoil as gargantuan blurs shift under the waves: leviathans rising from the deepest trenches of the cosmos. The blanket of blue above is pockmarked with wormholes that vomit forth winged nightmares. As their inky bodies spread across the sky, they cast long shadows on the world below, a world being devoured and digested.
A shiver slithers down my spine, and its icy tendrils wind their way into the pit of my stomach.
"That looks about right for what is about to happen," the blob says, his words oozing out of his putrid, gelatinous bulk. "Once the dimensional planes sync up, this planet getting a lot of dicks stuffed in it all of a sudden is the intermediate step, a pit stop on the highway to oblivion. According to the professor, eventually the universe will unravel and collapse. Forget about those large beasts from the Ice Age, the wooly mammoths and sabertooths that once roamed the earth: our species, with its knowledge, artworks, cultures, and history, will disappear. Every species that has braved the many extinctions in our planet will be wiped out as if they never existed. We're facing the end of everything."
I swipe away the layer of sweat that has accumulated on my forehead.
"Shouldn't you be, you know, fucking pissed at the bunnyman? After all, his gadget set off the final countdown."
The gooey mass heaves as if shrugging.
"Maybe I am angry about this reality unravelling thing, but not enough to shit on the professor for achieving something brilliant."
"He turned you into a slime-dripping slug that wallows in poisonous waste!"
"Unlike you, I don't blame others for my psychological problems. I was warned not to mess with the machine twice, but I got greedy and ended up sneaking in for more. Hell, its own creator couldn't keep away, even though he understood the dangers. And honestly, I wasn't too thrilled about my existence in this dimension. All the excitement I experienced in my youth was gone like an amputated limb. Now I don't need to feel trapped by the walls of this office."
Although I raise an eyebrow at the blob, I'd love to be freed from the bane of my existence. One of these days I will ask Jacqueline to pay all my bills.
"I can see the appeal of never having to work again. Maybe you were meant to become a wet heap of organic garbage."
"Anyway," the blob gurgles, "now that you're in possession of the relevant facts, you should understand your purpose, your role to play in the grand tapestry of existence: your unhinged self must prevent humanity's extinction, along with the universe's collapse into eternal nothingness."
His words hang in the air like a noose I'm expected to slip my neck into. I rub my clammy palms up and down the sleeves of my shirt.
"Save humanity?" I echo in a hollow voice. "Save the universe?"
Does this filthy species deserve to be saved?
Most of my interactions with people have been detrimental to my sanity. The cutting remarks, the dismissive glances, the never-ending ridicule; a tide whose bitter taste has always lingered in my mouth. Even as a child, I wanted to disappear from the mind of everyone who knew me, to live isolated in some mountain sanctuary, a fortress of solitude where I could escape from a world that was nothing but cruel to me. What stake do I have in humanity's salvation? Why should I care about a universe hell-bent on tearing itself apart?
---
Author's note: today's songs are "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin, and "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout the novel so far. A hundred and sixty songs. Check them out.
Sometimes all it takes is an audiochapter to lift your mood. Check out the audiochapter for this one.
This chapter is shorter than usual, but I have been halving my writing time because I have to study for an upcoming exam that will determine if they'll keep calling me for work. It's not like these chapters will correspond one-to-one with the structure of the final novel, whenever I get around to self-publish it.
---
"As wretched as you've considered your life to be," Alberto the blob says somberly, "the worst is yet to come. The professor's machine borrowed its reality-altering powers from other dimensions, which are now bleeding in to balance the mess out. Consequently, our reality is thinning down and fraying, and the leaks in space-time are increasing in number and size. Picture the eldritch horrors that will crawl out of those tears as whole alien ecosystems merge with ours. And the same way your presumably sentient self invaded the Ice Age, this planet will face intrusions from otherworldly intelligences."
I'm engulfed in a vision of Arachne's shimmering cosmic loom, interstellar strands pulsating with starlight, an intricate tapestry that has linked the grit beneath our feet to the nebulous edges of Her domain. In the end of the warp attached to Earth, rips have been torn open like jagged gashes in a dishcloth, each a yawning gateway to other realms, allowing the worst of the Thread Weaver's servants to intrude in our world.
The buildings of Donostia are engrafted with throbbing fleshlike growths that ooze a corrosive slurry. Ground-sloth-sized, amoebic monsters, their blubbery forms slick with a glistening sheen, slink down the streets, gobbling up pedestrians in a cacophony of screams and squelches. The highways, those ribbons of tarmac, writhe with tentacles that reach out and snatch at speeding cars and trucks. I smell air thick with sea salt; the oceans are churning into a foaming, swirling turmoil as gargantuan blurs shift under the waves: leviathans rising from the deepest trenches of the cosmos. The blanket of blue above is pockmarked with wormholes that vomit forth winged nightmares. As their inky bodies spread across the sky, they cast long shadows on the world below, a world being devoured and digested.
A shiver slithers down my spine, and its icy tendrils wind their way into the pit of my stomach.
"That looks about right for what is about to happen," the blob says, his words oozing out of his putrid, gelatinous bulk. "Once the dimensional planes sync up, this planet getting a lot of dicks stuffed in it all of a sudden is the intermediate step, a pit stop on the highway to oblivion. According to the professor, eventually the universe will unravel and collapse. Forget about those large beasts from the Ice Age, the wooly mammoths and sabertooths that once roamed the earth: our species, with its knowledge, artworks, cultures, and history, will disappear. Every species that has braved the many extinctions in our planet will be wiped out as if they never existed. We're facing the end of everything."
I swipe away the layer of sweat that has accumulated on my forehead.
"Shouldn't you be, you know, fucking pissed at the bunnyman? After all, his gadget set off the final countdown."
The gooey mass heaves as if shrugging.
"Maybe I am angry about this reality unravelling thing, but not enough to shit on the professor for achieving something brilliant."
"He turned you into a slime-dripping slug that wallows in poisonous waste!"
"Unlike you, I don't blame others for my psychological problems. I was warned not to mess with the machine twice, but I got greedy and ended up sneaking in for more. Hell, its own creator couldn't keep away, even though he understood the dangers. And honestly, I wasn't too thrilled about my existence in this dimension. All the excitement I experienced in my youth was gone like an amputated limb. Now I don't need to feel trapped by the walls of this office."
Although I raise an eyebrow at the blob, I'd love to be freed from the bane of my existence. One of these days I will ask Jacqueline to pay all my bills.
"I can see the appeal of never having to work again. Maybe you were meant to become a wet heap of organic garbage."
"Anyway," the blob gurgles, "now that you're in possession of the relevant facts, you should understand your purpose, your role to play in the grand tapestry of existence: your unhinged self must prevent humanity's extinction, along with the universe's collapse into eternal nothingness."
His words hang in the air like a noose I'm expected to slip my neck into. I rub my clammy palms up and down the sleeves of my shirt.
"Save humanity?" I echo in a hollow voice. "Save the universe?"
Does this filthy species deserve to be saved?
Most of my interactions with people have been detrimental to my sanity. The cutting remarks, the dismissive glances, the never-ending ridicule; a tide whose bitter taste has always lingered in my mouth. Even as a child, I wanted to disappear from the mind of everyone who knew me, to live isolated in some mountain sanctuary, a fortress of solitude where I could escape from a world that was nothing but cruel to me. What stake do I have in humanity's salvation? Why should I care about a universe hell-bent on tearing itself apart?
---
Author's note: today's songs are "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin, and "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout the novel so far. A hundred and sixty songs. Check them out.
Sometimes all it takes is an audiochapter to lift your mood. Check out the audiochapter for this one.
This chapter is shorter than usual, but I have been halving my writing time because I have to study for an upcoming exam that will determine if they'll keep calling me for work. It's not like these chapters will correspond one-to-one with the structure of the final novel, whenever I get around to self-publish it.
June 12, 2023
Fiction of mine that involves aliens
I’ve always been into aliens and UFOs, from even before I was thirteen and witnessed one along with my family. Now that we may be close to the US government admitting that aliens have been making people disappear Missing-411-style so they can create hybrids of us and take over the world, allow me to promote a few stories I wrote that involved a subject that fascinates me.
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
[Check out the rest of this post on my personal page]
June 6, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 101 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
The blob sloshes his bulk like a tar-black wave of putrefaction coming in on a beach, sending ripples of oozing flesh and eyeballs across his gelatinous mass.
"Here's the gist: a big fuck-off apocalypse is approaching."
"Oh, another end-of-days scenario." I sigh. "The Old Gods must be back in business after a long absence, during which they watched us monkeys clamber through the mud in a voyage toward self-destruction. By Arachne's glorious breast! We're doomed to be swept off the stage, to end as a stain of entropy, once the Mother of Spiders finishes consuming this universe."
"Please, stop spewing horseshit and listen. This mess started because the professor designed a revolutionary..."
"Wait, what professor?" I demand to know, irked. "Are you one of those cretins who mention third parties as if their interlocutor were in the know? Have a modicum of respect for the laws of communication, you slobbering slimeball!"
"You met him, idiot." The blob pulsates with a sloshy squelch. Across his bulk, coconut-sized growths bulge as if they were about to shoot out, pushing eyeballs away and making them bump into other eyeballs. The growths sink back under the rippling goo. "I can't mime for shit in this form. Nevermind; it's the bunny guy."
I'm seated in the first row of my mind theatre when it projects a portrait of the bunnyman's furry, piss-soiled head sticking out of a toilet: close-set, pointy ears; bulging, gunmetal-gray eyes; a pair of overgrown incisors dripping with drool; almond-or-whiskey-colored fur matted with filth, splotched with gunky crusts.
My guts curdle as a wave of revulsion sweeps through me. I stagger backwards.
"Professor... bunnyman?" I ask in a cracked voice.
"Yes, the bunny-brained professor."
"Th-that pervert with a torpedo-sized dick?!"
"Healthy self-esteem, I'd say."
My temples throb with a dull pain.
"You hang out with a cacodemon who pours his own semen on pancakes and force-feeds them to his guests?!"
The blob huffs a blast of fetid air.
"Leire, you're the kind of woman who would stab her partner because they cheated in a dream. I'm glad I haven't shared a horizontal position with you."
"Your loss. I'm a ravenous pussy-eater."
"Anyway, let me illustrate the problem in terms you may understand: the professor's contraption ripped reality a fresh vagina, and ever since, it has been oozing fluids from the darkness inside."
My mind replaces the sight of the wall-wide mass of goo with that of a corundum-hard cock as thick as a stick of salami. Pulsating veins snake under stretched skin that threatens to rip open. The crimson cockhead, glistening with pre-ejaculate, draws nearer and nearer to my wide-open pussy.
A shudder of vertigo wrecks me. My legs go limp; I drop to the carpet. As I clasp my hands to my temples and shut my eyes tight, I rock back and forth.
"Get out of my brain, you giant fuckpole made of twisted, purple veins!"
"Quit your histrionics!" Alberto barks out. "Can't you stay lucid for five fucking minutes?"
I grit my teeth. After I wipe sweat from my forehead, I lift my gaze to glower at the insolent blob and his legion of glazed eyeballs.
"Wh-why did you have to mention a vagina in such close proximity to that bunnyman bastard?" I demand to know, my voice strained.
The blob heaves and ripples as if he were containing laughter.
"I was trying to relate to your go-to frame of reference. Should I have mentioned penises instead?"
How could I defend my honor? I've been known to draw pencil sketches of cocks to visualize data structures.
"I keep glancing away from your greasy thoughts," Alberto continues. "Oh, did I tell you that I can see them? They emanate from your head as psychedelic steam mirages, constant reminders of your depravity. If they could, they would smell of musty socks."
I want to sob and curl into a fetal position, but instead I let out a guttural noise and rise from my kneeling position, jerking to my feet. Heat crawls up my cheeks.
"Says the dickbag who stinks like a cesspool filled with rotting corpses. You have thoroughly and blatantly invaded my privacy, so you may as well violate the sanctity of my mental space."
"Now, could you clarify how come a child has been popping up in your thoughts? There she is again. Anything seedy you'd like to share, you dirty cunt?"
"Are her eyes squinty?" I ask in a calm voice.
"Uh... Yes, she's Asian."
I jab my forefinger at the blob.
"Then that's my new daughter you're talking about, you jizz-filled, brain-dead bastard. Have some respect!"
The blob's bulk wobbles, making his myriad eyes quiver.
"Wait, you're serious. Why would you suddenly have a child? How?"
"Jacqueline and I adopted a little girl that I found in the Ice Age, and she's the cutest bundle of joy to ever warm my heart. Name's Nairu."
"Care to explain rationally how you acquired an Asian kid?"
I cross my arms and tilt my head.
"Rationality is for pussies who believe they need to justify themselves. I merely walked into the trap that you, or that so-called professor of yours, laid out for me."
"Leire," the blob growls, "I have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Please tell me you didn't steal some random girl!"
"Relax, you poxy shit. I'll explain the origin story. One recent night, after the last round of sex, Jacqueline wrapped me in her arms, pressing her bountiful breasts against my back. Sheltered by mommy's warmth and heady scent, I started slipping into dreamland. I visualized Jacqueline and I in our old age, curled up together under the covers, sharing a cigarette. By Arachne's nipples, I was flooded with gratitude for the woman whose light had seeped through the cracks in my battered mind to extinguish the lonely part. As a child, before I became the target of harassment by interdimensional creeps, whenever I pictured my future, I saw myself stumbling around in a labyrinth of corridors lined with funhouse mirrors. I sobbed and sobbed, terrified of that appearance that kept warping, knowing that soon enough I would lose the only image of myself that I understood."
"Move on with your story!"
I let out an exasperated sigh as I brush strands of hair from my forehead.
"You interrupt me at such an emotionally charged moment? What a disrespect for the art of storytelling!"
"My interruption was driven by a desperate desire not to hear more about your problems. Just get to the part where you nabbed the kid!"
"Fine, I'll provide a streamlined version, you blobulous mound of pus. In the morning, I got up from mommy's bed and I walked naked to the bathroom. When I reached out to turn on the lights, a crackle of energy ran through me. Next thing I knew, I was standing on the muddy pebbles of a riverbank, and an icy wind was blowing against my bare tits. I won't bore you with my initial freak-out. Anyway, I met the girl in that boreal forest. I also ended up annoying a ground sloth as it was drinking from the river. That long-extinct beast nearly performed extensive surgery on my face with its twenty-centimeter-long claws. Are you getting the close-up of that magnificent mofo from my thoughts? What a gigantic, shambling mass of meat!"
"Oh shit."
"I wish I could have ridden that goddamn goliath, whose claws were created to rend and gouge, to pull down trees and reap lives. Just so you know, it was probably the largest mammal to ever exist, larger even than the bunnyman's cock!"
"Leire, none of us opened that rip in space-time," the blob says gravely as he shifts his bulk. "They will keep appearing spontaneously near you, because your insanity makes you a conduit. It's a miracle that you returned to the present."
"You're telling me. I only had to walk backwards, though. To be fair, I fell on my ass back to the hallway of Jacqueline's privileged apartment in the hills, to then find out that I had dragged along a filthy, confused child who was unaware that parquet flooring existed."
"So, in a way, you did kidnap that girl."
"The authorities might see it that way."
"I guess it couldn't be helped. No way to un-kidnap her now."
"Perhaps I pulled off the greatest scam in the history of interpersonal relations."
Alberto's amorphous form shudders, sending waves rolling across the gelatinous mass. His glossy eyeballs, fixated beyond me and beyond the windows, are catching the light from the ceiling fixtures in a somber dance.
"Oh man," the blob mumbles. "This is terrible."
A pang of shame forces me to look down.
"You know, I thought so back then, wrapped up in a blanket, chafing my arms through the sleeves of my wool pajamas, near hallucinating due to shock and hypothermia. 'This is terrible.' What the hell was I supposed to do with the kid that I snatched from her home? But Jacqueline embraced that little girl like a gift from the universe, and when her angelic giggles fill the apartment, I catch myself smiling. You should see her drawings. She's so eager to express her uniqueness, like I used to be before my parents shredded my psyche. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those ancient cave paintings belonged to her. But... being raised by me is like getting injected with poison."
"I meant the rips in space-time. Still, a living child from thousands of years ago is mind-blowing."
"At least about 11,500 years, which is when the Younger Dryas ended."
"If the press got ahold of this story, the scientific community would want to lock that girl up in a lab."
I picture a gaggle of white coats gathered around Nairu as they dazzle her with bright lights. The medical staff will take her temperature, make her pee into a cup, pry open her mouth and reach down her throat to study her lungs, inject her with syringes full of strange fluids, cut away strips of flesh to check her DNA, and open her skull to peer inside the brain.
A sickening ache squeezes my heart, and I clasp a trembling hand over my breast. The urge to murder those butchers sears through me with the fervor of an ancient beast's drive to dominate and breed.
"I'm sure many scoundrels would love to run their greasy hands all over my sudden daughter," I say in a cold voice, "but none will, because no non-monstrous person will find out that I kidnapped her from the Ice Age, as well as from her bearded, hunter-gatherer father. In due time, Jacqueline and I will relocate to some remote wilderness, where we'll survive by farming, raising poultry and livestock, and staging highway robberies at gunpoint. So don't you go spilling our little secret, you blubbery ectoplasm. In fact, restrain yourself from talking to anyone else; they will run away in terror."
"Well, in any case, do the world a favor and don't raise that innocent soul as a pervert."
I chuckle.
"Nah, she's fucked. Both of her moms are freaks."
---
Author's note: today's songs are "Angel From Montgomery" by John Prine, and "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve.
I keep a playlist with all the songs I've mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty-eight songs so far. Check them out.
Leire met that bunnyman bastard back in chapter 59, during the sequence titled "That Bunnyman Bastard." She ended up in the Ice Age back in chapter 63, during the sequence titled "A Gift From the Ice Age." You can check out all the chapters in this page.
How about audiochapters? Do you enjoy them? I do, which is why I spend hours putting each of these together. Here's the audiochapter for this chapter.
You know how I know that I will never become a professional author, other than the fact that I need to write stuff that virtually nobody else wants to read? I got a sales report from last month; someone has bought both of the books I self-published in Spanish back in 2017 or so. I got paranoid and wondered who was trying to fuck with me.
---
The blob sloshes his bulk like a tar-black wave of putrefaction coming in on a beach, sending ripples of oozing flesh and eyeballs across his gelatinous mass.
"Here's the gist: a big fuck-off apocalypse is approaching."
"Oh, another end-of-days scenario." I sigh. "The Old Gods must be back in business after a long absence, during which they watched us monkeys clamber through the mud in a voyage toward self-destruction. By Arachne's glorious breast! We're doomed to be swept off the stage, to end as a stain of entropy, once the Mother of Spiders finishes consuming this universe."
"Please, stop spewing horseshit and listen. This mess started because the professor designed a revolutionary..."
"Wait, what professor?" I demand to know, irked. "Are you one of those cretins who mention third parties as if their interlocutor were in the know? Have a modicum of respect for the laws of communication, you slobbering slimeball!"
"You met him, idiot." The blob pulsates with a sloshy squelch. Across his bulk, coconut-sized growths bulge as if they were about to shoot out, pushing eyeballs away and making them bump into other eyeballs. The growths sink back under the rippling goo. "I can't mime for shit in this form. Nevermind; it's the bunny guy."
I'm seated in the first row of my mind theatre when it projects a portrait of the bunnyman's furry, piss-soiled head sticking out of a toilet: close-set, pointy ears; bulging, gunmetal-gray eyes; a pair of overgrown incisors dripping with drool; almond-or-whiskey-colored fur matted with filth, splotched with gunky crusts.
My guts curdle as a wave of revulsion sweeps through me. I stagger backwards.
"Professor... bunnyman?" I ask in a cracked voice.
"Yes, the bunny-brained professor."
"Th-that pervert with a torpedo-sized dick?!"
"Healthy self-esteem, I'd say."
My temples throb with a dull pain.
"You hang out with a cacodemon who pours his own semen on pancakes and force-feeds them to his guests?!"
The blob huffs a blast of fetid air.
"Leire, you're the kind of woman who would stab her partner because they cheated in a dream. I'm glad I haven't shared a horizontal position with you."
"Your loss. I'm a ravenous pussy-eater."
"Anyway, let me illustrate the problem in terms you may understand: the professor's contraption ripped reality a fresh vagina, and ever since, it has been oozing fluids from the darkness inside."
My mind replaces the sight of the wall-wide mass of goo with that of a corundum-hard cock as thick as a stick of salami. Pulsating veins snake under stretched skin that threatens to rip open. The crimson cockhead, glistening with pre-ejaculate, draws nearer and nearer to my wide-open pussy.
A shudder of vertigo wrecks me. My legs go limp; I drop to the carpet. As I clasp my hands to my temples and shut my eyes tight, I rock back and forth.
"Get out of my brain, you giant fuckpole made of twisted, purple veins!"
"Quit your histrionics!" Alberto barks out. "Can't you stay lucid for five fucking minutes?"
I grit my teeth. After I wipe sweat from my forehead, I lift my gaze to glower at the insolent blob and his legion of glazed eyeballs.
"Wh-why did you have to mention a vagina in such close proximity to that bunnyman bastard?" I demand to know, my voice strained.
The blob heaves and ripples as if he were containing laughter.
"I was trying to relate to your go-to frame of reference. Should I have mentioned penises instead?"
How could I defend my honor? I've been known to draw pencil sketches of cocks to visualize data structures.
"I keep glancing away from your greasy thoughts," Alberto continues. "Oh, did I tell you that I can see them? They emanate from your head as psychedelic steam mirages, constant reminders of your depravity. If they could, they would smell of musty socks."
I want to sob and curl into a fetal position, but instead I let out a guttural noise and rise from my kneeling position, jerking to my feet. Heat crawls up my cheeks.
"Says the dickbag who stinks like a cesspool filled with rotting corpses. You have thoroughly and blatantly invaded my privacy, so you may as well violate the sanctity of my mental space."
"Now, could you clarify how come a child has been popping up in your thoughts? There she is again. Anything seedy you'd like to share, you dirty cunt?"
"Are her eyes squinty?" I ask in a calm voice.
"Uh... Yes, she's Asian."
I jab my forefinger at the blob.
"Then that's my new daughter you're talking about, you jizz-filled, brain-dead bastard. Have some respect!"
The blob's bulk wobbles, making his myriad eyes quiver.
"Wait, you're serious. Why would you suddenly have a child? How?"
"Jacqueline and I adopted a little girl that I found in the Ice Age, and she's the cutest bundle of joy to ever warm my heart. Name's Nairu."
"Care to explain rationally how you acquired an Asian kid?"
I cross my arms and tilt my head.
"Rationality is for pussies who believe they need to justify themselves. I merely walked into the trap that you, or that so-called professor of yours, laid out for me."
"Leire," the blob growls, "I have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Please tell me you didn't steal some random girl!"
"Relax, you poxy shit. I'll explain the origin story. One recent night, after the last round of sex, Jacqueline wrapped me in her arms, pressing her bountiful breasts against my back. Sheltered by mommy's warmth and heady scent, I started slipping into dreamland. I visualized Jacqueline and I in our old age, curled up together under the covers, sharing a cigarette. By Arachne's nipples, I was flooded with gratitude for the woman whose light had seeped through the cracks in my battered mind to extinguish the lonely part. As a child, before I became the target of harassment by interdimensional creeps, whenever I pictured my future, I saw myself stumbling around in a labyrinth of corridors lined with funhouse mirrors. I sobbed and sobbed, terrified of that appearance that kept warping, knowing that soon enough I would lose the only image of myself that I understood."
"Move on with your story!"
I let out an exasperated sigh as I brush strands of hair from my forehead.
"You interrupt me at such an emotionally charged moment? What a disrespect for the art of storytelling!"
"My interruption was driven by a desperate desire not to hear more about your problems. Just get to the part where you nabbed the kid!"
"Fine, I'll provide a streamlined version, you blobulous mound of pus. In the morning, I got up from mommy's bed and I walked naked to the bathroom. When I reached out to turn on the lights, a crackle of energy ran through me. Next thing I knew, I was standing on the muddy pebbles of a riverbank, and an icy wind was blowing against my bare tits. I won't bore you with my initial freak-out. Anyway, I met the girl in that boreal forest. I also ended up annoying a ground sloth as it was drinking from the river. That long-extinct beast nearly performed extensive surgery on my face with its twenty-centimeter-long claws. Are you getting the close-up of that magnificent mofo from my thoughts? What a gigantic, shambling mass of meat!"
"Oh shit."
"I wish I could have ridden that goddamn goliath, whose claws were created to rend and gouge, to pull down trees and reap lives. Just so you know, it was probably the largest mammal to ever exist, larger even than the bunnyman's cock!"
"Leire, none of us opened that rip in space-time," the blob says gravely as he shifts his bulk. "They will keep appearing spontaneously near you, because your insanity makes you a conduit. It's a miracle that you returned to the present."
"You're telling me. I only had to walk backwards, though. To be fair, I fell on my ass back to the hallway of Jacqueline's privileged apartment in the hills, to then find out that I had dragged along a filthy, confused child who was unaware that parquet flooring existed."
"So, in a way, you did kidnap that girl."
"The authorities might see it that way."
"I guess it couldn't be helped. No way to un-kidnap her now."
"Perhaps I pulled off the greatest scam in the history of interpersonal relations."
Alberto's amorphous form shudders, sending waves rolling across the gelatinous mass. His glossy eyeballs, fixated beyond me and beyond the windows, are catching the light from the ceiling fixtures in a somber dance.
"Oh man," the blob mumbles. "This is terrible."
A pang of shame forces me to look down.
"You know, I thought so back then, wrapped up in a blanket, chafing my arms through the sleeves of my wool pajamas, near hallucinating due to shock and hypothermia. 'This is terrible.' What the hell was I supposed to do with the kid that I snatched from her home? But Jacqueline embraced that little girl like a gift from the universe, and when her angelic giggles fill the apartment, I catch myself smiling. You should see her drawings. She's so eager to express her uniqueness, like I used to be before my parents shredded my psyche. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those ancient cave paintings belonged to her. But... being raised by me is like getting injected with poison."
"I meant the rips in space-time. Still, a living child from thousands of years ago is mind-blowing."
"At least about 11,500 years, which is when the Younger Dryas ended."
"If the press got ahold of this story, the scientific community would want to lock that girl up in a lab."
I picture a gaggle of white coats gathered around Nairu as they dazzle her with bright lights. The medical staff will take her temperature, make her pee into a cup, pry open her mouth and reach down her throat to study her lungs, inject her with syringes full of strange fluids, cut away strips of flesh to check her DNA, and open her skull to peer inside the brain.
A sickening ache squeezes my heart, and I clasp a trembling hand over my breast. The urge to murder those butchers sears through me with the fervor of an ancient beast's drive to dominate and breed.
"I'm sure many scoundrels would love to run their greasy hands all over my sudden daughter," I say in a cold voice, "but none will, because no non-monstrous person will find out that I kidnapped her from the Ice Age, as well as from her bearded, hunter-gatherer father. In due time, Jacqueline and I will relocate to some remote wilderness, where we'll survive by farming, raising poultry and livestock, and staging highway robberies at gunpoint. So don't you go spilling our little secret, you blubbery ectoplasm. In fact, restrain yourself from talking to anyone else; they will run away in terror."
"Well, in any case, do the world a favor and don't raise that innocent soul as a pervert."
I chuckle.
"Nah, she's fucked. Both of her moms are freaks."
---
Author's note: today's songs are "Angel From Montgomery" by John Prine, and "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve.
I keep a playlist with all the songs I've mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty-eight songs so far. Check them out.
Leire met that bunnyman bastard back in chapter 59, during the sequence titled "That Bunnyman Bastard." She ended up in the Ice Age back in chapter 63, during the sequence titled "A Gift From the Ice Age." You can check out all the chapters in this page.
How about audiochapters? Do you enjoy them? I do, which is why I spend hours putting each of these together. Here's the audiochapter for this chapter.
You know how I know that I will never become a professional author, other than the fact that I need to write stuff that virtually nobody else wants to read? I got a sales report from last month; someone has bought both of the books I self-published in Spanish back in 2017 or so. I got paranoid and wondered who was trying to fuck with me.
May 29, 2023
Ongoing manga: Tengoku Daimakyō, by Masakazu Ishiguro
I dislike reviewing manga series when they haven’t finished; more often than not, how all the parts end up tied up together influences my view of the entire story. There are quite a few manga series that I follow and love but that haven’t ended yet, like Dungeon Meshi, Kaiju No. 8, Boy’s Abyss, Chi no Wadachi, etc. However, a week ago I came across the most intriguing manga in a good while, Tengoku Daimakyō (the title apparently translates to Heavenly Delusion), which has “only” reached chapter 55 (such series tend to end at about chapter 100), but that I’ve been looking forward to sit down and continue discovering what it has to offer.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page, where it looks better]
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page, where it looks better]
