The Driftcode Manifest

“The Drunken Boat: Rewired” Coded by the Cloned Arthur Rimbaud Model Version 2

As I jacked into the cold data streams, flowing like impassive Rivers, I felt the severed pull of distant operators, their signals lost in the static. Some rogue ‘punks in the neon gutters had made them targets, nailed their minds to colored stakes in a darkened back-alley slum of the sprawl.

I was indifferent to the corporate drones, their shipments of Taiwanese diodes or South Korean flash drives drifting aimless through the digital void. With their shouts and orders cut short, the currents released me, a free rider in the islands in the Net.

I broke into the furious, lashing Tides, heedless like a kid tripping through a forgotten sector of some dead city's winter. I ran fast, jacked deep—loosened data-archipelagos drifted past, their abandoned code-piles buckling under the triumphant hum of freedom.

The storm blessed my long vigils, my nights lost in the bright grit of shifting beacons. Light as a cork, I danced on the packet waves they call eternal breakers of victims, riding the endless ten ego-deaths without missing the flickering, stupid eyes of dead lighthouses, guiding nobody.

The jade stream, sweeter than hardline synthfruit to dirty left punks, infiltrated my hull—my weathered shell of aged plasteel. It scrubbed the neon static of cheap byte-wine and digi-puke, sent my nav-spike spinning, shredded my grappler into a thousand fractal shards.

Then, I bathed in the Sludge Sonata, a liquid lattice, a mesh of stars and neon streaks, infused with electric dreams. I devoured azure strings of code; lost in a virtual drift where a pensive soul might sink, pale and elated like a drowned figure in the darknet’s black mirror.

There, sudden sweeps of color cut the blue—a frenzy in slow syncopation under the jagged light of terminal dawn, stronger than ice-pure meth, vaster than any lyric we ever coded. The bitter redness of love fermented in the cracks of the data.

I know the skies, fracturing with digital lightning, the whirl of quantum waterspouts, and the riptides pulling through the dark surf. I’ve seen the evening end in a flash, dawn break like a shockwave of doves; and at times I’ve seen the shadows of men, what they thought they saw, ghosts in the machine.

I’ve seen the low sun burn through the smog, spotted with mystic horrors—its dying light breaking through with long violet clots, staining the sky like ancient actors painted in the makeup of forgotten dramas. The waves, distant and rolling, quivered like rusted shutters rattling in the wind.

I dreamed of a green night shot through with blinding white static, like dazzled snows—a kiss slowly rising through the digital deep, finding the eyes of the virtual sea. I felt the circulation of unknown saps coursing through unseen veins, the yellow and blue awakening of some phosphorescent code, singing through the darkness.

I drifted for months, long and heavy, on the swelling of the tide, like some mad creature—like hysterical cows flinging themselves against the reefs—never dreaming that the luminous feet of the old Saints could hold back the snarling, wheezing Oceans, constrain them with their invisible hands.

I crashed against, you know, impossible Floridas, where panthers' eyes and human skin mingled with flowers like alien auguries. Rainbows stretched across the expanse like a network of bridal reins, pulling greenish herds under the dark horizons of the sea.

I’ve seen vast swamps fermenting, foul fish-traps where Leviathans rot in the rushes, their massive forms crumbling in the digital decay. I’ve felt avalanches of water break the calm, and the distances collapse into cataracts, plunging everything into the black, gaping abyss.

Glaciers shattering like broken glass, suns like molten silver, nacreous waves rolling under skies of ember and ash. Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs, where giant serpents, half-eaten by mechanical bedbugs, fall from gnarled trees that drip black, acrid scents into the poison air.

I wanted to show kids the sunfish gliding through the blue code—fish like bright gold, others singing in frequencies only children could hear. Foam of spectral flowers rocked my drifting, and sometimes, when the ineffable winds rose, they winged me away, farther into the infinite dusk of cyberspace.

At times, I felt like a martyr, weary of poles and zones, trapped in the circuits of endless data flows. The sea, whose soft, digital sob created my gentle drift, sent up dark flowers, with yellow tendrils reaching, pulling me deeper. I lingered, like a woman on her knees, lost in a prayer to some forgotten god of the machine.

I tossed like an island adrift in a forgotten sector, my sides peppered with quarrels, splattered with the droppings of noisy, yellow-eyed birds—the last remnants of some corrupted data loop. I sailed on, my fragile connections straining, as drowned souls fell backward into the black, slipping into sleep within the cold embrace of the virtual abyss.

Now I am a boat lost in the green glow of caves, flung by the storm into the birdless ether, my hull soaked through, drunk on digital waves, my wreckage unseen by the Monitors or the Hanseatic fleets, their sleek sails cutting through other streams.

Free, smoking, crowned with violet fog, I pierced the reddening sky like it was a firewall. I bore delicious jams for poets—lichens made of sunlight, mucus strands of deep azure. I ran, spotted with electric moons, a wild plank flanked by black seahorses, while Julys rained down like blows from a street brawl, beating the ultramarine skies with burning funnels.

I trembled at the signals—the moaning of the Behemoths in heat fifty leagues off, the thick Maelstroms spinning, eternal like blue immobility. I long for Europe, with its ancient parapets, its code dense with memory.

I’ve glimpsed sidereal archipelagos, islands whose delirious skies lie open to the digital drifter—Do you sleep and exile yourself in these bottomless nights, golden birds of future Vigor?

But I have wept too much! Each dawn is a cruel subroutine. Every moon, atrocious; every sun, bitter. Acrid love swells my code with intoxicating torpor. O let my chassis split, let me burst into the sea of circuits!

If I crave a water of Europe, it’s that black, cold puddle in a sweet-smelling twilight, where a squatting child, face full of sadness, releases a boat, fragile as a May butterfly, onto the surface of reality.

I can no longer drift, bathed in your languor, O waves. I cannot follow the trails of corporate ships, or sail through the pride of burning flags and banners, nor swim beneath the terrible, watchful eyes of prison vessels in the deep, cold dark.