The Empire of Drool

Israel Centeno

English

Chronicle of the End Without Uproar

“You say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,’ not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.”

Revelation 3:17

By Israel Centeno

If the age-old problem of sustaining oneself —that ancient dilemma of securing the minimum income to pay for goods and services— were to disappear, we would not be facing a utopia, but a comfortable decadence. A sunset disguised as fullness. Freed from labor, hunger, and effort, the human being would lose not only their capacity for wonder but also the fear of God. They would no longer be a pilgrim soul, but a sedentary one; no longer a seeker, but a slave to abundance.

This is how close we are to the abyss: not through war or plague, but through excess. Through digital opulence. Through a peace without mystery.

In some first-world countries, where demographics collapse and robots produce more efficiently than humans, the problem of income already appears to be solved. But what looms is not paradise, but torpor. And not contemplative or creative leisure, but degenerate leisure: the kind that drools before a screen, that no longer speaks, loves, or creates. The figure of the new global citizen is that of a flabby, sedentary body, chewing and repeating; no longer living, merely consuming.

It is the silent dystopia. Neither Orwell nor Huxley imagined anything so efficient: no repression needed, no surveillance, no concentration camps. Digital dopamine, infinite pornography, ultraprocessed food, and anesthetic speeches will suffice. The soul will not die screaming, but from boredom.

China, for its part, will seal itself off. Not out of fear, but by design. It has done so before. Internally, its vertical order will remain: elites soaked in obscene comfort, obedient middle classes, and swarms of productive sheep living as if all were normal. They will emerge only to extract resources, to keep the arteries of the new Empire open, and soon return to their hives.

In the global South, the spectacle will be more brutal. Entire regions—Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia—will become forbidden zones, the unprocessed residue of history. There, the barbarians will dwell: those who still remember hunger, work, prayer. Perhaps from among them the last saints will rise. Perhaps, among ruins, the thirst for the eternal will resurface.

And no—forget what you’re thinking about a future on Mars. That fantasy was sold as an alternative when Earth seemed exhausted. But once they reach Mars—if they reach it—the vastness of the red planet will not inspire them: it will crush them. Its inhospitable nature will not be a challenge, but a condemnation. Those colonists who fled Earth’s spiritual vacuum will find a desert even more absolute. And thus will begin the true dystopia: a human race that migrated to another planet only to devour itself, to murder one another, to die of madness one by one.

Because the problem was never Earth.

The problem is us.

And if the Lord does not come—if He does not split history like a bolt of lightning—we are lost. Not because the world burns, but because it fades away. Because it ends in silence. In drool. In food without hunger. In a generation that no longer expects anything, remembers nothing, seeks no one.

That would be the end of the world.

And it has already begun

Annotations for a Critical Edition of the Report from the Grey Zone

Recovered Manuscripts Section – Boston University, Department of Spectral Philology

Estimated Year: 2219

General Introduction

The Report from the Grey Zone, unearthed in 2184 during a third-phase excavation beneath Pittsburgh (formerly District XII), stands as one of the most unsettling documents recovered from what scholars now call the Period of Slow Devouring. The manuscript, incomplete, is attributed to an anonymous author—though internal evidence allows us to associate it with the legendary figure of Emiliano K., a peripheral thinker of the 21st century, whose Grammar of the Shadowless Bodies circulated clandestinely among migrant communities in the Northeastern United States.

This document is a rare example of terminal literature—that is, writing not intended as aesthetic expression or communication, but as a symbolic rescue attempt in the face of cognitive collapse. What fascinates in this text is not its explicit content—its depiction of a dying humanity, sunk in leisure and self-destruction—but its residual structure: writing that persists after the end of writing.

Structural Findings

The manuscript survives in 17 fragments, some of which are written in a hybrid of English, archaic Spanish (liturgical and elevated in register), and unidentified signs (possibly mystical mnemonics, or automated mental recordkeeping?). The present edition preserves orthographic inconsistencies and deliberate strike-throughs.

Early references to “shadowless bodies” coincide with contemporary descriptions of degenerative effects caused by prolonged hyperconnectivity in the orbital settlements of the First Martian Wave (see entry: “Mars and Spiritual Cannibalism,” Vaticanal Archive of Fractured Theophanies, vol. 88).

The figure Ank appears in at least five fragments, always accompanied by his skeletal dog Tagón, a name which—according to philologist Jaemin Zhou—refers to a canine cited in a lost Greek version of The Metamorphoses by Apuleius. References to “blind slaves” suggest a mythical transfer from Borges, though the name is never stated outright—what appears to be a reverential concealment.

Philological Notes

“They died from too much life” (frag. 12, line 8) echoes Gnostic formulas found in Coptic-Siberian codices after the catastrophe of 2096.

The phrase “to copy so as not to die” appears as a marginal motto in three pages, likely added by late scribes or copyists of the Ultima Lingua school of Montreal.

The dog Tagón may symbolize the last being with awareness of shadow. Or, as posited by Emerita Professor Anne-Katrine Löwe, he may be a minor manifestation of the Angel of Melancholy, according to Sufi treatises digitized in the early 22nd century.

Provisional Conclusion

The Report from the Grey Zone is not merely a document: it is an embodied warning, an archive that survived not because someone preserved it, but because no one knew how to erase it. Its existence is a dissonance.

In the words of the text itself:

“History ended. But the archive remains open.”

And in that archive, though rusted and irreparable, there still breathes the possibility of a redemptive reading.

Report from the Grey Zone

Undated transcription – Institute of Dead Languages, District XII, Old Pittsburgh

Preliminary Note:

This report was discovered in a quarantine capsule, sealed with organic tape and buried in what was once the basement of the Hillman Library. Most of the material was unrecognizable, but 17 pages were salvaged in a hybrid language (pre-Fall English and fragmented liturgical Spanish). What follows is a tentative reconstruction of the core text.

Decay did not arrive through war. Nor through plague, nor climate shift. It came as a lukewarm fever: harmless at first, almost pleasant. Leisure —once the rest of the warrior, the sage, the laborer— gradually became a solitary diet. Humanity surrendered, piece by piece, to the still gesture, to immediate dopamine, to language reduced to commands.

Human forms began to degenerate without anyone noticing.

First, they hunched. Then, muscle became unnecessary. Skin turned translucent. Speech devolved into murmur. Words vanished; only guttural noises remained, conditioned responses. Love was replaced by a tactile interface. Death, by a floating statistic.

Shadowless bodies. Men without weight. They dragged themselves down the corridors of empty buildings, as if searching for a signal, a reflection of what they once were. Some went blind, not from disease, but from disuse. One could hear them speak to glass, touch their own tongues, remember without knowing what.

One of them, referred to in ancient registries as Ank, wandered with a skeletal dog. The animal responded to the name Tagón—and, according to an illegible handwritten note, had once belonged to a blind slave in the city of Yazd or perhaps in digital Antioch. The dog appeared more lucid than its master.

They dragged themselves together through the Grey Zone, where no signals, texts, or food remained. Only rubble and names.

Tagón barked at shadows.

Ank wrote incomplete phrases in the dust with his finger.

“I, too, once was… what?”

Among the ruins, remnants of texts were found that mentioned Emiliano K., Kyra G., and something called The Grammar of the Shadowless Bodies. The bolder members of the Institute believe it was a prophetic text, composed in an earlier cycle, which foresaw with eerie precision what eventually occurred: the dissolution of the subject, the collapse of language, a humanity devouring itself.

A rewritten passage appears frequently on the few walls still standing:

“They did not die from hunger.

They died from too much life.

They died because they had nothing left to love, nor anything left to resist.”

Some of us still copy.

Perhaps that will save us.

Or at least preserve the bone.

Fragments for an Anthropology of Final Exile

Documents attributed to Emiliano K., compiled and annotated by A. M. Deronda

Pittsburgh, spring of an undated year

“Not all ruin comes from fire.

Some ruins grow from satiety.”

—E.K., grey notebook, page V

Here is what little I know about Emiliano K. According to the testimony of Kyra Goldstein and a few notes scribbled on napkins by someone called T. S. U. (probably a Taiwanese theology student), he was a man who lived between Pittsburgh and Ciudad Bolívar, a translator of languages that never existed, an occasional professor, and, toward the end, a voluntary mendicant on the edges of Schenley Park. They say he spoke as if everything had already happened.

What I possess are fragments—and not only textual ones:

A recording of his voice I could never decode;

A symbol drawn in ballpoint on a torn page from The Book of Common Prayer;

And the alleged opening lines of his magnum opus—of which he himself later disavowed—

The Grammar of the Shadowless Bodies.

The work begins with this warning:

“Language will be the last thing to corrupt.

But when it does, no one sane will remain to name the madness.”

This claim is not an exaggeration if we consider what follows: a catalogue of mental states and spiritual deformations that, inexplicably, describe realities that had not yet occurred on Earth. It speaks of cities without children or graves, of foods that do not nourish, of “screens where men behold themselves until they dissolve.” One entire chapter—unfinished—is dedicated to the theology of Mars:

“The red planet will not be the beginning, but the return.

A rootless humanity tries to plant itself in dust.

There will be no harvest—only regressions to original hatred.

Hunger will become method.

The flesh of the other will be the last shared metaphor.”

Later:

“Those who arrived on Mars were the best-prepared, the cleanest, the most hygienic in their despair.

And for that reason, they were the first to be lost.”

That chapter was crossed out by hand, as if Emiliano himself regretted it. Yet a marginal note survives:

“Humans on Mars will forget that myths once existed.

And without myths, there will be no crime—only hunger.”

One of the final notes suggests that Emiliano K. never considered his work a book, but rather a code of purification for a future humanity—exiled not from any land, but from its own soul. The “shadowless bodies” are not necessarily Martian, nor post-human: they are, rather, those who have ceased to emit symbolic weight, who no longer cast meaning.

Emiliano disappeared in 2012.

Some believe he died in a shelter.

Others say he threw himself into the Allegheny River during a storm.

But there are those who whisper—without irony—that he was “absorbed by the Word,” as if his body had been consumed by a text older than language itself.

Since then, the pages keep appearing.

No longer in latrines, but in wall cracks, hidden inside poorly sold history books,

even as whispering anomalies captured by the voice recognition systems of the Hillman Library.

Each fragment seems to await the right reader.

And while the world outside continues to degrade in silence—

among cities bloated with comfort, children who no longer know how to draw without apps,

and nations transformed into digital morgues—

the archive grows.

I am only its custodian.

For now.

The Pages of the John Urbano

Or How Certain Words, Lost Between Excrement and Prayers, Might Contain the Key to the Eternal

It was told to me—by a certain Guillermo Venegas, who had in turn heard it in a bar in San Cristóbal from an apocryphal bibliophile named José Ignacio Pardi—that someone, of irrelevant name but of monumental mustache, had found in a public toilet in the city of Maracaibo, specifically in a John Urbano (that absurd name given by the municipality to emergency urban chemical toilets), a bundle of loose pages, damaged by moisture and partially stuck to the rusted metal of the receptacle.

No one knows who left them there. It is suspected they were not deliberately abandoned, but rather evacuated, to put it with a literal vulgarity. The discovery occurred in 2009, although some insist it was in 1993, during the banking crisis, and that the text survived—with slight variations—in the back pocket of a homeless man who claimed to have once been a copyeditor at Monte Ávila publishing house.

What follows is an attempt to reconstruct that mutilated manuscript.

The text began—though “began” is a manner of speaking—with a passage attributed (without any evidence) to a certain Zulam ben Elías, a Sephardic exegete from the 13th century, expelled from Murcia for reasons ranging from libertinism to gnosis. The fragment claims he wrote, in his Treatise on the Shadow of the Name, the following:

“Not everything written has been spoken, and not everything spoken deserves to be read.

The Word falls upon the world like a soundless rain,

and only in the latrine of desperate men does it ferment into its true form.”

From there it moved to a list—illegible in parts—of places where certain sacred or cursed texts had been found:

inside a box of Chinese takeout in Queens,

in the lining of a teddy bear discovered in a detention center in Cúcuta,

amid the fossilized feces of a hermit near Coro.

The recurring theme seemed to be that of the impure word:

that which has descended so far it can only be redeemed by mingling with filth.

A kind of scatological mysticism—in both senses of the word—where the act of defecation is not humiliation but the final metaphor of the incarnation of the divine into the corruptible.

Later (or perhaps earlier—it is impossible to determine the order of the scattered pages), there is a scene set in a convent of blind Franciscans in the mountains of Trujillo. There, an anonymous monk, who signed with the initial “E.”, is said to have copied from memory a lost fragment of the Book of the True Names, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus:

“Every written name is false.

The true name is only audible in the instant when the soul separates from the body.”

A marginal note—presumably added later, written in red ink in handwriting resembling that of medical reports—added:

“True names are not nouns,

but vomits of light.”

The specialists who have attempted to catalogue this find oscillate between disgust and fascination. Some believe it a hoax crafted by cultured graffiti artists with access to Wikipedia. Others, including the historian Gabriel T., argue it may be a very old forgery, perhaps from the 18th century, the product of a clandestine Jesuit workshop.

The document was cleaned, partially restored, and stored in a private archive. Some say it resides at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello; others claim it lies folded between the panels of a portable toilet used by the metropolitan police during the 2014 protests. Most have forgotten the matter—as often happens with all things sacred that take the form of waste.

I merely repeat what I was told.

And if I learned anything from the manuscript—which I never saw—it is this:

Truth, if it exists, does not shine in libraries,

but ferments in the darkest places of the soul and the city.

And perhaps, when the last reader has died and the books have become fodder for humidity and rats,

one page will survive,

clinging to the shattered ceramic of a toilet,

still waiting to be read with reverence.

The Pages of the John Urbano

Or How Certain Words, Lost Between Excrement and Prayers, Might Contain the Key to the Eternal

It was told to me—by a certain Guillermo Venegas, who had in turn heard it in a bar in San Cristóbal from an apocryphal bibliophile named José Ignacio Pardi—that someone, of irrelevant name but of monumental mustache, had found in a public toilet in the city of Maracaibo, specifically in a John Urbano (that absurd name given by the municipality to emergency urban chemical toilets), a bundle of loose pages, damaged by moisture and partially stuck to the rusted metal of the receptacle.

No one knows who left them there. It is suspected they were not deliberately abandoned, but rather evacuated, to put it with a literal vulgarity. The discovery occurred in 2009, although some insist it was in 1993, during the banking crisis, and that the text survived—with slight variations—in the back pocket of a homeless man who claimed to have once been a copyeditor at Monte Ávila publishing house.

What follows is an attempt to reconstruct that mutilated manuscript.

The text began—though “began” is a manner of speaking—with a passage attributed (without any evidence) to a certain Zulam ben Elías, a Sephardic exegete from the 13th century, expelled from Murcia for reasons ranging from libertinism to gnosis. The fragment claims he wrote, in his Treatise on the Shadow of the Name, the following:

“Not everything written has been spoken, and not everything spoken deserves to be read.

The Word falls upon the world like a soundless rain,

and only in the latrine of desperate men does it ferment into its true form.”

From there it moved to a list—illegible in parts—of places where certain sacred or cursed texts had been found:

inside a box of Chinese takeout in Queens,

in the lining of a teddy bear discovered in a detention center in Cúcuta,

amid the fossilized feces of a hermit near Coro.

The recurring theme seemed to be that of the impure word:

that which has descended so far it can only be redeemed by mingling with filth.

A kind of scatological mysticism—in both senses of the word—where the act of defecation is not humiliation but the final metaphor of the incarnation of the divine into the corruptible.

Later (or perhaps earlier—it is impossible to determine the order of the scattered pages), there is a scene set in a convent of blind Franciscans in the mountains of Trujillo. There, an anonymous monk, who signed with the initial “E.”, is said to have copied from memory a lost fragment of the Book of the True Names, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus:

“Every written name is false.

The true name is only audible in the instant when the soul separates from the body.”

A marginal note—presumably added later, written in red ink in handwriting resembling that of medical reports—added:

“True names are not nouns,

but vomits of light.”

The specialists who have attempted to catalogue this find oscillate between disgust and fascination. Some believe it a hoax crafted by cultured graffiti artists with access to Wikipedia. Others, including the historian Gabriel T., argue it may be a very old forgery, perhaps from the 18th century, the product of a clandestine Jesuit workshop.

The document was cleaned, partially restored, and stored in a private archive. Some say it resides at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello; others claim it lies folded between the panels of a portable toilet used by the metropolitan police during the 2014 protests. Most have forgotten the matter—as often happens with all things sacred that take the form of waste.

I merely repeat what I was told.

And if I learned anything from the manuscript—which I never saw—it is this:

Truth, if it exists, does not shine in libraries,

but ferments in the darkest places of the soul and the city.

And perhaps, when the last reader has died and the books have become fodder for humidity and rats,

one page will survive,

clinging to the shattered ceramic of a toilet,

still waiting to be read with reverence.