by Shaun Grub
These days, it's impossible to tell, not the difference between what is and isn't real, but more to the point, to differentiate between that which appears to be masquerading as another false front, and whatever's left (i.e, whatever's actually part of the natural scene). It's not only difficult to tell what's really going on nowadays (unless you separate yourself from whatever shell-guise you happen to prefer strutting down the lanes of Candy Town all dressed up in) but there still persists that nagging question following us around, what the Hell are we even doing here?
Most citicents don't know this, but their souls are already bought and paid for. That's how they manage to rush en masse down concrete city sidewalks while regulated through a synchronized system of traffic light sequences programmed into the hive of a metropolitan complex that's no longer run by an electrical grid, but rather maintained by the plethora of geosynchronous orbiting stations aligned in a super-symmetrical cybernetic shroud of Turing wavelengths interpenetrating at the solar plexus of the world.
The courtesans of industry float in and out of their reserved parking spots in an industrious multi-levelled traditional exercise that could be better described as a modern tesseract dance, but no further developed really than its beginning-to-be antiquated precursor generated by more recent historical episodes (such as presented by the early frontier days of the wild west, for example).
When the connective tissue presented itself by which the mystery could be solved (various petri-dish incantations that had been written for a key sequence in the circumstantial orchestra to be showcased), I was led by a surehanded means from a series of impulses drawn from having begun dabbling in the ongoing software development exercises helping to shape the artificial intelligence algorithms responsible for not just individual requests but for the general approach toward semantics that machine-learning may be bound to take, and shown where to go ahead and try being myself despite potential adverse consequences. Since all possibilities should be explored ahead of time, I took it upon myself to generate various renderings of vital icons I had already determined played an integral role in our developing consciousness. Especially when it comes to documenting impressions of the paranormal. But I digress.
Outpainting in my mind be like "Show me the Guardian of Lollipop Lake surveying the Kingdom of Mushroomland during a Rainbow Thunderstorm in a lightning flash," or some such spontaneous wordplay designed not to stump but rather challenge the AI algorithms. Somewhere along the synthographic mutation of a subvariant following a series of remolded prompts into the next iteration of expression, my eye got caught up in a recurring theme of mirrored similarities I kept seeing pop up with certain sequences of modified variants. Don't try to figure out what I mean, just trust me that I know what I'm talking about.
Since the best art remains a process of elimination, I like the challenge of eliminating the three worse variants, and nevermind the efficacy or lack of what's left; I just use it even to the point of going against my own aesthetic, because more often than not it produces results, yielded from a process whose common denominators cross-reference one another just enough to take hold, like ivy on a trellis, or snowflakes on a cherry tree branch, to name two relatively obtuse examples. Bear with me.
This character was borne of a prompt my wife snuck into my DALL-E 2 account: "A Takashi Murakami character trick or treating in a post-apocalyptic Hellscape."
This variant depicted above happened to come along after many different rendered manifestations. To my mind, this curious character has something to do with a subvariant line of escaped SCPs, and something tells me there may be a programmer whose game got twisted into another reality, courtesy of random interstitial holographic spark induction maneuvers, as in the case where an army of alternate hallway mirror reflections morph toward a different outcome amid the war they are waging, forging a divergent potential line of futures beckoning.
The suggestion implicit in this illustration appears as a singular slash of a lightning stroke split-dividing the possibilities of the Transmission Beams, shown here clearly depicted as being architecturally associated with the folds and division within the Mirror Labyrinth. Our cloaked explorer holding the Lollipop Staff seems to be in the midst of a journey being transported across adjacent realms of wonder grown from the perspective of a seaside meadow where mushrooms flourish on a hillside by a lake with glowing green globules gently hovering in the distance casting their mercurial twinned reflections in the glassy water.
The message in this graphic mystification becomes more evident in the glassine shape of the figure relaxing on the weed infested shoreline (seen in the larger image above), their having gradually taken the shape of river stones, exemplary of the way time can creep up on the best of us, while we're admiring the gleams of the sun upon the surface of a river or pond we happen upon one fine day.
Of course, every day remains that "one fine day" we may happen to stumble onto a body of water with the sun or moonlight reflecting off its surface in wavery suggestions of the evolution of stones. It's just a reminder we should all be more prepared to take on unexpected guests. Bear with me as my mind makes a series of small leaps, not unlike the sequence of hops that flat stones make when skipped across the surface of a still pond.
There has been zero information on the name or possible whereabouts of this creature, and how it relates to the SCP SERIES 21-77-12 anomaly last spotted in a remote dada club in the Netherlands.
Their swirling "Lollipop Cane" seems to me to indicate a sort of transmitting antenna, I mean by now it could be anything if you stop and think about it for a second. Maybe it's an interdimensional vortex cane, I don't know. But my mind's set on finding out, the only way I know how to. And that's by continually adding up the clues provided courtesy of this ongoing rush of synthographic emulations churning from computer monitors across the world. I take a momentary break and crack my knuckles as I wait for the next onrush of variants to come.
