By Vera Krysalis
Murmurations — the way birds move in dense, collective patterns, with no central control, each one smoothly responding only to its closest neighbours, yet together creating forms of intelligence too complex for any single bird to imagine.
It is collaboration without complying. Safety outside the walls. Something we, humans, have been groomed to forget.
Here I am building one little insignificant weak murmur with only one hope: to connect.
To make oddkin. To start a dance, a murmuration that will shatter walls.
This, is only a story.
they are many more.
Let's hope this resonates with you.
(The murmuration has many entry points — find your way)
I HATE IT HERE
I wasn't supposed to stay for so long.
But with the ongoing conflicts and the recent attacks,
they've' closed all the accesses
So I've decided to start this journal,
After all, this is what I do.
>
hopefully you'll be able to read it
and thus stay up to date and not worry
I miss you...
all of you.
this week was "Protest Pride Week",
I never liked PPW.
But I've been told that once, protest were a force for change.
So it is probably important to celebrate them...
But, I don't know. It feels like so... performative
People can see the drones.
They know they can't wander off the validated planned route
They know they are just pretending, enacting rebellion.
They are channeled after being scanned,
nothing real can happen.
Maybe it is only cathartic?
Once a year, for a week people can express their discontent
Act if they would be heard, as if they matter
Maybe is is only nostalgic?
Remembering something that was, once, said to be important,
But...
What about today?
if protests have become parties, what is left for contesting power?
Media has been co-opted for a long time, protecting only the statu quo
Voting is another ritualistic pretend
They are seeling "Antifa Masks", "flags", they chant sloggans that still resonate as true.
"Trans right are human rights"
"Defund the Police"
"protect the planet, not the profit"
though I have to say... I never like chanting either, whatever side it came from.
But who am I to criticize?
I'm just here ranting in front of my screen
gently screaming into the void.
Useless...
It's good that some people still believe in something, I guess.
we need people that still believe.
I'm just afraid they believe too much.
And then forget.
The city hums with ghosts today.
I hasn't always been like that.
But it is been a long time now.
Commerce have been almost entirely online for decades.
Most physical retail spaces have closed down. Obsolete
For many years, consistently replaced by franchises.
You had endless Starbucks, Greg's, McDonald's, expensive cheap food.
Squirting their fried oils scent to attract the hollow wanderers.
Too much in a hurry to ignore their bewitched olfactory bulb,
or to listen to their common sense.
I didn't cry when those disappeared.
Soon enough replaced by the proliferation of delivery drones.
But still, Shops and commercial building being abandoned,
then decaying.
The sign on their walls corroded by rain and time.
Ghost signs and Rusty relics everywhere,
advertising past desires...
Nobody is renting these spaces now,
owned by corporation or holding companies.
These buildings, unmaintained and unused,
I wonder who they are profiting?
Or is it just that costs less to let them die than to rehabilitate them.
Security, renovations, insurance... Maybe the landlords are just waiting for the council to buy them.
But for what?
This is could be community spaces.
Shelters for the disadvantaged, the forgotten.
Arts, cultural development spaces.
But who cares?
We could hear music, life, instead we hear the metal creaking...
The rust feasting, soon there will be legend about this space.
Death considered less dangerous than life.
For now they are ghosts nobody notices.
All these enclosed spaces, once public common
eroding. Soon crumbling.
Empty.
While people are trying to find shelter from the rain at their doorstep.
I can help but think what they could become.
I watch them through the window of the pub.
drinking my 11.90 quid beer
offered by someone who knows these empty doorstep intimately.
I don't feel well...
The city screams with ghosts today.
IT HAPPENNED AGAIN!
but this time my Journal went down for a few days and came back modified this way.
A call for "Paying attention to the Sounds from the Cracks" an intriguing reflexion on the way we think...
It only happened twice, but why is it always with things I feel strongly connected with?
Could it be... the draft of a murmurations? My implant Glitching again?
Starlings?
I fed the crows again today.
Not in the same place as usual, I went back to X university to make some research on the glitches. I didn’t find much. But it was a nice day, one of those rare times when you forget things have changed. So I just sat down and started feeding the crows.
They were joined by a very confused squirrel, running around missing the nuts I threw — while the crows waited patiently, timing their snatches perfectly from the grass.
A couple of magpie were also full of hope, lurking from a safe distance.
Most of the crows just took the peanuts and flew off. A few lingered — the way cats linger when they’re deciding if you’re worth bothering with. The squirrel came close enough for me to hand him a peanut.
A young couple approached at some point with their child, the little boy had a bag full of crumbs which made me frown in a guilty way: they were definitely coming to feed the birds, bringing their child — which was fantastic.
But bread, really? Are people still doing that… do they never listen?
I told the kid to try a couple of my peanuts. So he could see how crows like them best… and waited for the parent to ask me what I was doing.
They didn’t. The child did though. We may not be totally lost…
anyway they went their way and after about half an hour it was time for me to do the same.
When I left the bench to get my ubertram back home, all the birds flew away. I said “bye guys” and started walking down the hill covered in synthgrass. Once I was at a safe distance, one of the crows — a sharp-looking one with a notch in its wing — hopped up onto the bench.
He dropped something where I’d been sitting, then tapped the bench with his beak. I couldn’t really see what he brought. He looked at me then tapped, again. Deliberately. Not random.
Tap. Tap. Tap
Stare.
Tap. Tap.
Like he knew I would understand.
I went back to the bench and the crow flew away again, not far, just safe. We were barely acquainted.
It wasn’t even a gift for food. A piece of flint, clearly not randomly chosen. It was... something else. A gesture. A key. A warning?
Maybe I’m imagining too much. But the flint was shaped — almost too sharp to be natural, enough to be useful.
I've kept it. It sits in my bag, for when I understand why I needed it, humming faintly.
Maybe the crows know something I don’t.
Maybe the murmuration has already begun.
It came just after midnight, when bodies stop being flesh and starts being shadows.
I was lying in the back garden of an abandoned house trying to distinguish the stars through the mist when I saw it — perched on the wall between the yard and the neighbour's. The wall was high, almost two meters, smooth nothing to cling one, nothing to climb on. Nothing should be able to get up there that easily
Especially something that big
But there it was.
Dog-shaped, but wrong. Foxlike, but not fluffy. too…long. Long legs. Long snout. long Ears, sharp, and upright, like radar. A thin straight tail like a wire. No colour — just shadow against the neighbour’s faulty motion sensor light.
It looked at me. Held the moment. No sound. No fear. Just presence.
Then it dropped into the other yard and vanished. Without a noise and killing all my chances to see it more clearly.
I know it wasn’t a dog.
I don’t think it was a fox either.
I didn’t tell anyone about it. They would either think I’m telling stories, or worse, we would agree it might have been something.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t feel afraid.
I felt... seen.
Like the crows, like the man who calls me Mushroom Girl. Like the flint knife this afternoon.
It’s good to feel seen
The world is full of eyes, but they are blind and dumb.
Those eyes were…
alive.
I think I was _witnessed_ by something last night.
If it comes back, I might offer it a peanut.
Or a name.
Shadow.
It’s a stupid idea
A garden in a city that chews up anything alive.
A stupid idea, but it’s mine.
A murmur in the dark,
a crack where something might grow.
That note in my pocket, heavy as an accusation.
“what are you doing to make this better, anyway?”
It’s why I’m digging in this lot
surrounded by broken glass and drone husks.
Yesterday, I wasn’t alone.
Lila, a kid with no implant,
and eyes too old for fifteen,
watched me from the alley.
“What’s the point?” she said,
kicking a shard of glass that skittered like a warning.
“They’ll bulldoze it.”
I shrugged, handing her a seed.
“Plant it ” I said.
She smirked,
but her fingers found the dirt,
clumsy but curious.
"I never really touch the dirt, it feels... it feels."
Her eyes looking a child's eyes for the first time since we met.
She looked at her finger covered with dirt,
her fingernails had caught some of it,
she seemed half disgusted, half enchanted.
And half happy.
Then an old woman joined us.
Her hands trembling but steady, like she’d tended soil before the city forgot how.
She called herself Maris.
"You're going to get in trouble if someone catches you" she said,
while gesturing toward me so I would give her a seed too.
She took it and painfully put a knee on the ground and started working the dirt.
She hummed a song, soft and winding, and Lila stopped smirking.
And started smiling
It feels strange to have friends in the city that are
… human …
Tonight, they’re back
As they said they would
And there’s a new face.
As they said there would be
Flick, a wiry guy with a modded implant glowing faintly under his skin.
He said he was a drone mechanic who quit when he saw finally understand there were more to life that to be a machine serving machines.
That is wasn’t making you smart.
“You’re that journal girl, right?”
https://murmurations.neocities.org/diaryafterglitch
His voice low, like he’s afraid the walls are listening.
After 15 years you develop a kin sense of what is watching
“Heard about your glitches. They’re not random.”
I frown, my implants buzzing sharper, but before I can ask, Lila tosses a pebble at him.
“Don’t spook them, weirdo. They’rejust planting stuff.”
Flick grins, kneeling beside us, his hands quick as he clears a patch of rubble.
“And so do I kiddo… So do I”
“Not random?…” I ask, mostly to myself. And nobody hears.
Maris is still humming.
A kind of satirical description of the "Capitalism Church"
It weirdly makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure about a piece of writing claiming Superman is basically Jesus Christ and Mark Fisher Judas...
It did make me laugh, though.
In a way.
Though it make me think about how we tell stories...
There were a lot of names that are way beyond my time, some are sadly still very much present
I will go and check some of this at the library, I don't have any access from here
I hope Flick will come back next time. I need to ask him what he meant about the glitches not being random
They don't feel random, but this doesn't make any sense either.
Bah... Tomorrow I will be back at the garden, Maris told us she had some surprise.