The Generals
There must be some kind of key, some motive-piece, that explains where we are, or were, or will be. We don’t know how we know this. Maybe a map held in some archive that can never safely be released or viewed; drawn up for an important peace conference decades before it shows that the government of the day was prepared to trade away land that is now declared sacrosanct, inviolable. Even knowledge of the map is contested, a kind of cult within the ranks of librarians and archivists.
Pseudo-mycorrhizal networks penetrate all aspects of human life. No data is beyond their reach; as people turn increasingly to neural modification to extend brain life and to sedentary existence to reduce physical damage, it is the elderly, religious adepts, who notice the differences first, that life is not the same anymore, we don’t think the same. We think the same. Irrationality is no longer seen as the noise but as the signal. Topography warps so far that each nation becomes the other that it is facing: every border becomes a circle. History acquires a Will, just as enmeshed consciousness dispenses with the will entirely.
The generals hover about the low-lit table, pointing, muttering, moving counters and withdrawing them. The table has no edge. Time could move in any direction or stutter, break up into vectors, isobars. One wipes her clammy neck. If she stumbles or falls she could be replaced by any other.
Geoff Sawers is the author of Friends of Friends (Diehard Fiction Direct, 2024) and Reading Quaker Meeting: A History (Two Rivers Press, 2024). He has new work published recently in Blackbox Manifold, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, and Sage Cigarettes; criticism in Culture Matters and the Times Literary Supplement.