there were naked politicians on the sulfur-yellow field, running in circles around a vague object. it was a diffuse evening, you couldn’t see far across the vast fields. at dusk the landscape took on a trembling rust-red hue, you sat on a chair, almost petrified,
with heart-shaped glasses, making calculations of the accretion disk’s rotational speed. you were very skinny and had been silent for many years, but you kept on with your calculations even as night began to fall. it glowed red at the horizon and flakes of gray dust drifted down from the sky. the naked politicians in gas masks had painted black crosses on each other’s bodies. they looked rather funny, greased up in some kind of baby oil. you could barely hear what they said. misshapen deformities had begun to appear on their faces.
one of them crouched and dug in the dry earth for prosthetics, digging and howling like a dog for greasy prostheses buried there a few hundred years earlier.
you had long nurtured a dream that you and i would bathe in the glowing accretion disk around sagittarius a*. from the outside of a black hole it seems as if an object near it is frozen in the event horizon forever — a so-called holographic projection. but from the inside it feels as if one is dragged down into the black hole, the body’s image intact forever as a holographic projection encoded on its 2d event horizon, while from the subject’s perspective there is no existence, since it has long been dead.
the politician had managed to dig up a prosthesis from the soil,
and tried attaching it to the now mutated, abnormally deformed body. the limbs looked swollen with cysts the size of watermelons,
the face like the elephant man’s, bulging under the damp gas mask. but the politicians still seemed cheerful enough, dancing around the vague object in their gas masks and oiled bodies. a few crows sat in the dry soil at their feet, pecking at imaginary worms. the whole landscape was sulfur-yellow and still. in my head i heard snakefinger’s cover of kraftwerk’s the model. you sat frozen on the chair, your heart-shaped glasses glowing in the radium-bright night. you and i and the crows had long been dead and buried, but we didn’t care — it had been a phantom life. even the politicians had long been dead and buried, but no one had told them yet, and they went on dancing in circles around the diffuse monument, centuries after their death.