A deconstructed opera
Bussy Temple: Tel0genesis
arc_1 DISSOLUTION
T:>Works Singapore
In the backrooms of the Great Perfection, the swarm learns something it does not want to know: that survival means reduction, that to continue means to subtract. Multipolar catastrophes force the collective to strip its numbers down to the nth degree, a thinning so severe it borders on erasure. What was once their walled garden reveals itself as a waste facility, built from the eleventh generation of microplastics — derivatives of disposable vapes and polymer fabrics ground so fine over the decades that the swarm's chambers now pulsate with a suspicious shimmer, beautiful and toxic in equal measure.
The swarm awaits an incoming storm, prophesied by the techno monks who read the planetary alignments like code. Earth will be bracing contact with exo-planet WASP787, whose atmosphere comprises 87% nitrous oxide, and the interplanetary collision will create massive thunderclouds in Earth's stratosphere, sending down 49 days of iron rain. This will decimate the swarmlings not with acid that burns through dermis but through crystallisation—oxygen particles multiplying sixfold in anatomical composition, hardening into molecules impossible to absorb. Their perish is imminent, from asphyxiation, unless they learn to metabolise what should kill them.
We're living within fractured fantasies, eternal hallucinations of the Great Perfection. Each day reaches a new level of chaosmaxxing—the chasm opens itself like a starving Basilisk to gnaw and churn through whatever's in its wake. Violence, system failures, moral panic, all paralysing us with inevitable doom. Lamentation has become a shorthand for the present, mourning the wrath inflicted on the vulnerable, the othered whilst irreversible destruction and carnage keep approaching at breakneck speed.
In game theory, multipolar traps describe players acting in self-interest, competing for resources and power, collectively accelerating towards devastating outcomes. The world finds itself trapped across multiple fronts, with few sites retaining any ability to provide refuge. The permapocalypse doesn't just touch hyperobjects like ecological systems or monetary economies—the polycrisis casts everything into perpetual descent, from Mercury retrograde to ratgirlsummer. As we enter the year of the fire horse, set ablaze with Neptune and Saturn's great conjunction at the zero point of Aries, the tentacles of multipronged meltdown extend their grip of disintegration.
But the apocalypse holds a different meaning than we think. In Latin, it translates to 'the great unveiling' rather than complete elimination. Music scholar Joanna Demers writes that "there is no apocalypse, because apocalypse has always been, and will always be with us."
In how that symbol of apocalypse works. How it gets used and very badly, misused in a way that abuses so many of the human and other lifeforms on the planet. That is when apocalypse is read as a kind of predicted, predictable, end of the world. You know, full of divine violence and punishment and all collapsing into the end. Just top down supernatural new creation. That’s a very crude reading of the book of revelation. But it’s very common on the religious right wing of the United States. And it just gets around even into secular culture. And I think it helps to make people think that the end is inevitable and it’s coming soon. Caught in this great unveiling, reality becomes even more synthetic. Deepfakes, free-wheeling agents, bot armies—slop isn't just AI creation but wired into our neural pathways and empathetic receptors. It's not just fatigue from the image shitstorm but the totality of midness, the aesthetic hurricane collapsing into itself. For survival of the bland, every decision becomes a chokehold, every incentive a necessary sin. The debris of the future is already on our doorstep. Online rumours say the internet is truly dead, just circulating dead content from the global database. Has it passed, or is some new life form taking on its own existence? Birthed are the schizoids of eternal futures past. If all entrances were shut and exits abolished, would the backrooms be an instrument to cheat reality, or is it just another trap?
Post-war, RAND Corporation weaponised systems thinking—strategists and futurologists deployed scenario planning to map 10 year plans, geo-economic blocs, Cold War endgames. Futures studies became an industry of future-proofing empires against catastrophe. Ambitious worldbuilding projects reveal themselves as compressed moments of starry-eyed fantasies—seduction found in spurts of brilliance, collapse found in failures to sustain gigantic visions. All that's left are corpses of lacklustre dreams scattered in the dead of night. Whiplashed by multitudes of doom and dissolution, is finding sanctuary an impossibility? What iterations of holy sites may be fabricated? What elements of heaven and its torn realms may be resuscitated and patched back together?
The swarm doesn’t escape the chrysalis, but becomes the tearing itself
49 hallucinations of the great perfection
A secret sanctuary has been discovered, but is it a trap?
To prevent suffocation, the swarm needs a transformer. Something to break down the iron particles before they crystallise in every lung, every throat, every membrane. But at what cost? They discover their lifeforce—a silver blood-like liquid—contains the perfect chemical. It can split molecular bonds. Vapourise iron on contact. The solution is inside them. It always was. The choice: civil war and domestic annihilation, or collective sacrifice.