draconian error handling
by Cristiano Cardone
I couldn't recollect the last time I blinked, but the thought of doing so here fills me with unease, as if losing that little light for a moment would invite something I dare not face. The aloof steps march with a lowered gaze, in the rhythm that pumps desire into the heart.
The soles cannot break, forced to repeat the heart's rhythm on the ground, caressing it. When walking, I project my internal discussion to the movement of my feet, which must be careful to caress the asphalt. The effect of the cocktail of cognitive enhancers I had taken was dissipated by the cosmic cold that pricked my ribs under this human jacket. Soon, fatigue would arrive; the days awake were starting to weigh.
An abrupt clarity of thought dissipated the dance of the legs, bringing back the existential anxiety that must accompany every citizen: the rounded gray rubber shoes had to scrape the ground, not stomp on it. The black basalt blocks pulsed under the light of a neutrino star, undulating from the bottom of the deserted street and reverberating that change in surface tension up to me. I moved my hips but did not fall – it was a breath. If I wanted to survive, I had to reach my scale as soon as possible. There, desire’s pulsations would have let me be for a short while.
Havayoth, also called Black Diamond by others, was the name that the city obtained. The few contacts I had defined it as a city, at least, but it was hard to maintain friendships when a misstep could lead to certain death. What remained now was only sporadic, planned contacts, encounters with those you'd risk your life to see one last time: escorts, drug dealers, underground raves, and occasionally mass suicides. Meeting someone on the street was extremely rare – every job had vanished, leaving only smuggling or the grim task of rationing the last of the dwindling supplies. I didn’t want anymore; the drugs were enough to carry forward the shell of resentment and apparent critical vision. I felt my astral projection screaming above me, trying to direct my gaze toward yet another star swallowed by the violet abyss visible in the distance of the vault.
We had crossed the threshold and entered the Sitra Achra; that's what some mescaline-addled face had said in the last bunker-rave I had been to. Was I sure? No, but I had stopped wanting further explanations. All the bodies I touched in my long stay agreed that Earth was now the shell of the dragon Theom, and every surface had become a plate of the shell, cubes aligned and perfectly carved, rising and falling with its breath. The infatuation with darkness had finally borne fruit: the desire to become one with demons and awaken the sordid path that, for so many years, every human had traversed inside in the letting go of every vice. We were responsible for bringing Earth into this primordial slime. I couldn’t be happier: we finally got what we fucking deserved, a cosmic scolding.
The dragon's shell pulsed – no one was to wake it – the basalt was sensitive. Walking was an infernal mantra: what worked was mixing between walking with irregular steps, dragging feet, distributing weight, and crawling or going on all fours. The few alive had learned it independently, watching the cars consumed by the shell's defense system. When too much weight was applied, the cubes would rise, translating upward and revealing the living matter beneath the shell. An intricate sprouting of nerves illuminated the center of the egg, like foul purple roots, whose mere touch was enough to absorb vital energy and melt inorganic matter. Angelina, the escort I was returning from now, called those nerves "the phalluses of Samael" for their pointed ends and veined surface. She had seen her son devoured in that way, and thinking about it, I could have asked her a few questions before screwing – having a conversation – but I don’t think either of us cared. We hadn’t made a sound. The only positive thing about being transplanted into the abyss of existence was that no social facade mattered anymore. They required an unnecessary effort, and no one had the strength to erect – for what purpose? Life became entirely pornographic: it shifted its compulsion, leaving reality as secondary to pornographic impulses.
In hindsight, Angelina had given me that confidence because she knew her time was near – no one who had seen "the phalluses of Samael" survived long. It was as if the city remembered who had seen its intimacy: a revenge or an absolution? Perhaps both, that place was the expression of desire and, thus, also of the sublime. A shame. Angelina had such big tits...
A positive consequence was that nothing made sense. The denial of purpose contracted into a smile on my tired face – finally free from constraints and social anxieties created only by us.
I turned the corner, heading into a narrow alley, squeezed between two concrete walls – a withered symbol of destroyed skyscrapers. The buildings had been too heavy, they had been mowed down, leaving only walls. I started another dance: the surface of the cubes was thin – the nerves were visible in this area, and the sensitive asphalt was jagged with what looked like taste buds. Havayoth knew it already savored my feet, which glided and made the buds tremble. What looked like pebbles were fetishistic excrescences tasting my feet.
The purple sky mocks us; even the sacred lightning that illuminated it, small remnants of purity, avoided the earth's surface. Here, only desire, whose burning did not cease in the apocalyptic geography – formed by the pulsing streets, the asphalt ready to gauge the weight of the steps, and the scales where the last homunculi dwelled. Every surface seemed gripped by the egg, so much so that my memory could not confirm a past contact with nature.
The alley ended in a rose of edges and lamellae emerging from the ground. There they were, the scale-dwellings revealed themselves with the sharp redness of nerves still entwining their bases. The egg was about to hatch, and some of Theom's scales had already erupted on the surface – protected by that blade of evil so pure it escaped all judgment, people lived. Solitary encampments and campsites could be found between the tip of those teeth and the asphalt; man's return to the cave from whence he arose. That return to ignorance, fear, awe, and belief in the darkness completed mankind's wandering. We had explored the light too far, and now the primordial darkness had forced us back on our steps for a closer examination of the origins. Escaping from desire was a hypocritical move.
I reached the square after the alley, a palm of empty concrete where the cubes trembled more frequently – the Dragon's lungs were nearby. Further ahead, a row of scales indicated the presence of some citizens. I was a few steps from the warmth of my lamella; I could already glimpse the black tarps I had hung on the protruding posts to create some minimal privacy. My rations, some clothes, and the encyclopedia of Uqbar: all that the city's nerves hadn't taken from me. A couple of cognitive enhancers moved in the pocket of my greasy pants; I was thinking about how I would have to replenish them when I saw a shadow running toward me.
Here was another suicide fleeing their scale to end their suffering. She looked like a woman, but I wasn’t sure – cutting hair wasn’t really an option. She was a figure, skinnier than me, not by much; I would soon reach that stage. She reached the carved edge of the concrete as I dragged myself behind the curtains. There – a roar shook the ground. I covered my eyes and crouched as a cramp of muffled laughter shook my belly. Fuck yes, yes! I could steal her drugs soon! But I had to wait; I could not see the nervous phalluses devour that prey – otherwise, they would target me, too.
Lazily, I removed my safety shoes – large gray shapes; my battered feet took a few seconds to rest on the surface. The pain and heat from the shell beneath the scale confused me, or maybe it was the lack of sleep. My sticky eyes slid into a slit in the black tarp, observing the few remnants of civilization. Only tall industrial skeletons sketched the lines that differentiated from the purple abyss. Bare utility poles, scaffolding walls with no buildings to support, artistic obelisks with no audience. If I could, I would have wanted to die with my head toward one of those pinnacles of human presence, not staring at that frightening concentric vortex in the sky. Yet, I didn’t even know how to reach one of those places. With every breath, the cubes of asphalt, taste buds, and nerves shifted in short but frequent waves; every city map I had tried to organize was always distorted. Considering the time I spent dancing, every journey became unpredictable, making finding my way back to my scale challenging. The whole city was flat, indicating the unnaturalness of the morphological composition; the topographical impossibility of representing the infinite goad of the unattainable.
I took another cognitive enhancer, felt the pressure at my temples rise, and my field of vision became more saturated. I was ignorant and would die as a perfect nobody, which gave me freedom.
A thud – something had hit the roof of my scale. The pointed ceiling lowered, the veil I used as a curtain rippled, and I felt the heat crushing me. With a quick gesture, slipping my shoes on with my thumbs, I crawled out before my refuge collapsed. My personal belongings were lost; only the encyclopedia of Uqbar had flown out – seemingly intact. I awkwardly started the dance, but buzzing behind me stopped me.
'We are about to leave Gha’agsheblah; we will soon plunge into the Abyss to be reborn in the final spheres. The great dragon is almost ready to awaken. The mistake of Babel was to rise toward the Tree of Life, which is why it was destroyed. Havayoth extends toward the tree of death, descending it has found eternity.'
The voice of a beautiful woman, the sight of a terrible insect. Angelina’s voice…maybe the precise buzzing at that frequency gave me that impression. Three horns sprouted where I had expected full lips; a single eye in the center of the forehead presented a mandala of pupils instead of the grace of two lights; a pale exoskeleton replaced the skin's softness – it generated that light. Arachnid appendages extended from her back, and black webs hung from the joints between the coxa, trochanter, femur, and patella. A long blue metasoma covered her chest and belly, ending with the phallic telson that concealed the vagina. I shivered; she did nothing, yet her presence exposed every hidden pornographic desire I wished to deny. The responsibility for that dread was mine— I was the one left clutching the sickness she evoked while she floated above it all, pure and untouched. My head started to throb, and the images blurred slightly, indicating a drop in tolerance to the pills or to the demonic figure. I felt some pupils lower onto me, others directed toward the book on the ground.
Then it spiked – all my bodily senses were numbed as I wanted to devour, claim, understand, and reach that deity. The asphalt seemed to react; the more my disorientation increased my heart rate, the more I desired, and the more the blocks jounced. I turned my back, grabbing the book of fictions and escaping my drives. Without being able to read, I would have been like all the other dwellers, but projecting my thoughts in the land of Uqbar cooled down my compulsions – only for this reason I managed to survive that long. I rifled through the pages, running, I could slide under another scale…
Then, an uncontrollable erection, and the drives surged back. A burning dick erased my hand, shoving the book aside. The encyclopedia slipped under another scale, swiftly gripped by a hand that, for a moment longer, would have survived through those words. A hand that could still hold the rod and the one that no longer could.
When my eyes came back into focus, I saw that the demon in front of me was caressing a bundle of nerves protruding from a cube that had just risen.
«By commoditizing desire, you have forgotten how to accept it.»
The phalluses wrapped around me, and I was dragged under the block, dissolving. In the end, I was a big hypocrite, trying to escape from what I was breathing and living. I immersed myself in the dragon's waking eye as I flowed beneath the basalt.
***“Draconian Errors Handling” is an apocalyptic fiction with erotic/occult themes about the world plunged in the abyss while a survivor investigates themes of human survival, technological transformation, and the psychological impact of the end of times.***
Photo of Cristiano Cardone
BIO: Cristiano Cardone, born in Naples in 1997, has published two novels—Fecola di Neve and Etimasia. In 2019, he published his first comic, CFBT, a thriller cyberpunk trilogy. He is currently publishing short stories in Don’t Submit and Apocalypse Confidential, with more on the way. Another novel is slated for release in summer 2025.
Cardone earned his BS in Literature in 2019, then moved to Norway, where he completed an MS in Ibsen Studies in 2021. He is now finishing a second master’s degree in Library and Information Sciences at OsloMet.