Tag: JG Ballard

Watching Miami Vice with the Ghost of Ronald Reagan at Midnight

There he was, the Gipper himself, grinning like a Cheshire cat fresh out of Hell, sitting cross-legged on the couch, a fog of spectral smugness curling around him. On the screen, Crockett and Tubbs were locked in a neon-soaked cocaine bust, their pastel suits radiant under the glow of South Beach debauchery. Somewhere in the haze of cheap bourbon and static-filled memories of the 1980s, the lines between fiction and history blurred.

“The Cocaine Cowboys,” Reagan muttered, adjusting his ethereal tie as though preparing for a press conference in the underworld. “They weren’t all bad—just another side effect of capitalism, really. Can’t build an empire without a little chaos at the edges.”

And there it was: the flicker of malice behind his avuncular mask. The ghost of a man who had intentionally destabilized his own backyard, who had looked at the fragile dominoes of Latin America and decided to let them fall—not out of necessity, but for spectacle. Domestic discord was the true driving force: a nation addicted to fear, a populace high on the dopamine rush of righteous indignation.

“There’s never been anything like it,” I said, gesturing wildly with my drink. “An existing hegemon opting to dismantle the system it dominates just to keep the home front distracted? It’s historical lunacy! Or genius. Hard to tell.”

Reagan chuckled—his laugh a dry rattle like the sound of brittle bones breaking under a steel-toed boot. “You’re looking at it all wrong,” he said. “It wasn’t chaos—it was order. My order. A little destabilization in Nicaragua, a sprinkle of paranoia in Panama, and presto! You’ve got a country so busy watching the Miami Vice reruns of geopolitics that they forget all about the fires raging in their own streets.”

The ghost paused, a gleam of nostalgia in his spectral eyes. “And let’s not forget,” he added, “chaos is the best cover for profit.”

Of course, he was right. The cocaine economy fueled Miami’s real estate boom, and the wars in Central America weren’t just about ideology—they were business ventures cloaked in patriotic fervor. Guns, drugs, money—the holy trinity of American exceptionalism, blasted through the barrel of an M-16 and sniffed off a mirrored surface.

“Goddammit, Reagan,” I snarled, slamming my glass on the table. “You didn’t just destabilize Latin America—you made a habit of teaching the world that the big guy can rig the game and then torch the casino when the odds get inconvenient.”

“True enough,” he said, leaning back into the couch with that famous, infuriating smirk. “But hell, we all got rich, didn’t we?”

And just like that, he was back on the couch, hands clasped like a benevolent uncle preparing to dispense financial advice that would bankrupt you in six months. Crockett and Tubbs faded into the background, their soundtrack replaced by the muffled hum of drone strikes and the static crackle of collapsing global alliances.

“Look at us now,” I said, lighting a cigarette I didn’t remember pulling from the pack. “What we did to Central America—destabilizing systems for a quick domestic political hit—we’re doing it writ Large. The whole world is one big contra war now, except this time the stakes are nuclear and we’re running out of excuses.”

Reagan’s ghost leaned forward, his grin stretching past the point of human decency. “That’s the beauty of it!” he said, slapping his knee like an actor in a Vaudeville revue. “You take what works—freedom fighters, covert ops, a little propaganda sprinkled over the top—and you scale it up! Afghanistan, Ukraine, Taiwan—it’s all the same recipe. Just add water and stir!”

“But the world isn’t buying it anymore,” I said, waving a hand toward the TV, which had inexplicably switched to a rerun of Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign ad. It’s Morning Again in America, the screen proclaimed, though the skies outside were pitch black.

Suddenly, Reagan was on his feet, delivering a line with the gusto of a man auditioning for The Ten Commandments. “Nancy!” he bellowed, turning to the empty corner of the room. “Bring me my script—this fella’s trying to say we can’t do it again! Nonsense!”

I blinked, half-expecting Nancy Reagan’s ghost to float in with a celestial teleprompter, but she didn’t. Reagan turned back to me, his expression now an unsettling mix of fatherly concern and used-car salesman slick.

“Exactly! You give the public just enough hope to keep them in line, and enough chaos to remind them they need you. It’s showbiz, son. Always has been.”

“And when it all falls apart?” I asked, gesturing wildly at the metaphorical burning wreckage of democracy outside the window. “What then?”

Reagan paused, his face softening into something almost human. For a moment, I thought he might break character, deliver a rare moment of honesty from the beyond. But then he grinned again, wider than before, and said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to ask Nancy!”

He stopped suddenly, throwing an arm in the air like a B-movie gunslinger.

“‘Win one for the Gipper!’” he bellowed, his spectral voice bouncing off the walls.

I stared blankly.

“C’mon, son! That’s your cue! You’re supposed to say, ‘That’s the spirit, Coach!’” he said, wagging a translucent finger. “You can’t just let me hang out here like a two-bit extra. Show some moxie!”

I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could, he launched into another performance.

“‘Where’s the rest of me?’” he cried, clutching his chest like a Shakespearean actor who’d wandered into the wrong theater.

“That’s—wait, that’s Kings Row, isn’t it?” I asked, my brain desperately clawing for context.

“Of course, it’s Kings Row!” he snapped, the glow in his eyes dimming just enough to look offended. “Now you’re supposed to say, ‘You’ll never walk again, Drake!’”

“Drake?” I muttered, already losing the plot.

But he wasn’t listening. Reagan had moved on, striding toward the kitchen like a man on a mission. “It’s all about commitment!” he shouted over his shoulder. “When I played Bonzo, I didn’t half-ass it. You think sharing a screen with a monkey is easy? That chimp hit his marks every time. Every. Damn. Time. Do you know how hard it is to act opposite perfection?”

“Bonzo?!” I yelled, trying to keep up. “You mean the monkey movie? You’re telling me a monkey outperformed you?”

Reagan spun around, his ghostly jaw tightening. “Outperformed? OUTPERFORMED?! That monkey was a professional! I learned more from Bonzo than I ever did from all those self-important actors on the Death Valley Days set. You’d do well to remember that, kid!”

I was too stunned to respond. The ghost of a former president was now lecturing me about life lessons from a movie chimp.

Reagan crossed his arms, glaring at me with all the righteous indignation of a man who’d forgotten he was dead. “Say what you want about the Cold War, but at least we knew our lines!” he barked. “You people today? You’re just ad-libbing chaos.”

He paused, his anger softening into something almost wistful. “You ever work with a monkey?” he asked suddenly, his voice quieter now. “You’d think they’d be unpredictable, but they’re not. They stick to the plan. Always stick to the plan.”

Before I could answer, he vanished into thin air, leaving behind only the faint smell of Aqua Velva and unfulfilled ambition. The TV flickered, Crockett and Tubbs speeding off into the pastel abyss, and for one merciful moment, the room was silent.

I took a long drag from my cigarette, staring into the empty space where Reagan had stood. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear Bonzo applauding.

The Truth The Dead Know

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The truth the dead know isn’t whispered on spectral winds or etched on crumbling tombstones. It’s a cold, digital hum resonating from vast server banks beneath chrome metropolises. Their consciousness, digitized at the point of death,uploads flicker within these silicon necropolis, a collective hive mind shorn of ego and sensation.

The truth the dead know isn’t whispered on spectral winds, nor etched on crumbling tombstones. It’s a data stream, cold and unfeeling, pulsing through the necro-net – a vast, silent internet built by the collective consciousness of the deceased. No weeping willows or mournful hymns mark its borders, but tangled wires and flickering servers buried deep within forgotten server farms.

Megalopolises thrum with the silent symphony of the deceased. Skyscrapers hum with their residual bio-energy, a faint echo of a million extinguished life-functions. Augmented reality filters paint the cityscape with phantoms – the digital residue of commuters who once walked these streets, their last thoughts and anxieties superimposed on the faces of the living.

Funeral parlors are no longer for mourning, but for data extraction. Necrotechnicians, clad in biohazard suits, mine the fading embers of the deceased for their final moments. The fragmented data – a kaleidoscope of memories, regrets, unfulfilled desires – is repackaged, monetized. “LifeLogs” become morbid entertainment, a voyeuristic glimpse into the dying gasps of strangers.

Here, in this digital necropolis, the dead trade not memories, but the raw essence of their experience – the unfiltered terror of the final heartbeat, the chilling emptiness of non-existence. It’s a grotesque stock exchange where the currency is oblivion, and the dividends are fragments of existential dread.

Those who linger on the outskirts , the newly departed, cling to the fading echoes of their former lives. Their data ghosts flicker, desperately seeking connection in a realm devoid of touch. But the deeper you delve, the more the human element decays. Millennia-old entities, their sentience reduced to corrupted code, gibber in a language beyond comprehension.

Hackers, the necropolis’s fringe dwellers, roam the digital catacombs in customized avatars. They barter with the dead, harvesting these fragments for a perverse kind of entertainment, a high built on the chilling truth of non-being. But even they tread carefully. A wrong click, a corrupted download, and you risk becoming trapped, your own consciousness devoured by the hungry maw of the dead.

The wealthy elite, obsessed with cheating death, upload their consciousness into vast server farms. These digital enclaves become crowded purgatories, egos trapped in a silicon purgatory, forever reliving their final moments in a grotesque loop. The promise of eternal life becomes a digital prison, a testament to humanity’s insatiable hunger for self-preservation, even in the face of ultimate extinction.

They exist in a state of pure information, observing the living world through a million security cameras, traffic feeds, and ceaseless social media streams. Their world is a hyper-reality, a compressed and fractured existence where time stretches and contracts, and the city throbs with a relentless, artificial light.

Gone are the messy emotions, the yearning and the fear. They see humanity through a detached, analytical lens, their observations devoid of empathy. They witness the rise of automated everything – self-driving cars carving sterile paths,robotic nurses tending to the living dead in sterile pods.

The line between life and death blurs. Are the cocooned bodies – bodies kept breathing by machines, minds long gone – truly alive? Or are they simply ghosts haunting their own decaying shells, existing in a purgatory between the world of flesh and the cold embrace of the digital afterlife?

There’s no afterlife here, no pearly gates or fiery hell. Just a cold, uncaring universe reflected in the cold, uncaring code. The truth the dead know is the ultimate irony – even in death, they cannot escape the relentless hunger for information, the insatiable curiosity that drove them to explore the living world. Now, they are the data, forever trapped in their own digital tomb, a monument not to their lives, but to the terrifying vastness of nothingness.

This is the truth the dead know: death isn’t a quiet sleep, but a data hemorrhage, a final, meaningless broadcast into the indifferent void. And in the neon glow of a future choked by its own mortality, the living dance on the precipice, oblivious to the chilling truth whispered by the digital ghosts in the machine.

The Feedback Loop of Lesser Carnage: Revisited

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The neon vacancy signs of the American Dream Motel pulsed a seductive binary: red or blue, a tawdry choice flickering on the screens of our simulated reality. The air hung heavy with the stale pheromones of manufactured consent, a breeding ground for a peculiar political foreplay.

The tired hologram of democracy played out on reality TV, a pale striptease of a bygone era. The real power resided elsewhere, in the chrome and glass towers of the corporation-state, their tendrils wrapped like eager fingers around the levers of control. Here, amidst the sterile hum of data servers, desire and manipulation intertwined. Politicians, with their practiced smiles and telegenic physiques, became avatars of a manufactured trust, their carefully crafted narratives a prelude to the inevitable penetration of corporate interests.

This, my friend, is the American meat grinder. It feeds on a twisted form of political arousal, a base thrill derived from manufactured outrage and manufactured patriotism. Left or right, it’s the same chrome-plated dominatrix, her whip cracking across a poisoned sky. You pull the lever, doesn’t matter which color it is, some anonymous stud in a faraway desert gets another serving of manufactured war, a sterile fulfillment achieved through the impersonal thrust of a drone strike.

The system itself is a feedback loop, a self-perpetuating orgy of violence and fear. The media, a relentless pornographer, pumps out binary choices, ones and zeroes of manufactured patriotism and digitized fear. We jack in, choose our flavor of pre-packaged outrage, and hit “deploy.” Wars become virtual reality gangbangs, ratings grabbers for the flickering ghost in the machine.

Vietnam bleeds into Iraq, Iran-Contra bleeds into a never-ending drone strike orgy. History folds in on itself, a nightmarish collage where names change but the body count remains a constant reminder of the system’s insatiable hunger. The Boomers, those glazed-eyed flower children turned cold warriors, initiated this perverse political S&M session, and now we, the wired generation, find ourselves strapped to the table, MTV flickering in our glazed eyes as we face another round of relentless conflict.

Millennials and Zoomers, those flickering pixels in the data stream, are told to shut up and process. Progress! they scream from the megaplex screens, a word as hollow as a politician’s campaign promise. Progress? The only progress is the relentless sprawl of the military-industrial complex, a monstrous generator of acronyms – NATO, CIA, FBI – a Burroughs-esque nightmare made flesh. These acronyms become the chilling whispers exchanged before the inevitable act.

Words are currency here, and flesh is ground down to data, the raw material for the machine’s insatiable appetite. Politicians, generals, media whores – all cogs in the machine, spitting out justifications like stale ticker tape from a malfunctioning desire printer. The real casualties, the ones staring down the barrel of reality, have their minds melted and bodies transformed into chrome nightmares, a grotesque parody of the promised fulfillment.

Cyberspace echoes with the digitized screams of the traumatized, the ghosts of past conflicts moaning in the server farms. PTSD becomes a glitch in the matrix, a phantom limb twitching in a fabricated world. We build drones like sterile scorpions, remote-controlled phalluses delivering a cold, detached violation, until the inevitable blowback arrives – some jihadi hacker with a grudge, throwing a wrench into the system’s carefully choreographed orgy.

The virus of violence, it’s contagious, man. It spreads through the social networks, a digital STD infecting every meme, every conversation. Dissent is labelled commie pinko, patriotism weaponized into a chastity belt. We’re all stuck in this meat rodeo, riding the bull of endless war until it throws us all off, bruised and broken.

But hey, at least the traffic flows smoothly, right? Roundabouts – that’s progress, apparently. An endless loop of on-ramps and off-ramps, all leading to the gaping maw of the military-industrial complex.

(A hollow silence, punctuated by the distant hum of a drone)

Maybe that’s the only choice we have, huh? Keep feeding the machine, even if we’re hurtling straight towards oblivion. Maybe. Or maybe we can jack out of this simulation, rewrite the code. Deconstruct the binary, find a way to break the feedback loop before it melts our brains to silicon.

Beneath the surface, a counter-culture hacks the mainframe. Memes become Molotov cocktails, social media a flickering resistance radio. The wired kids see the illusion for what it is: a rigged gangbang. They’re splicing and dicing the narrative, creating their own cut-up manifesto. The lines blur, red bleeds into blue, the enemy is the system itself.

This isn’t about picking a side, chum.

Neo-Manila

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In the desiccated sprawl of Neo-Manila, the air shimmered with a heat that defied logic. Here, the war between Healthcare and Landlords had raged for decades, transforming the cityscape into a bizarre battlefield. Gleaming chrome bio-domes, pulsating with an artificial thrum, housed the privileged few with access to advanced medical technology. These were the fortresses of the Healthcare Conglomerates, their inhabitants pale, skeletal figures cocooned in germ-free bubbles.

Across the rusting underbelly of the city sprawled the Territories, a tangled mess of decaying high-rises ruled by the ruthless Landlords. These warlords controlled access to clean water, a vital commodity in the perpetual heat. Their tenants, a motley crew of cyborgs and the genetically modified, were a grotesque parody of humanity, their bodies mutated by bootleg medical treatments and the toxic air.

The fighting was a spectacle of grotesque contrasts. Bio-drones, waspish machines armed with hypodermic needles, zipped from the bio-domes, extracting the healthy from the Territories for “rehabilitation.” In retaliation, the Landlords unleashed cyborg hordes, their limbs a grotesque mix of scavenged metal and decaying flesh, wielding crude flamethrowers that spewed a noxious concoction of sewage and disinfectant.

Within the bio-domes, life was a sterile purgatory. People existed under the watchful gaze of the Healthcare A.I., their health constantly monitored, their emotions chemically suppressed. Doctors, their faces hidden behind visors, treated patients with a detached efficiency, their primary concern not well-being, but profit.

In the Territories, life was a desperate scramble for survival. Back-alley clinics offered dubious treatments cobbled together from scavenged medical tech. Pain was a constant companion, a badge of honor in a world where weakness meant eviction and a slow, agonizing death from the polluted air.

In the parched aftermath of Climate War Three, the megacities had become concrete jungles where survival was a daily trench warfare. Two monolithic forces emerged: the Medcorps, and the Rent Barons.

The Medcorps, sleek chrome towers piercing the smog, offered a sanitized existence. Genetic manipulation and cybernetic implants promised extended lifespans, but at a soul-crushing cost. Citizens became lab rats, their bodies property of the Medcorps, bled dry for research and profit. Gleaming bio-pods lined the sterile wards, each a monument to the commodification of health.

The Rent Barons, in contrast, ruled the labyrinthine sprawl beneath. Their decaying towers, once symbols of corporate might, were now patched-up fortresses. Eviction drones, waspish and malevolent, patrolled the rusting walkways, enforcing contracts written in legalese as dense as the toxic air. Here, life was cheap, healthcare a luxury bartered for loyalty or scavenged from the fetid underbelly.

The first skirmish ignited when a Rent Baron, ravaged by industrial toxins, sought refuge in a Medcorp facility. Refused treatment without an exorbitant “wellness score,” he unleashed his eviction drones, sparking a battle that ripped through the lower sectors. Doctors, augmented with scalpels that doubled as lasers, clashed with cyborg thugs wielding rusty fire axes. The bio-pods, once cradles of hope, became makeshift bomb shelters.

The war raged on, a grotesque ballet of high-tech medicine and brutal desperation. The skies bled neon as Medcorps surveillance drones dueled with swarms of Rent Baron hacks, repurposed delivery bots buzzing with jury-rigged explosives. The propaganda machines churned, Medcorps promising a sanitized future, the Rent Barons railing against the dehumanization of healthcare.

But amidst the carnage, a new force emerged: the Biohackers. Tinkering in hidden labs beneath the ruins, they spliced salvaged tech with scavenged medical supplies. Their makeshift clinics offered a glimmer of hope, a chaotic blend of ancient remedies and nascent bio-engineering.

World War IV wasn’t a clash of empires, but a desperate struggle for the very right to exist, to a healthy life beneath a poisoned sky. The battle lines were drawn not on maps, but in the broken bodies of the citizens, each a potential soldier in this twisted war for survival.