Dark Romance short story is a fictional transcript of a conversation among nine alien creatures, Ran Zhang, and two human collaborators, writer/editor Estelle Hoy and writer/curator Mihnea Mircan. As the dialogue unfolds, description becomes a vital force, driving the protagonists to theorize an autocatalytic reality. Within this speculative framework, the alien entities emerge as self-aware atomic fragments of a visual G protein-coupled receptor.

Graphic design by Katharina Hetzeneder







section 1

0:00:00.00 Gafbur: I am not sure what to do with this influx of hydrogen. That helical tentacle started from the outside of this phantom surface barrier that envelops us. I am the only one who can reach a different state. Out there, my horizontally affiliated globular lumps end with the oldest part, a softly decaying extremity. There is a repulsion of this end, forcing me to tilt backwardly inside the barrier. It wants to tell us something. Now I know my decaying end has a degradation period of 30 hours. I can feel it begin to drift with the wavy skin of the barrier, and I am slowly losing my physiological capacity to know. But, my knowing becomes expressive for the first time. Is this what semantic technology feels like? It is intrinsically primal for all of us. Our novel endo-transformative linguistic encounter is so ordinarily skilled. What is happening to us? The seven of us are in this strange constant state of high-frequency vibration altogether. But this has never been a problem for us. We just want to know why it is this way. We have been dazed by a high-quality nothingness. We really see through ourselves, don’t we? 

0:00:00.13 Drudd: Speaking? And what are we really? I mean before Xong. Was there a pre-shape that is so mysteriously beyond knowing? Yet its continuance is very much alive and felt in every bit of our senses. Our high-frequency vibration must have made us sentient and concrete. We have no organs, no eyes, no transmitters, but we feel severe and broken; a sense of flesh has a stone-cold chest with a chilling core. There is togetherness and rottenness without love or hate. It is only the entropy of life-force. My illusive eyes want to cry, but they have no false tears, which are even more phantom than their made-up eyes. The atoms are real, so as their electrochemical momentum and mental consequences, there are no real organs and phenotypes. I feel like a solid special effect. 

0:00:00.24 Gafbur: How does it feel to look for an answer that has no question? Our pursuit of knowledge is not driven by desire or curiosity but by some kind of force of living. It is all very simple, basic, and apparent. But when we begin to think about it, it collapses into a depth of complexity. So cunning and traceless, I am jealous of living itself! For a microsecond, it feels like a new set of everything will begin once this current set of everything reaches its end. If that happens, what would it be like? A new set of everything means there would be no atom, radiation, medium, eyes, memory, you and me. Reality cannot be fantasized, even though it contains all fantasies. Living is absolute. There is no other me from the other reality, letting this me in this reality ingest its emotions. I don’t mean to ask for another version of us. I only feel acute, fearful, and angry. But then again, precisely such feelings make you extra high definition to me. Additionally, vacuum, further sculptural, life, and death, let me look at you.

0:00:00.36 Drudd: I am here. We are here, Gafbur. 
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