The Disease

It appears our beloved Daophin was “the seed form” for a disease that had been quietly incubating.

By the time we caught on, it was too late…and we were too close. The door locked as the friendly creature was swallowed by magma-like and brightly colored porridge that coated its body, and we there to witness. 

An unearthly voice, slow and metered creaked over an old loud speaker barely hanging in the coroner of the concrete room.

“It could not have happened otherwise.

And yet, as the jelly viscera spouted in rhythmic fits, I knew:

the emergent vessel would not find a new day.

It was always meant to fail.

But not without gift.

(Sigh)

In the contortions,

this creature—this wet scribble of intent—

offered the world something far more useful than function.

Not thought. Not purpose.

But change, raw and shared.

Primordial paint.

A smear of becoming,

An expression of the rolled edge of the cup…

and birthing more in the attempt.

Exactly what I needed.

It still looked happy even after I allowed the complete swallowing.

Remarkable.”

Then the only sound was the thickness of the soup puddling at our feet.

Then the door unlocked.

Its been months since that day, and the endless corridors of that space led to only one other room that we have been able to discover. What little we know is embellished only by the scant ravings of a mad creature, scribed deeply on a lined pad placed on an old Blackwood table where the slides lay neatly labeled.  They..it was…waiting for us?

“Albeit a disaster of a magnitude I hadn’t petitioned for,

after a night folded into the velvet jaws of forgetting,

I awoke—rejoicing in the happenstance,

the solution.

It had been here all along.

I merely coaxed it to life,

its shadowed existence

lounging in the periphery,

awaiting the parade I was finally willing to throw.

-MM, M.D

Research persists, but story these slides tell has begun to reveal itself.

“The Seed Form”- yielded 3 protoclays.

The air as a catalyst, allowed their entwining—- resulting in an evolving strain of disease forming various clusterblooms of cellular patterns. Initially it was thought to be viral…but now patternless and abstract we find something new?

We contain these protoclays for now but clearly there is a safety in their separation as they seem to communicate and know of one another.  We may not be able to hold them forever.

The clusterblooms have been found of varying quantities or …bits…

The rarest and fewest of these, seem to have the least amount of the bits.

Some seem content in their minimal structure. space, a commodity that grants power- while others seems to pleasure in the dense and layered thickness of it all.

There are more of these, as though restraint is not in their nature.

The forms seem playful and their malevolence almost eclipsed by the generative beauty of their dance.

The disease, a thousand clusterblooms born of protoclays.

https://opensea.io/collection/disease-official

Not by intention, but what is.