Death Monkey Explosives

Death Monkey Explosives is a network of workshops, revolutionary cells, performers, and armed crews that share a name without answering to a single owner. It makes weapons and the machinery needed to survive using them: reactors, thrusters, sensors, cooling equipment, and radiation protection. Underground venues, salvagers, and commercial fronts also carry the DME name, sharing designs, working practices, enemies, and a reputation they consider worth inheriting.

For a shipowner buying a pump, DME means equipment built to keep working beyond prudent limits, with provision for the damage that follows. For someone living beside a DME target, it can mean destruction that continues through connected machinery after the blast has passed. The same network sells repairable equipment and sabotages the systems on which communities depend.

DME is a revolutionary brand commons. Its members believe that a system becomes a prison when people cannot meaningfully break it or survive its failure. They disagree about what that belief permits them to destroy.

A Name Nobody Owns

There is no headquarters, common command structure, or legal entity able to grant or revoke the mark. What matters is the workshop behind the product.

Workshops earn recognition by publishing useful designs, demonstrating them before witnesses and surviving the demonstration, meeting their material obligations to other cells, and making equipment that behaves as violently as advertised. Established crews keep lists of suppliers they trust, maintain their own versions of designs, and train successors through apprenticeship. Endorsement by several respected cells can make a product credible enough to finance without creating a central authority.

That arrangement leaves considerable room for invention and makes responsibility difficult to enforce. A cell may publicly disown an unsafe workshop, an indiscriminate attack, counterfeit parts, or a political position it considers cowardly. It cannot stop the offending group from using the name. Buyers must judge particular workshops, while successes and atrocities alter the reputation of everyone under the DME mark.

Sales support the wider network. Some workshops supply almost nothing but ordinary shipowners, frontier settlements, salvage fleets, and militaries. Others put equipment, labor, transport routes, and revenue into sabotage. These roles can change. A crew making heat pumps may take up arms after a client uses a habitat’s dependence on its services to control the inhabitants. A celebrated bomb maker may settle into radiator repair, still supporting the same comrades through work that attracts fewer cameras.

Why DME Breaks Things

DME attributes much of its thinking to Yara So, its disputed founder. Surviving recordings and manuals attributed to her describe a patient strategist who studied reconnaissance and logistics. This Yara is much colder than the pyromaniac mascot the brand has made of her.

She argued that stable systems can conceal growing coercion. People lose the ability to live without a system because they are never allowed to learn how. Her proposed remedy was forced adaptation: destroy the dependency, reveal who has become unable to act without it, and force alternatives to develop.

No one can now establish when or how Yara died, disappeared, or ceased speaking for herself. Cells circulate incompatible editions of her work. Some read her as diagnosing an existing threat: if losing a monopoly would cause mass suffering, the monopoly already has the power to use that suffering as a weapon. Others invoke her to defend disasters that gave survivors no meaningful chance to adapt. Every faction claims the Yara who understood consequences and blames later editors for the stupid cruelty.

DME’s declared targets are usually infrastructure rather than populations. Cells attack metering systems, points where command can be blocked or monopolized, closed repair monopolies, logistics used to coerce people, strategic containment, and machinery that prevents people from leaving. They accept collateral harm but fight bitterly over how much makes an operation indefensible.

The results do not support one simple account. DME has helped liberate people, and some communities have built lasting alternatives after a monopoly fell. Other communities have been left colder, poorer, and easier for the next armed power to seize.

A destroyed system teaches survivors only if they still have memory, tools, time, and enough freedom to build something else. DME is good at identifying what people depend on. Its doctrine is much less reliable when it assumes that destroying a dependency will also provide the conditions needed to replace it.

Communing with the Void

DME practices a cultivated mental state called communing with the void. Through the Aether, this state allows an ordinary release of heat or force, or an ordinary cascading failure, to keep destroying things along connections that would usually limit the damage.

The practice begins by refusing to treat existence as a meaningful distinction. Practitioners then apply that refusal to themselves. As their dissociation deepens, the acting self is progressively excluded from reality. There is no heroic destroyer standing apart from the destruction, no surviving witness guaranteed a place outside it, and no independent hand entitled to choose how it ends. At the deepest point, they temporarily cannot sustain even the distinction between something and nothing. DME calls this becoming unbeing.

The Aether supplies no explosive energy in exchange for nihilism. Aggression and theatrical display are not enough to produce the effect. A practitioner in communion becomes an opening through which a material event acquires the logic of unbeing: destruction continues through what remains connected to it, without recognizing a reason to preserve any of those connections or the things they join.

This is why the weapons are feared. Their detonations are not invariably larger than competing weapons. Instead, heat reaches machinery that still functions, and fractures cross structures that would ordinarily contain them. Repairs can suffer the damage again. Redundant components can inherit the same failure. Continuity drift can offer a nearby version of history in which connected matter remained intact. That escape also becomes less available. Anything still coupled to the event may continue to take part in its destruction after the obvious blast is over.

The void does not distinguish a legitimate target from a bystander, an allied platform, or an acceptable stopping point. Deeper communion increases intensity; it never improves discrimination.

People and machinery must therefore provide all the precision. They choose where the release begins, how much ordinary energy it has, which structures can carry its effects, and which connections to sever physically. Hidden redundancy may survive because it was isolated. An innocent habitat may be destroyed because it shared power, cooling, command, traffic, or load-bearing structure with the intended target. Neither outcome is a judgment about who deserved it.

Being Consumed Last

DME has developed a way to influence the order of destruction. Practitioners are conditioned to recognize a distinctive telemetry pattern as an allied force already participating in unbeing. Within communion, that association puts the transmitter last in the sequence of things to be consumed.

It grants no immunity. The transmitting ship, weapon, or crew has not acquired a right to exist. The conditioning puts other connected things ahead of the marked allies in the order of destruction; it changes who is consumed first, not who may be spared. Often the delay lasts long enough for the ordinary release to exhaust itself or for the crew to sever its remaining connection. If it does not, the void follows the telemetry home when it has finished with what came before.

DME regards communion as holy. Its doctrine does not separate a useful weapon from an unfortunate spiritual hazard attached to it. Crews repeat the assurance that the void cannot take what did not already belong to it. Death, survival, and a person’s failure to return fully from communion can all be understood as revelations rather than judgments on whether the rite was sound.

The assurance serves several purposes at once. It comforts mourners and helps volunteers commit themselves. It also excuses negligence. Even careful technical discussion can become a question of what should be consumed first, leaving unasked whether the void should have been invited aboard at all.

Preparing a Crew for Communion

An operative’s training includes maintenance diagrams, labor routines, supply contracts, repair doctrine, control paths, and the lives connected through them. These are practical studies: every real connection can determine where unbeing goes next.

A serious operation may bring the weapons crew, bridge, engineering watch, or an entire ship into communion at different depths. DME does not ordinarily confine a lone practitioner in a clinical chamber. Shared work, machinery, fear, and intent already bind the crew together; cultivation distributes resonance through those relationships.

The crew rehearses its descent station by station. Weapons personnel enter first, followed by the systems supplying them. Anchors stay closer to ordinary cognition long enough to check alignment, release the weapon, and sever the connections required by the plan. The Choir, a learned system of sound, movement, and signals, carries communion through the ship. Once the weapon is released, anchors may enter full communion themselves.

These procedures control sequence and depth. They do not make the rite safe. DME performances celebrate a whole crew entering together, making the choice loud and explicit enough that the sacrifice cannot be mistaken for an accident. The admired figure is not a lucid technician remaining behind while an expendable mystic dies.

The Choir

The Choir lets a prepared crew coordinate when its members can no longer use ordinary language or follow a command hierarchy. It combines vocal patterns, breathing, posture, stamping, struck surfaces, machinery noise, haptic pulses, and the shaped telemetry carrier.

Its signals carry little complexity. They identify another participant as an expression of the same void, convey readiness or direction, change tempo and intensity, and establish rough instructions: follow, release, sever, converge, return. Decisions requiring nuance must be settled before communion. The Choir retains just enough organization to carry out the prepared attack as its participants cease to function as people.

Cells teach these patterns at ritual gatherings where hundreds may enter shallow communion together. Participants practice losing their ordinary identities while continuing to recognize one another. Individual voices, crews, machines, and remote transmissions remain distinguishable as expressions of a shared annihilatory presence.

Local rhythms, gestures, quotations, distortions, and challenge-response exchanges encode the patterns. A recording is therefore difficult to imitate successfully. Gatherings can also absorb variations without needing a universal codebook. Established cells can usually learn to work together through rehearsal, but incompatible Choir traditions have killed allied crews.

In deep communion, much of this training survives as bodily habit. An intercepted channel may carry screaming glossolalia, broken lyrics, animal grunts, blows against consoles and hull, weapon reports, and telemetry folded into a common cadence. It sounds like collective rage without direction.

Inside the trance, it still coordinates action. Repeated sounds receive the expected responses. Stations enter on the expected beat. Damaged groups fall silent or others take their place. Separate ships turn and fire as though they retained a shared tactical mind. This coordination is narrow and learned in advance, but exceptionally hard to break. A Choir can keep carrying out an attack after none of its members could explain what they are doing.

Severance, Survival, and Return

Before firing, crews trace every connection among the delivery system, target, launch platform, their own people, and surrounding infrastructure. They may cut power feeds, break coolant loops, make control paths disposable, and separate launch hardware with vacuum gaps and sacrificial masses. The purpose is to bring the enemy into contact with the void first.

Survival is welcome and commonly planned for, but DME does not treat it as the moral limit of the rite. The shaped telemetry carrier is the last connection deliberately left in place. It identifies the transmitting ship to the communion as an allied engine of destruction to be consumed last.

Redundant machinery supports the plan when ordinary judgment fails. Automated interlocks maintain the agreed firing sequence even after the bridge can no longer do so. Dead-man cuts disconnect telemetry at preset thresholds. Sections expected to survive hold recovery lockers, medical supplies, food, names, recordings, and simple repair tasks.

Crews also rehearse care. They decide who will drag someone away from a live console, who is permitted to sedate a comrade who has not returned from communion, and which systems must be abandoned without inspection. They prepare for the aftermath as damage control following a sacred catastrophe.

Once the event has exhausted itself, whoever can act begins bringing the others back. Survivors receive food, washing, and repeated use of their names. Someone explains what happened and reconnects them with familiar tools and people whose histories they know. There is no assumption that the former anchor will be fit to provide this care. A junior loader may regain awareness first and spend hours helping reconstruct the person who commanded them.

Some cells maintain households for veterans who never fully return. Others keep such veterans in workshops, on stages, or at weapons stations, treating their continued closeness to unbeing as insight. The same comrades may care for them and exploit them.

When Destruction Comes Home

The most common cause of a DME operation consuming its own crew is a missed connection or a telemetry link cut too late. Destruction does not have to wander at random. It can return through a structural brace, shared radiator, live sensor return, command acknowledgement, recovery tether, or a connection dismissed as mere information.

The cause is not always an oversight. A severance mechanism may fail. An anchor may deliberately hold the link open to keep resonance on a stubborn target. A crew may have decided that survival would cheapen what it intended to do. Investigators fight over the engineering evidence afterward because DME doctrine makes deliberate sacrifice, ecstatic misjudgment, and ordinary incompetence hard to distinguish.

Private procedures can consequently be exact even where the public culture celebrates recklessness. Severance checklists repeat dependencies and escape routes with almost liturgical care. Crews say one another’s names while arming and paint them beside recovery caches for whoever wakes.

An anchor holds an intimate and terrible responsibility. The last lucid members of a crew may decide when everyone else crosses into communion, then follow them. Manuals retain the names of collateral dead and consumed crews as test cases, accusations, dedications, and verses for later rites.

DME repeatedly tells the story of a practitioner waking among the wreckage of both enemy and former crew. The anchors are dead. The recording is damaged or metaphysically incoherent. The survivor has no memory that explains how the event found its way back.

These accounts appear in songs, depositions, training scenarios, accusations, recruitment material, and legends shaped to serve the teller. A survivor may grieve or boast, deny that they were spared, or insist that the dead reached the truth first. They may spend the rest of their life maintaining the severance procedure that failed them and still volunteer for communion again.

Repeated practice can leave people depersonalized, unconcerned with staying alive, or unable to regard ordinary continuity as meaningful. Some need the noise and intimacy of their cell to remain present. DME romanticizes these injuries openly while also arranging daily routines around them.

Its loudness helps sustain devotion, attract recruits, coordinate the group, and draw damaged comrades back into relationships. Sympathizers see whole crews entering the same void they direct at an oppressor as evidence that DME shares its own sacrifices instead of assigning them to professional soldiers or disposable proxies. For people living near the target, that sincerity does little to reduce the danger.

Encores and Captured Monkeys

A Choir can culminate in an Encore, DME’s collective Eidolon tradition. Over months or years, the crew prepares a synthetic host, threads it through its stations, and trains it into the same patterns the people use. In a final full communion, an extreme release binds their collective resonance into the host and destroys their brains.

DME does not treat the result as the preserved crew or as a composite person authorized to speak for its dead. The Encore carries the attack-pattern they became together. Recognition ciphers, station reflexes, grudges, broken lyrics, and tactical forms remain, along with the ability to conduct later crews after language fails.

The host may be a ship, a weapon complex, or a distributed battle network. Old voices appear within its Choir as working fragments, completing responses that no living singer began. Famous Encores have conducted several generations of crews and acquired so many variations that no cell can identify every voice. DME reconciles that persistence with its theology by saying that the void took the singers; the song already belonged to everyone.

Necrotech dealers can make a more private, more easily sold instrument from one living DME practitioner—a Monkey. Destructive imprinting produces a singular Eidolon with an exceptional affinity for weapon systems, cascading failure, and the ordering of annihilation. It may remember Choir ciphers and recognize DME telemetry, but it has neither an Encore’s collective pattern nor its communal provenance. That concentration is precisely what dealers value: one captured opening to unbeing, placed in a host a buyer can aim.

DME condemns this isolated conversion as sacrilege. Cells do not harvest individual Monkeys for it. A voluntary Encore is understood as the culmination of a Choir’s shared practice; solitary imprinting turns a comrade into someone else’s instrument.

Once such an Eidolon exists, however, DME claims it exclusively as its own. The captive resonance is kin and a terrifying inheritance. Fleets sacrifice ships and crews to recover identified Monkey Eidolons from brokers, foundries, patrons, and battlefields.

Recovery does not end in dismantling the weapon. DME gives it a name, or restores a remembered one, brings it into the Choir, and mounts it in a revered weapon. It is granted the privilege of directing unbeing back at the market that made it.

Iranian Lineage and Public Culture

DME’s strongest cultural inheritance comes from Iranian underground music, protest poetry, clandestine publishing, organizations built to resist censorship, and workshops that kept restricted machinery running through improvisation. It is not an Iranian state successor, and national inheritance alone does not explain its politics. Crews from across Elysium joined the commons while retaining forms developed where art, technical instruction, humor, and political survival had used the same hidden channels.

A lyric can help someone remember a procedure, advertise a product, identify its maker, or carry a compact piece of doctrine. Product copy is made to be shouted, remembered, copied imperfectly, and recognized across a noisy room. Manuals carry poems in their margins. Revisions remain visible over censored or obsolete text. A dispute over engineering can become a verse, and that verse can reveal which workshop produced a particular design fork.

The equipment and printed material show the same history of use: scorched print, lyrics laid over one another, heat-discolored metal, exposed service access, replaceable armor, sacrificial standoffs, and projecting parts that hold heat or a blast away from something meant to survive.

Outsiders tend to remember the spikes. Crews need to know which projections are handles, radiator guards, stand-off mounts, or structures meant to crumple along a chosen path.

Thermal Craft

DME cooling systems move and dispose of heat; they cannot annihilate it. They follow the chain described in Thermal Management: collect heat, transport it, buffer it, lift it to a more useful temperature where appropriate, and reject it. DME builds that chain for conditions in which neighboring machinery may already be damaged and a crew still needs one more action.

Loops are kept understandable. Sections can be isolated, pumps replaced, and equipment reached during nearby failures. Buffers have finite capacity and make their saturation painfully clear. Sacrificial heat sinks, vented hot mass, and emergency dumps provide further ways to shed a load.

These choices cost mass, waste material, expose the ship, and often require inelegant replacement afterward. DME accepts those costs when they let equipment continue after a prudent design would have shut down. Quiet operation still accumulates heat debt. A dramatic release still gives observers evidence to interpret and contest, as described in Thermal Signature Warfare.

The high-tech heat pump cold like my heart is the famous polished exception to the rougher equipment: expensive, efficient, and aggressively branded. It shares the expectation that the system it protects will eventually demand more than any sane warranty would cover. gamma raybans (make you incandescent) applies the same concern for continued operation to protection in ionizing environments.

The Product Ecology

The DME catalogue includes the equipment that supplies a ship, keeps it working, and spends its remaining capacity on destruction:

• make bombs not war supplies power, while deep space burnout provides propulsion.
• fuck your feelings and not if i see you first gather information.
• cold like my heart and gamma raybans (make you incandescent) help preserve the margin within which people and machinery can keep operating.
• scorched void policy, banana split, pretty pretty bang bang, rail against the machine, and watch me burn use that margin to deliver terminal violence.

A familiar product name does not guarantee compatibility. Different cells make incompatible versions, fork one another’s designs, and reuse established names for revisions. The catalogue is not one integrated platform family.

Across those differences, DME expects machinery to make three things clear: what it is prepared to destroy, what it is built to preserve, and where the crew can reach it with a wrench after finding out whether either claim was true.