WARNING – IT MIGHT INDUCE AN OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE.

This is completely unexpected. I was bathing in the tar pits behind the Bates Motel. I had been there for days, or was it years? Tar is thick. Unattainable. Silent. Predictable. But, suddenly, a swinging bass line shakes my warm stomach from the inside. It doesn’t ask. It doesn’t wait. How can anyone survive in this darkness? And yet, epileptic lights dance beneath me. And then thump, bang, thump, bang, thump, and honk, honk, honk, honk and…

“Go to therapy or else you are gonna go to jail.”

A child’s voice from a stop-motion march of dead bodies fidgeting compulsively and flashing in my direction from below. Alice emerges from the tar, a godly vision of a post-industrial dystopic future. A plutonium angel lullabying out of focus beyond the scratched glass of an arcade machine.

“Ciao bella, ciao bella, bellissimo.”

Their language of sounds and pixels is fast, unpredictable, hammering, and pneumatic. Half machine, half human, half megabit, more than whole, unfathomable to my human ears, but crystal clear to my marrow; smooth, like the neon reflecting surface of the tar pit where radioactive insects now scamper in a frenzy, and I can’t survive, and she blooms. What are you, Alice Longyu Gao?

“I am a killer, not a sugar baby.”

Shut up, me. No need to understand. Stop fighting against the tar and let it phagocytise our physical, obsolete bodies. Let us leave room for the sound of the future. Bellissimo.