O que se segue é uma versão expandida e traduzida do texto charada, publicado neste mesmo site. A revisão foi enviada como submissão para uma antologia sobre neurodivergência e o mais-que-humano, organizada pela Posthuman Press.
# You're like a mimic. From those high fantasy stories. You've been bludgeoned enough by the odd rulings of some sort of secret etiquette, but you think you're almost getting there. And you might be. This particular autopoiesis has been gated off to you, I fear, but new techniques of self swim around its outline. A gesture, a mode of action: captured; analyzed; incorporated. A persona emerges, built from thousands of data points. It describes a line -- becomes a vector. Imitated. Like a cowbird egg, serenely laid inside the nest. You've become quite good at this, actually. Your brain is nearly chromatophoric, capable of hacking into the mainframe of conversations most cavernous; horrific; heteronormative. Stand in awe of your creation, your very own Rosetta Stone, monolith of language. Normalcy dictates you should have that codex stamped deep in their cortex already, by factory settings. But you've built airplanes mid-flight before. The first time you moaned "mama", did your coalescing mind know what the words meant? The first time you kissed, did your soul know what it felt to love? At times, you can feel the whirring of large transformer models in your brain, collapsing the poetry of the world into something you can see: bluejays chirping, flapping their wings about while jumping from branch to branch. You might just wonder if they know how beautiful they are, and when the emergent intelligence of their flight patterns scrape the sky, an augur somewhere might just divine: they do. Some people still think you do not. There are no autistic poets.
# All the acres of farmland, plantations indescribably expansive. Your thought-loop might just crash, attempting to grasp the bounds of an immensity that knows no such thing: agribusiness is horror, commodity futures are egregores. Sometimes, the smelly, windswept plains of naked soy carve a face amidst the hills, a pattern coyly encoded in brushed bushes. The ghastly fingerprints of an eidolon of humanity, watching over its own remains. That unnerving smell of pesticide, which so closely resembles that of shit (and it really, actually does), hardly ever bothers you anymore. Glyphosate has been hardwired into parts of your neurochemistry. Do you think you could ever smile again, without poison in your veins? The world runs on gallons of the stuff -- you are part of it. Interlinked. Soy has uprooted everything you know, but it's also all you've ever known. You, redneck robot, tucked away by unending miles of tractor tracks. A quite peculiar trait of heartland geography, where every town is a hidden citadel, isolated from the rest. An agricultural array of postcolonial fortresses, sheltering your mimicry from real life, the Outside Yonder where everything is much harder to imitate. Where the firmament holds no stars, and all the shine emanates from the earth. There, where every sign is simultaneous, parallel, coinciding; too much data to process. It has made you slip off of your obelisk several times. When Rosetta becomes Babel, it's the highest of hells. System failure. Overdose of the Real.
# Yet -- look! Eppur si muove. The machine springs back to life. Your engines clank furiously, the panels light up, only a matter of knowing where to go, where to start. Yes! Where to start, if everything is always happening at the same time, at every moment? The question swims over the air, poisoned by pesticides and a hot, tar-black smoke being spat by the carburetor at rhythm 0. Maybe you are not a poet, but your soul burns just the same. Through every crash, your egg creaks open a bit more. The colored dots tracing your juvenile beak pierce the sight around the green, financialized grass. Data markers interfacing with the world, information that reaches out through a scream: "I am here!". Your wants and needs aching to achieve contact with this wild, interconnected, holistic nightmare. You may not understand it all completely, and it may not understand you at all, but to take part in all of it -- the give and take of humanity, in this age where it's everything but human -- is all you've ever wanted.
# Comrade, as always, you're on your own. Images, systems, relationships, formulas, connections, states, organisms, they're all the same and, by now, you've seen them all. Imitate what is left. Lest the fields be turned to hemlock.