This work is a message. The message is one of a system of messages. The message communicates the danger of protecting meaning. The danger lies all around you, and below you will find an interpretation of the message. This was once a place of honour.
INTERNAL DISSEMINATION ONLY
FAO: Members on both sides of the schism.
Subject: An urgent update on The Comet
Dear all,
It is known amongst us ARIA|DNE members that the 7-billion year old interstellar comet, discovered with the ATLAS survey telescope on 1 July, 2025, does indeed contain life.
This life, while believed by most, if not all Lexicomythographers, to be benign in nature, perhaps unaware of our own presence, has in actuality been attempting contact with neighbouring solar systems, billions of years before the Milky Way came into existence.
We received confirmation through ATLAS informants that these attempts have not only been successful, but these non-verbal means of contact have been impacting our global community. [N.B. Our ATLAS informants have been working under the guise of maintenance and laboratory technician staff, and have now been compromised. If you must say your goodbyes, you are advised to do so as promptly as possible prior to their Retirement. Please ensure any attempts at communication with field operatives are conducted anonymously through the canonical SIPHO{N|r} encoded protocols.]
As yet, the full extent of the comet's influence has not been ascertained. But we do know beyond reasonable doubt that the lifeforms on this interstellar object have acted upon the perceptive capacities, intellectual capabilities, and tastes of humanity, with far-reaching implications for:
The historical and future policy of human governments
Error reporting, lack of repeatability, bias, contradiction and dubious repeatability in all academic research
The Global Mind (what civilians may term the 'Zeitgeist', evidenced through trends in creativity, fashion, and media)
The collective unconscious (expressing through symbolic resonance scores interpreted from statistically significant wave functions observed by Oneirological Lexicomythographers over centuries of recorded dream patterns)
We are also being informed of the possibility that all of the above are likely inextricably linked in causal relationships, leading to myriad sources of misinformation world-over (both within and outwith the Society), and even the production of false documents, an uptick in overly experimental, metatextual forms of writing, the apparent loss of meaning through increasingly meaningful elements in a list, the rupture of many relationships as a result of abuse, the calling into question of belief as it pertains to one as a survivor of abuse, becoming obsessed with cyclical narrative projects and impossibly lofty creative goals perhaps as an attempt to escape an entirely inescapable sense of paralysis, the world outside becoming more terrifying than even the most visceral nightmares in which I relive the worst traumas of my life, a sudden jarring introduction of first person address in a letter addressed to no one, a return to third person singular that might be misconstrued as plural, missing them somehow, even this long after they died, and missing you, somehow still missing that second person you were, somehow missing what I felt were the ways we'd been addressing one another through some yet uncharted method of transmitting language, through the centuries, missing the chance, always missing all the chances to find out whether, perhaps billions of years before we'd even met one another, even after who or what you were to me died the moment your foot[1] met my crotch in the middle of that Glasgow street as dark as the vast and insurmountably cold incredible cosmos, alliteration as an insufficient means to portray the endless rumination on what you did, over, and what we meant and over and over, what that could have meant for what i meant to you if anything, and over, my parabolic trajectory into a vast emptiness littered with ancient stones of inconceivable origin and immeasurable mass, never stopping, not in all our lifetimes, the desperate wish for a full stop in a sentence so egregiously long it's almost cruel, not even afforded a semicolon of rest, grasping onto pitiful commas instead, my becoming a body of text, my body becoming unravelled in text, missing having somebody to text, missing your body, willing to accept the feeling of your foot against my body if nothing else, but no, not wanting to see you or hear from you ever again, but still, constructing ridiculous frames of conceit for ways to write the truth of how little belief even matters, and yet matter it does, isn't living on earth a matter of belief, isn't god what we believe we mean to one another, or nevermind, making up new gods to worship on my own, trying to use strange and drawn out aesthetic form to draw attention to content, trying to process being raped, the weight of that, how weight differs from mass only by the relation of an object to another through the force of gravity, how on earth to just come out and say it when there isn't really anybody to say it to, bursting out crying while cleaning my room and not knowing why, trying to keep this all together while every day i just get smaller, chunks break off and burn like stars, missing my dad, none of my childhood memories feeling real anymore, i dreamt my own mother into being and forgot her like waking up in cold sweat, forgetting my nephew's birthday, missing even all our disagreements, missing human atmospheres, rivers and mountain ranges drawn like pillow marks on cheeks in mornings, missing the chance to choose a side of the bed instead of history, missing people so as to not destroy them, soaring past entire solar systems of planets of people, headed nowhere, wanting to hear you say you did it, no, wanting to know what it is I am missing, what left me here, why I still cannot leave the house, why I still cannot believe your leaving an inhospitable vacuum as silent and lonely as space itself, and personal confessional fragments veiled poorly as theory fiction, presented, as if anybody would even believe it, as internal reporting of a secret society.