Slaughtermatic

by Steve Aylett

On a coffee table was a large bowl of anodyne pills, used to damp down original thought and reduce conspicuity in public. The practical hazards of re-examining one’s mental premises on the wing were well known to the denizens of Beerlight - a guy skyjacking a plane one time had pushed a gun to the pilot’s face and instead of demanding a flight to Cuba, snarled, ‘The cultural space vacated by logic and morality has been filled at once with an automated and meaningless simulacrum which is nevertheless of precisely the same dimensions.’ A kidnapper started assembling a ransom note from scissored headline letters and finished a year and forty thousand words later with the words ‘and won’t accept the jig’s up even when faced with a show of apathy equal to their own’. The kid he kidnapped had long since escaped. Another sparkhead entered a bank right after a romantic break-up and delivered a bitter monologue on how ‘women send signals but men speak English’ while performing the most mawkish heist in Beerlight history. He later wrote and signed a confession which, published under the title The Seahorse’s Gaze, replied to theories of gender manipulation with those of hermaphroditic self-fertility and indifference.