ALUMINO-MANIFESTO:

We have been up all night, my mates and I, beneath the hum of the microwave transmitter, electricity piped in through high-voltage aluminium conductors. Transported here by motors, alloy rims with deep polished lips, fat pipes and chrome spinners, bright as our souls. Like our machines, we are ruled by the internal glow of electric hearts. Trampling the earth underfoot, we wear down the heels of violent Chinese pirates: fresh from Nike-faking factories slaving along the Cambodian border. We have been discussing right up to the limits of our programming and scrawling across filthy keyboards to create these demented writings.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like an Essex squaddie in some far-off outpost. Holding up tickets to heaven for an army of suicide bombers. Alone at the gates of social hygiene. Alone with the engineers in clean rooms servicing the reactors of nuclear submarines rehearsing attacks on no-one in particular. Alone with the train driver bearing down on some fool who jumped under the 8:22 to Fenchurch Street. Alone with the dark spirits which rage in the belly of a cruise missiles aimed at the church, synagogue, mosque or temple of animism. Alone with the drunkards beating their better halves and spewing curried onions up the walls.

Then, suddenly distracted by the giant whining aluminium tubes, grinding their jet engines to stir the nightmares layed out in their beds at the semi-detached rind of the city. Planes returning from Bangalore, New York and Tokyo ...they scream up the Thames following the eddying flight path of regeneration.

Then we kicked back. In the silent intervals we listened to distinct media for the very last time, a faint memory of the dead masses of the 20th Century. The crackling needle jumping on etched groves of vinyl, speeches by Mussolini, Hitler.

Suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows and we were refreshed again by the fumes of speed coursing through our nostrils. `Come, my friends!' I said. `Lets go!' Electrolytic refining for aluminium, immune to corrosion and with only one-third the weight of steel, the future was ours.

At last... I thought the mystic cult of animism was abolished. We are going to be present at the greatest birth, a noble embryo, from whose mixed biology a flock of electric angels will shoot 3 miles high into the sky. Their electricity will illuminate the planet, open windows and reflect light into the darkened flesh of the undeserving. 'Test our atheism to the metal!' I said. 'Let us go!' Here is the very first sunrise on earth! Cloning. Stem cells catching our minds on fire to light our millennial darkness.'

This is the bacteria growing on the frothy brew of capitalism.

We went up to the three silent machines to caress their aluminium cages, placing our finger tips deep within their heat sinks. We felt the breath of their cooling fans running over us like the fanny-breath of a joyous youth. I lay alongside mine – naked, like a corpse on its slab, but I suddenly revived again in front of the keyboard - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us on through issue crawlers, web pages, audio patches and deep technical details of network surveillance.

Here and there we could catch sight of unhappy souls looking at us looking at them. Soft windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes.

`Smell, the numbers' I shouted, `smell is good enough for wild dogs!'

And we hunted like dogs, with the morals of a Tactical Autonomous Combatant, death's relentless progress bar flashing in front of my eyes, my face dappled with blood & guts. And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses split apart! Here, in our machines we could die and die again with full resuscitation as long as memory lasted. No reason to die I thought, unless it is the desire to be rid of the great weight of our courage!

Piccadilly circus: 18:30

We drove on by Eros, crushing everything beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron. Death ran in front of me at each corner offering me his hand nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws and jolted screams giving me velvet glances from the bottom of London's filthy tide.

Let us leave good sense behind like a discarded skin - let us hurl ourselves, like cocks spiced with pride, into the immense cunt of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!

As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with the mad intoxication of an 11 year old script kiddy, and suddenly there was a women with a baby in a pushchair, tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons.

Her sentimental cooing got in my way. What an arse! Pouah! I gave the pram a slight tap, sending it spinning. As it went under the wheels it punctured my tire and ripped the rubber from the rim of my alloys. The air bag sprung from the nape of its seat; my motor – crumpled. Its metal - vlam! - ending up in a ditch.

Oh, maternal shit pit, half full of oily water! An aluminium factory gutter! I savoured a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my African nurse! As I raised my bloody body, shit-spattered and foul smelling, I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart at what I had done. A crowd of Tescos tossers and domestic shoppers crowded terrified around this spectacle. With patient and tentative care they helped me pull the car out, like a vast great white shark that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving the ditch, with shining scales, its heavily modified bodywork and its upholstery of comfort came clean.

We thought it was dead, my great shark, but I awoke it with a single caress of its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its fins. Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with metal scratches, useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid shelf-fillers and angry green shoppers, we dictated our first will and testament to all the living men on earth.

Harwood