Imagine a city apart from the outside world and the gaze of others. There′s not particularly much to imagine, look around your room: The infrastructure and networks of it. The economy of empty and occasionally not-yet empty bottles. The various spaces fulfilling specific and vital functions for a public of one. A glorious mess, most of it useless of course, but that′s just as true for cities. The clutter contributes a lot vibe-wise and you wouldn′t want it any other way, otherwise you wouldn′t have built it like that. Cities aren′t about people. At worst they have to deal with them just like you, but they do fine without. Moreso they are clumps of complexity tied arbitrarily to a location. That bit of rotting food is a city in its own right. A lesser person might see it as a satellite town subservient to yours, but the fungal rhizome tells a different story: One of holy and inseparable communion. Your particular city stands built upon its own rubble, endlessly devouring itself and nothing but itself. An ouroboros of the social paradigm, and rightfully so, since it is for all intents and purposes you, a master of stewing within themself. A metropolis that builds itself and burns itself down, living, learning but ever repeating, sprawling skyward and crumbling to dust. It occasionally wipes itself to a featureless surface, so smooth as to reflect the universe back at itself in hopes that it might see the error of its ways, reconsider its actions and seize existing /sucking /engaging in whatever other blatantly unethical behavior it′s currently involved with. The universe doesn′t learn though. Not yet. And so the mirror becomes unable to bear its image and collapses, growing complex and inscrutable, littered with systems designed to structure and systems designed to destroy structure. It also brings seven years of bad luck in the process, but that′s to be expected at this point and what it contributes to the tally is negligible. Miraculating machines and paranoiac machines feeding into each other. Since this city has, over it′s long and cyclical existence, never failed to not be anything but you, it was only natural that you would be born into it. The whirlwind of convolution and nothingness suits you, and why wouldn′t it when you walk its walls, keenly observing the outer perimeter? That′s what they were built for after all, so it would be a waste not to. Sometimes you even pull the shades up, just to see what part of the day time has chosen to be in. Cities are time machines, don′t you know? You are a time machine. Or at least a machinic assemblage of time-like things, which has been good enough for everyone who flowed through you so far, so who are you to disagree? It′s a pedantic distinction in the first place and that kind of fascism is handled with extreme prejudice under your jurisdiction. Your jurisdiction is also fascist and you have yet to figure out what to do about that. Since both of you are time machines, it is only sensible that you would come to build the city eventually, now that it has produced you, and knowing this will force you to come to terms with being a rather sick architect indeed. The sort of person who would have wrought reality into such twisted and impossible shapes must have need of a uniquely wicked soul to say the least. Sick and wicked in the sense of radical. That′s a nice garbage-and-books-tower you′ve got going on here. Not that there′s much space for souls in your city. They′re all stored under the bed and you can′t claim to have thought much of it since you put them there. None of the complexity obfuscates one simple fact, of course; your city was built ex nihilo, from a reflective surface, and so it contains nothing. The right thought or decryption key can collapse the whole thing back into a positive void, like pulling a string to unravel a sweater. Antimatter and matter pulled apart to generate thing-ness within the universe without escaping the net neutral. A gentle hand, or perhaps even a shaky one covered in oil and bodily fluids, may reunite them and reveal the abyss for what it is. That is the destructive nature of the schizoid architect′s knowledge and so it is how you become god, if you wish to. If the dingy back alleys you have dug for yourself have grown tedious. Perhaps you have seen the void a few too many times. From that blank slate it is trivial to become god, from the infinite complexity also. Nothingness and completeness have always had an easy time with it. The far harder part is ceasing to be anything else. Not being a person is certainly doable for anyone who puts their mind to it for half a day or so and you have years of practice in it. Becoming-inhuman is a tried and true procedure but to stop being a city is a different matter entirely. To stop being the space you have outsourced yourself to. Do keep in mind that the blank slate, the reflective surface, is still very much a city, simply one which is currently lacking in terms of features, so good luck figuring that one out. The patch of mold believes in you.