Flash: Molten

In the flickering neon of Kalakaua Avenue, just past midnight, the air is thick, humid with exhausted anticipation and the scent of fried street food. The hawkers in the parking lot clear out. The tourists have dispersed, leaving behind their residue — a stray child’s slipper, plastic cups piled with filled with colors of shaved ice, and the stench of sweat of a forgotten neck towel draped over a framing fence rail. 

Beneath the pulsating street lamps, he stands looking through a garbage bag for left-overs — a figure of shadows and indistinct edges. His name is long lost, scattered like sand grains and dust from the mauka trades. He is a network of energy, a flickering signal caught between transmission and interference, a thing barely limiting itself within a skinsuit that twitches and glistens under the soft orange over head haze.

He drifts down the alleyways behind the old Moana Surfrider, where the stray cats gather and hiss at invisible things. His feet slap the pavement rhythmically, a dull wet sound that resonates into the distant, continuous hum of traffic — and something else, something deep beneath, like the gurgle of a subterranean stream. 

He stops in front of a boarded-up surf shop, its paint peeling in long strips like the flayed skin of some wounded hunted animal. He reaches out, his fingers tracing the rough wood, splinters bury themselves beneath his nails. The pain is exquisite, a sharp line that cuts through, a reminder of something once called a body. But that is a memory he no longer needs. 

The skin on his arms ripples, smooths out. The fingers stretch and bend, bending in ways they shouldn’t, reshaping themselves into something new. His mouth moves without sound, practicing the shapes of forgotten words. Then it settles into a half-smile, and his body begins to melt, limbs collapsing inward as though drawn by some invisible force. His bones liquefy into a warm gelatin, and his skin follows, sagging and pooling onto the pavement. 

The asphalt sizzles. There is a faint smell of burnt hair, then sulfur. His face is still there, floating on the surface, just a face with nothing behind it, only a mask stretched over boiling plasma. A grin now spreads across the surface, and the mouth — if it can still be called that — begins to move.

The words are garbled, half-formed things, pieces of sound pulled from a thousand memories that are not his. He speaks of places he's never been, names that were never his, lovers he never touched, crimes he never committed. He is channeling everything at once, a vast flow of everyone and everything that has been and will be. He is past record, present desire, future potential surging through the thin membrane of this fluid form. 

The city's network hums louder, as if responding. The streetlights above flicker, then blink out one by one, as if devoured by this mouth. Shadows stretch, thin, and warp, reaching toward the shapeless mass that once had a name. Somewhere far away, a siren begins to wail, but it is distant, irrelevant — an echo from another world.

He — or it — begins to move again, no longer walking but flowing, a viscous substance pouring through the cracks in the pavement, through the city’s subterranean veins. He tendrils into the storm drain, slithering through the darkness, feeling the cool metal walls kiss against his warm, fluid skin, if it could still be called skin. He moves like the lava that formed this place through the arteries beneath in drips of rhythmic time.

Down here, the rules change. Down here, he becomes what he always was a plane of immanence, of pure potentiality. No longer restricted by bone and muscle, he spreads out, thinness reaching into cracks, into forgotten spaces. He merges with the pipes, feels the thrum of electricity surging through wires, feels his being stretch into everything.

His consciousness, if it can still be called that, expands, touches the circuitry of a hundred hotel elevators, the flickering screens of a thousand smartphones, the surveillance cameras that blink on every corner. He is everything and nothing, an assemblage without center, without hierarchy, without purpose beyond the relentless drive to connect, to expand, to flow.

He feels the presence of others — ghosts like himself, bodies without parts, surging, dissolving into currents of data and desire, blending into the nameless tide. They reach out, welcoming him, seeking him, touching him with liquid thought, and together they merge, becoming something larger, a swarm, a buzzing multiplicity that hums with infinite possibilities. 

Above, the island tries to sleep, unaware of the molten thing that pulses beneath it, the shifting, flowing bodies that resist form, resist function, resist everything but the pure, ecstatic drive of becoming. The waves crash against the shore, indifferent, clueless to the hidden dance below, a dance without rhythm, without end, without form.

And somewhere, deep within the core of this undulating, molten thing, his face floats again to the surface for a moment — just a face, no organs, no history, nothing else. It grins, then dissolves into a burst of sudden static, a final electric sigh that echoes through the city’s darkened veins before the light blink out forever.

// Zero Strike