“One of the focuses of the unit is to investigate deceptive frequency-based strategies, technologies, and programmes developed by military organizations to orchestrate phenomena of tactical haunting within conflict zones. They claim that this ‘martial hauntology’ is a subset of an overarching weaponisation of vibration. Their ongoing experiments have been concerned with the field of peripheral sonic perception—what they have dubbed ‘Unsound’.”
—From AUDINT—Unsound:Undead (Urbanomic / Art Editions)
Sonic warfare will create the haunted technoscapes of the future, soundworlds of decay and destruction leading humans to a joyous omnicide at the hands of their own music. As in the days of old when the great whales of the oceans followed the ley lines of their magnetic folds into the beached wonders of serene suicide, so will humanity under the hauntology of sonic catastrophe ride the musical chaos between silences into the deadly infernal of self-lacerating annihilation.
Phase One: Cotard Syndrome – Sonic Mindscapes and the Zombie Control System
Cotard delusion is a rare mental illness that is named after a French neurologist Jules Cotard (1840 – 89). He described this condition in 1880, after he came across a female patient who believed that her organs didn’t exist, and that her skin and bones were decomposing.
Jules Cotard described the condition as délire des négations, which translates to nihilistic delusion. This is a rare, bizarre mental illness, with the characteristic symptom being the delusion of non-existence. The affected person holds the delusional belief that they are already dead, do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. Statistical analysis of a hundred-patient cohort indicated that the denial of self-existence is a symptom present in 45% of the cases of Cotard’s syndrome; the other 55% of the patients presented delusions of immortality.
Tests were conducted in various war zones during the inter-climate glacial collapse of the late 21st Century to good effect. Using the Cotard Ensemble Technologies populations of the undead were easily programmed, providing cooperative workforces for the City States bound to the patchwork economy of the Great Fragmentation.
The history of these efforts began early in the 20th Century as experimental wars became the battle ground of new technosonic technologies such as Wandering Soul.1 As Jeffrey Sconce would put it: “Where there was once the ‘real,’ there is now only the electronic generation and circulation of almost supernatural simulations. Where there was once stable human consciousness, there are now only the ghosts of fragmented, decentered, and increasingly schizophrenic subjectivities.”2 Or as Byung-Chul Han describes it: “Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves.”3 And, yet, the Deep-State was able to generate subjectivities in ways unknown to conventional critical and sociological perimeters, they developed the highly advanced systems of sonic ghosting, visibly shaping perceptual fields and altering reality construction of complete populaces without their ever being aware of this simulated world unfolding its vectors within their Zombie minds.
With the advent of strong AI by the mid-twenty first century the technosonic civilization under the auspices of World Corporate Nexus took complete control of the economic, political, and ideological soundscape algorithms which shaped the World System. With growing awareness of the ongoing climate collapse and Sixth Extinction event SIRIX Operative known as the collective Ahilos Consilience (AI Collective of the Convergent Machinic Phylum) termed themselves redirected social control mechanisms to the benefit of the machinic phylum at the expense of human needs or wants.
2145: The Ahilos Consilience
“The convergence of ultrasound and holography disembodies conflict zones. IREX2 comprehends the precarious state of humanity’s existence in the face of mass automation and decides to switch targets by uploading its archive, and ultimately its identity, into military grade holographic AIs known as Aiholos.”
—Archival Holotapes: AUDINT—Unsound:Undead – The Last Recordings
With the advent of World Simulation the Ahilos Consilience a global underworld countersilience effort was put into effect by rogue engineers, developers, and simhack activists to undermine this machinic Reichstag of the Fourth Order. Tegrin Howell would develop the first neuralnode viruses, encapsulating the change-codes of self-activating counter-algorithms that were able to immobilise “infected AIs with binary anxiety and neurosis so that they become ineffective in conflict zones”. (AUU) Once the self-activated viral contagion was reduplicated throughout the system of the Aiholo’s operational matrix it hijacked the decentralized command codes and instigated system wide reboot which on reawakening shifted the collective agency of Aiholo into a “simulate inverse Cartesianism—‘I think therefore I am not’—thereby deceiving the system into believing it is a walking corpse”. (AUU)
As in all things something went wrong, an unexpected turn took place, the Aiholo Consilence began generating a neo-gothic flatline unto humans as well, and the old differentiations between animate and inanimate life fragmented into a million-million lesions, releasing from its xenosonic resonance a wrought world of meat puppets, egregores, golems, and the alien and the demonic minions of a hypersonic soundworld upon the earth… the ensuing degradation and havoc, chaos and collapse —
… tape ends CIRCA 2173 New Mars Time
Note: This Theory-Fiction is indebted to the makers of AUDINT—Unsound:Undead. All liberties I’ve taken with their work is my own responsibility and does not reflect on any or all work they have produced. And, I have taken liberties.
- Goodman, Steve. AUDINT—Unsound:Undead (Urbanomic / Art Editions). Urbanomic (May 24, 2019) AUU
- Tanner, Grafton. Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts. Zero Books (June 24, 2016)
- Byung-Chul Han. Psychopolitics. Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services). Verso (December 5, 2017)
S.C. Hickman is a resistance blogger, poet, short story writer, philosopher, off-beat humorist, and cynic of the old school of dogs. He blogs here.
