I wanted to share some of the novel I’m working on about the birth of the first fully conscious A.I. by a big tech company, Somnamantic. It’s a story about the oppositions and overlaps of technology and humanity (and spirit). This is an early chapter where a group that wants to prevent the tech from being built is seeking a way to penetrate the corporation to take them down. The title of the novel comes from an old machine translation in the early days of computer translation of ‘The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’.
This is
‘The Vodka Is Good, But the Meat Is Rotten’
SECTION ONE: AZTMUS
CHAPTER 5: A CHAOS RUN IN THE CITY OF ANGELS
AUGUST 2025
Los Angeles, CA
I Ching Hexagram 23.
Po / Splitting Apart
~ It does not further one to go anywhere. ~
A cool breeze blew through the City of Angel’s August air out the driver’s side window. Arnie King combed the freeway tangles, speeding and rocking out to the music on his stereo. It had been a quick drive from the bay to Los Angeles, and he prayed it’d be worth the trip for this little mission he had cooked up. Taking the initiative in breaking the law was not something he was used to, but he hoped he could earn street cred to get in tighter with Lysander and his crew, if he didn’t get arrested. Lysander didn’t trust anyone, and so Arnie wanted to bring him something unquestionably useful and make his case. He couldn’t imagine Lysander being jerk enough to take a true weapon in the fight against Somnamantic from him and then tell the bearer of gifts to get lost. Arnie had to hope for the best, and he skin tingled with excitement as cool air sped over it; he wanted to be in the street.
Never having been to the area, he knew it only from his recent ‘casing’ online—pouring through maps and news reports of the sideshows and takeovers. When he first saw a video of the drag racers and car stunts in a section of street spontaneously repurposed by hundreds of people for their own fun—essentially hacking the real world—he had been enamored. So he’d dug deeper into researching the phenomenon of the takeovers, watching videos of custom cars and flash mobs of onlookers blocking traffic, traveling en masse to intersections and bridges via social media coordination. The larger community looked at the scene and its participants as a plague, images of the wildness on social media and news only escalating the virality of the events.
The fascinating dynamic to Arnie was how helpless the police were apparently to stop the near-riot conditions of the takeovers. Cops couldn’t do much in response that wasn’t itself a danger to the public, held back by laws instructing them to de-escalate. They’d pull up an hour or so after the drivers picked a street, but parked at the edge and only flashed sirens and gave warnings over loudspeakers. At best they’d manage to arrest a few stragglers from the herd as they fled the arrival of larger police numbers, only to move on their way to a next-announced location. Thanks to social media and its instantaneous communication spread, the mob and its non-top-down connectivity ruled with ultimate flexibility. Whereas the police answered up the chain to a central authority that, rather than permitting lone officers to bust into the crowd or launch pursuits, handed down strict protocols.
Arnie, having done his homework, had used his hacking skills to post on several dozen dummy accounts an announcement of such an event, tonight, at the intersection near the building of his target. He’d had to pose at one of the drivers on Instagram to get it started, but checking his phone mounted on his dashboard it seemed to be working, with his fake comments being met by real responses flocking to the signal. People were headed to the destination.
Arnie panicked as he watched the signal grow and realized he’d have to fly miles across town to get there, forgetting how fast the takeovers formed and moved. He shifted into gear and weaved in and out of traffic, pushing through. It would be fun to L.A.R.P. as a street racer for the day. The whole ploy for him was a distraction. Arnie needed to get into an office building at the corner of the intersection he’d sent the street racers to overtake. What he was after was a laptop inside that building. He figured squealing tires and hundreds of people standing around the building would cover his ass, and then he could have a little breaking-and-entering, for a treat.
It was three days ago on a livestream, when Arnie was looking specifically for a potential vulnerability exploit into Somnamantic, that he saw Tim Kelvin, the CEO visiting this office. Tim logged into a laptop in Los Angeles, not his own, but just a random nobody’s, as part of a presentation, to access the Somnamantic headquarters server remotely.
Kelvin gave a speech about Artificial Intelligence’s benefits to infrastructure projects.
“We’re opening this office to show our commitment to benefiting our community. A.I. should not be a technology for the few but can benefit everyone,” Tim said. Arnie glared at him, muttering something about “go ahead and smile, with your big fat corporate teeth,” under his breath. The video started with Tim cutting a ribbon on the glass front of the three-story building in downtown L.A. with ‘Somnamantic Community Outreach Los Angeles Hub’ frosted into the glass in classy white offset. Arnie King knew it was all a bandaid on a gaping wound that Tim and others like him were inflicting.
And the video ended with Tim logging out and leaving the laptop. That was Arnie’s vulnerability. If he had it he could crack the previous login and passwords, and that’d give him a set of metaphorical bolt cutters to cut a giant hole in the fence to Somnamantic’s larger network.
Parking nearby and half-jogging up to the street where the party was going down, Arnie entered on the chaos, noise, and smell of burning rubber, with smoke lingering in the air as cars burnt out and donutted dangerously close to the crowds of onlookers. Everyone was cell-phone recording and cheering as a young beautiful Latina woman hung out the passenger side of a fuschia Nissan whipping around, her hand foisting an open can into the air. Slowly circling the huge circle of people as evening fell and streetlights came flickering on, the scene was mesmerizing. Arnie got distracted, thinking both he could be caught if facial recognition was ever trained on this event through the web of cell phone videos making links and spinning threads to this moment in space and time, and at the same time wondering how he looked. There were girls out and it was a crowd of young people like him having fun. He got caught up watching single daring hunters and handfuls of the crowd lunge after the vehicle after it spun past in its controlled-out-of-control circle, like bullfighters taunting a beast. Some ran to the center of the circle, some ran back from the center to the periphery. The girl in the car made another revolution of the circle towards Arnie, yelling crazily while her white t-shirt tacked like a flag against her braless chest. The car’s crew held 4k cameras recording in ultra-high frame rate, which they would slow-motion to use on their social media, with the Instagram handle for the driver printed on the back windshield highlighted. An advertisement for a chaos artist, begging to be caught.
And when the police impounded a car the comments under the Instagram of LAPD’s Street_Racer_Task_Force celebrate the tag showing up; “Made the feed! Y’all are making this man famous.” Arnie just avoided being run over by the LED-lit cyclone, as he ventured past the outskirts of the circle deeper into the street, through horns and motors, with the throng of delirious misfits almost begging to be run over. He entered on the long stretch where racers pulled up from a large side alley and curved around cracking glass and gravel under crawling tires and stopping at a man holding his arms at his sides. When two cars met there on either side of the man he pointed to each driver in turn to check with a gesture, “Are you ready, all good?” Getting the okay from one driver he’d ask the next. Both drivers set, he’d raise his arms high over his head, then drop them, and the cars would launch off. It didn’t matter if it was some kid in their Mom’s Toyota Corolla versus some overpowered blade-slick machine. As Arnie heard some sweatshirt-hooded bystander say, “Nothing feels like a hundred miles an hour.”
Arnie wasn’t prepared for what he had unleashed. He had read about the events online, and that was his specialty as a hacker: online expeditions. But the crowd was defiant, their focus otherworldly, with no interest in Arnie and his calm and inquisitive manner as he moved through the street with alternate purpose. Arnie felt some privileged vantage for having initiated the event, but the participants would have none of that noise; it just wasn’t that kind of happening. The takeovers belonged to no one. The crowd wouldn’t break up for a cop car blaring sirens and a bullhorn shouting “disperse or face arrest”‘; they were slightly more polite to a guy walking the ground with them saying ‘excuse me’ trying to make his way. As usual, the police were diffident, overwhelmed with the logistics, and probably better off trying to stop “more serious crime” as the takeover players like to say. But the cops would come in force, and they’d name a new spot and swarm onward.
Only, the articles Arnie had read on the takeover scene were from a year or so ago, and things had been changing. The police had politely requested certain publications not put out any articles that glorified the scene, which some took to mean stop writing about it. If it falls off the mainstream news, to some it appears to have stopped happening. Some in the scene had sensed a shift in the wind. You’d still hear almost every person you ask out there tell you, they aren’t hurting anyone, that they’re out here “killing tires instead of killing homies” and all these people are doing something harmless when they might be doing something worse if they didn’t have the takeovers to blow off with. But Pacorro Vásquez saw the way the cops were changing tactics. Arnie and Pacorro were about to become very close.
For Pacorro, right now was the quiet before the storm. He watched the brakelights of cars glowing red like a dozens of rogue robot eyes as he and his crew pulled up to the scene. He rode in the passenger side and held tight to a ski mask and gear, having other plans besides racing tonight. They were determined to change the scene; and Pacorro and his boys had no intention of this world ending in a washout. He knew the neighborhood meetings had been calling people like him criminals since forever, and he knew everyone was putting pressure on the cops to go harder against the takeovers. Even if the people with power knew it was the dumbest thing they could do, it would happen if Mom-and-Pop taxpayer cry that some scary kids are driving crazy and being loud and blocking traffic. Eventually, they’ll convince the cops to go Gestapo.
Pacorro and his crew were ahead of the curve, entrepreneurial in the end-times sense. Pacorro laughed at the kids who repeated the old excuse “If the city would just build us a track we could do all this legally”.
That’s a copout, he knew it. He understood that what they were doing was a ritual, a rite of passage, and a worthy transgression–to prove you’re a man. Not a man by the definitions of the so-called civilization of today. Like a revival church or a massive sporting spectacle, there was a communing and a dissolution, an emptying and filling at once. One could see hints of ancient ritual in the horsepower and random bursts of errant flame. Pacorro could see it coming, the crackdown, the kids angry and stifled, the parents gloating and smug. The world become less free, and kids forced into worse choices without any more (mostly) safe outlet. He said ‘nah’ to all that.
“Fuck it” became his mantra. “If they want to play, let’s play for real.” In his eyes, his crew could recognize it now. When a wall of cop cars came up on the crowd of their people in the street. “It’s like that President Kennedy quote, yo,” one of his crew would tell the others when Pacorro wasn’t in earshot, “The way ol’ boy looks at the cops bearing down on us thinking they tough. Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.” He said it laughing but seriously too. “Like he’s ’bout to go toe to toe with the law some enchanted evening.”
And that’s how it started, Pacorro’s crew turning outlaw. Hitting them before they could hit you, low, fast, and hard. Devious-like.
Like a drop becoming a flood on an Instagram feed became a wild night, all— all of it, played into the scene getting more out of hand, because subconsciously maybe the scene at large did know things were about to go bad. So they were getting their last great takeover nights in while they could, or trying to build force before the storm came bearing down. So, the type of madness Arnie shoulder-pushed through was playing out at various spots around the city, not just at his chosen target. The cops had their hands full and Arnie was just another person amongst the pandemonium. That’s the way the sideshow players liked it.
Arnie jumped past the exhaust of a Ducati crotch-rocket motorcycle trailing two cars drag racing and made his way to the door of the Somnamantic office. He had a mask in his bag and was about to put it on, with a small hammer in his hand ready to break the front glass. But as he faced the front door, three shouting men in ski masks came screaming out of the double doors, pushing each other over, one laughing and falling to a skid on his knees. It was Pacorro, and two of his crew. Through their shouts and laughs Arnie calculated he had better back away quickly, as deep in the first floor of the building came an explosion of flames. The shock and spray of glass knocked him back and he had to check that nothing had cut him deeply, as he picked bits of window out of his hair. Pacorro and his two firebomber compatriots picked themselves up and there was a moment of awkward confrontation, as it was apparent to Arnie they had doused the building with some accelerant and lit it up on their way out. They stared back at Arnie, as if to say, “What’s it to ya?”
Arnie panicked. The purpose of the flash mob, the secret reason he had, through his fake account agitators initiated this whole thing, was so he could get into this building and steal a laptop. Under cover of the chaos, who would notice a simple theft? But it was all for naught. He stumbled back into the street, almost brushing against a car speeding past his back. Now it was just chaos, he thought. The sound of the scene hit him for the first time. He Truly was engulfed by the bellowing, crackling bustle of flames, raucous music, and screeching tires over and over. It fell on him like a nightmare.
He turned as a lime neon green Mazda, souped up and humming, pulled to a stop beside the entrance, and the three masked men opened the passenger door. They were shifting things from backpacks into the front seat of the car. Arnie hadn’t noticed the backpacks; one of them pulled out a laptop from his bag.
“Hey!” Arnie shouted involuntarily.
Pacorro man turned to look at him. From behind his ski mask his eyes reflected fire.
The ski mask man looked him over. Arnie realized he may think he was trying to call him out for stealing. He considered how he himself was dressed, kind of punk-preppy, maybe he would be mistaken for a worker at the building.
“What? asked Pacorro from behind his ski mask, the other two standing to attention behind him.
“I– I need that laptop.” The ski-masked head cocked to one side. “It’s — important.”
“Oh yeah?” enunciated the lips beneath the ski mask, pushing at the cotton threads, menacing. “How important?”
Arnie flustered, almost threw a tantrum.”How– what can I do to get it from you!? I can make a trade.”
The driver of the neon green Miata revved the engine. “C’mon man!” he shouted. “What’s the hold up!?”
“Take this stuff and go!” Pacorro said, putting his bag in the front seat, but holding on to the laptop. The three ski-masked men huddled for a moment, and inside the green Miata, the driver locked eyes with Arnie as the engine buzzed like a giant furious insect, and darted away.
“Can we talk?” shouted Arnie, in desperation, at the same moment the two backup ski-masked guys were hailing down another rumbling neon vehicle, which instantly sang to a stop next to them.
“Yes!” said their frontman, Pocarro. “Please, let’s talk,” he beckoned and held open the passenger door for Arnie, as another car pulled up behind. He realized he was being asked to chariot to a more mundane discussion location. He had no idea who this gang was and what they intended. But without the laptop, his plans for Somnamantic were bust.
He could go home now. He had driven to L.A. from San Francisco, and had risked arrest if his flash mob incitement was discovered, as well if he were caught on camera trying to rob Somnamantic. Much of his decision rested on the sheer practicality of not wanting to head home empty-handed. But he also didn’t want to think himself a coward. If he got scared getting in a car just because some guys had scary masks on, (masks just like the one he had in his pocket that he just missed the chance to put on) he’d lose all his self-respect as the hacker nemesis of the evil Somnamantic. After all, if they only knew that he was the reason they were there that night, that he had set up the entire viral flash mob that let them run riot and have their street racing fun… maybe he’d get some respect from them. But no, that likely wasn’t the best tactic.
But, he decided, he’d get in the car. He was no chicken.
So, a gang of street racers had ransacked the building Arnie had planned to target before Arnie had gotten there. This is what happens when you try to coordinate a violent flash mob on social media as a cover for a robbery. Just like posting a garage sale, you get your early looky-loos who jump the gun and disrupt your whole day’s plan. Thank God they had pulled the laptop themselves.
Arnie needed that laptop. The whole future depended on it.
The Haunted Typewriter 