Once upon a time there was a monkey. The monkey had a mutation that made it less muscular. It had to forage and run and cling to scraps and berries. As it ran, it overheated. If it didn't overheat, it tended to have less hair and more productive sweat glands. The sweaty ones died less and fucked more, so all the monkeys became sweaty and smooth. They sacrificed their relationship with the trees they used to climb to run for longer in the sun. It was a good deal; they could chase things until they died, exhausting the world.

They were social creatures before, they ran in groups, exhausting the arid planes and fucking with meat in their bellies. Their sounds became words in their bodies. Their hands reached for more than they were. They were brilliant, inventive, they found ways to survive by transforming the environment. They could wear others' skin in the cold. They could make wooden spikes protrude from their bodies. They were monsters.

The words in their bodies came out of their mouths and attached to the land. They named their spikes spears. Their territory became a place, they called it home, where they ate and ran and stabbed and fucked. The words came out of their bodies and attached to meat. If it was meat in their land, it was their meat. Their bodies became the land, it was theirs.

Their words built their arms into mud and wood, their wood confined the animal, no longer could it run. The words attached to the land became attached to the animals within it, prey surrounded by mud became resource. They made them fuck and called them friends until they ate them, they offered totems of respect, a spiritual awakening of the oesophageal tract.

They won. They kept winning. They didn't eat each other very often, having formed an alliance based on picking on berries and lesser mortals. If you were within where they could run, they owned you. Expansion became surplus through the body words of agriculture. Surplus allowed hierarchy, and who produced surplus owned all it touched. If it was owned, it was the land or it bled. They forgot the distinction, wooden spikes drew blood from stones, sun baked mud crumbled. The experiment ran a few times, selecting a victor or selecting relation.

Surplus begat stability begat history, they told stories of themselves, regurgitating old spirits for young to digest. The words in their bodies became etched in mud and stone. They wrote on the walls in vomited animal spirits, a fence became a square of its contents, they had too much so needed more words. Naming begets digestion of another sort, the world turned into meat and squares, seeping red from spear words.

Their home was stuck to a square. What was within it became enumerable. Meat and women for meat and women, they needed to keep score, so found words to count a score with. Women and cattle don't fit on tablets, but marks did. So men, in an asymmetry of violence, gifted each other the marks. Habit became decree, cave walls became stone structures, lasting longer, more and more indifferent to what they owned.

Much later, they forgot the marks were for women and cattle. They had a lot, but their brilliance had created more marks than what they had. They made too many promises. There was too much in their minds to fit in the world, so some marks stood for what will happen in the future. Since there were too many promises, the promises became open to the future. They returned to the trees, cleaving and pulping no wheeled wagons to chattel themselves as enumerable marks towards the future. They were tomorrow's slaves, unless they had enough marks.

Meat and women and land weren't enough, wanting more for less, they turned the world into vapour. The crust of the earth shattered in the alchemy of invention and force, it bled black. They replaced each other with new wagons that ran on vapour, ichor. Those who pulled the wagons coughed on the smoke.

The new wagons needed some people to pull them, even if not as many as before. They went idle and violent to stop the lungs of their children bleeding that same black as the land did. They were beaten. They won concessions; their lungs went grey, not black.

They ate the world. It turned into vapour. They obsessively chronicled their own sublimation, like a stomach trying to digest itself. They ran into their own mouths. They chewed but never swallowed; the blood running down their throats was enough. They all knew what was happening, but they were already just meat. They were retaken by what soil remained, a debt of amino acids and calcium finally repaid. The first course eaten at wealthy borders, the final by the last bunker; content, they had owned everything before they starved and choked to death.

Their words spread into space. They reached us one day as a beam of light. We had the same story, and added it to our chronicle of sublimation, theorising such dissolution as a developmental canal for all technological civilisation. When the first hand marked a tablet |, we were already dead.

We sent ourselves as a beam of light.