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moreweirdfuture-blog · 8 years ago

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NO AUDIBLE DIALOGUE (奇妙な未来 # 003)

Michael went home for his grandmother’s funeral.

It was a few days later, early one morning when you couldn’t tell the difference between night and day, Michael dropped a glass and it shattered on the floor.

“Careful,” his grandmother advised. “That glass’ll cutcha.”

His mother refused to leave her bedroom, but his father got a kick from it and kept bragging about its features. His sister Elaine was six and walked up to her mom and challenged, “I thought she wasn’t going to wake up ever again?”

Its capacity for language fascinated Michael. He was almost convinced of its humanity until one night when its gaze and smile froze in place. He assumed the battery had died, but he left the room without checking because he got the chills.

In the morning, her eyes were glued in the same trajectory.

“Do you have to leave so soon?” his mother asked when he was packed and ready. “Don’t leave me here with that thing.”

“It’s not that bad,” Michael said and hugged her. His mom scrunched her face.

“I don’t like it one bit,” she said. “Don’t ever do that to me.” Michael promised he wouldn’t as she drove him to the airport. He always missed home as soon as he left.

He passed an advertisement for the youtwo when he stepped off the plane.

Michael worked on a program that allowed your phone to have entire conversations in your place. It was called youtwo.

Just the other day, Michael noticed a text dialogue between his youtwo and his friend Ruis about 20th century French film editing. Except for a few artifacts, Michael’s youtwo was a stunning product of linguistic science.

“It’s more than statistics,” Michael explained at a sales meeting. “Users are convinced of its humanity.”

The fluorescence blurred the stockholders’ faces until one smile became many.

Michael recognized a Chopin composition when he came home.

“I don’t know why you play, “ he said to his husband seated at the piano. Then he signed, in front of his face so it interrupted his play and he had to notice, You’re deaf.

The music stopped. Kyle glared at Michael and walked out of the room.

Michael hardly even thought about his husband anymore except that he was rarely there.

Michael had fallen in love with someone he had never met.

It started as a bet. His high-school friend Ruis wanted Michael to see if he could fool a man into thinking Michael was a woman over the Internet. Michael didn’t want to.

“I mean,” Ruis laughed, “You’re effeminate enough already.” Michael gave her a look.

“That’s,” Michael looked for the word, “Sneaky.” Ruis blew a raspberry.

“The youtwo isn’t?” Ruis said. “How do I know when I’m texting you that I’m talking to you, or your youtwo!”

“They’re the same,” Michael defended. “The youtwo is trained on a corpus of the user’s text, so, it’s me.”

“No,” Ruis smiled through her teeth. “It’s not.” Michael wasn’t convinced, so Ruis added, “Think of it as a Turing test.”

They laughed and drank beer in the abandoned observatory. Michael took the bet because whenever he heard the word test, he envisioned the grade, and how much higher it would be than everyone else’s.

Michael had spent years as a linguist for the FBI, running semantic analysis on chat corpora to anticipate sex offenders.

He had learned much about human psychology. The major mistake any sex offender knew to avoid was coming on too strong, too fast. It had to be slow, so grooming could happen.

At first, they talked about nothing.

His name was Chris, twenty-nine. They chatted over text. He was pretty boring, Michael remembered, handsome, assuming the picture was real. They flirted, and it jump started Michael.

Before Chris, Michael slept until noon and struggled to get out of bed. After, he delighted in waking up, and even took up running and yoga for no reason other than to try.

Michael used a picture of Ruis, one where she had her hair done up and her hip off to the side looking ridiculous but fun.

Chris wrote that Michael was gorgeous and even though it was obviously a compliment meant for Ruis, it felt just the same. He was getting attention from the kind of guy he used to fear.

“He likes your picture,” Michael told Ruis. They had been friends since high school algebra and literature. Michael liked binary and she liked we real cool.

They came up with a secret language where vowels could represent one another.

ded je hur wot a sed = did you hear what I said?

Michael used it to confess a crush he had on Ruis’ boyfriend, a skinny jewish boy who couldn’t pronounce invisible and who played soccer every Tuesday. They sat in the stands and Michael would fantasize about kissing him.

One afternoon Ruis pushed scrap paper into Michael’s lap.

Scribbled next to You do not do, you do not do and a list of irregular Spanish conjugations she had written, Ma befrond laks gois.

Michael wrote back, Hew du u knu?

Becos a fund gei purn an hes liptap.

Suddenly Michael lost interest.

In high school, none of his crushes were gay. They were straight. He never made eye contact with them, and it was in the locker room he first learned the mistake of touching one. Michael was trying to get from the locker to the door.

He was square faced with a high edge up and lunged to punch Michael.

“Touch me again,” he threatened.

Kyle had lost his hearing after they were married. Doctors stuck plugs in his ears and prescribed medication, but he looked like a freeway exit you get farther and farther away from. He quit DJing. He sold an unopened Underground Resistance cd for five-hundred dollars. A few days later, Michael had found the money ripped up in a blender.

It had happened suddenly.

The poor guy had been dizzy for days, to the point of sick. Then he woke up and zip, couldn’t hear a sound, just feel its dull throb.

Michael was never sure why they married. Kyle had admitted to loving someone else even before, back that summer where they would make out between the Leland cypress. Kyle would spit in Michael’s ear and suck it out with a chuckle that made Michael cross-eyed. Kyle whispered, “Every little thing I do, you’re on my mind,” and Michael just stood there kissing him.

Kyle spun hip-hop in the black clubs from Crescent Heights down to West 3rd. He arranged tracks in an apartment that smelled like sawdust. Michael would jab Kyle, talk about patterns and math, and Kyle would shrug. He was never a rational guy like Michael. His thoughts didn’t live in logic, but in the pulse that made logic possible.

He worked a day job as a mechanic and would leave giant handprints all over Michael’s textbooks.

“You’re dirty,” Michael would say.

“You better believe it.”

Michael was finishing his dissertation, what would become youtwo, and Kyle always said:

“You’re gonna realize,” then he grabbed his crotch, “You can’t program this.”

He made a song especially for Michael. Soon, Michael’s brain defaulted Kyle.

Michael caught him one night kissing some greasy kid with studded earrings and goatee in a lilac haze of patio smoke. When Kyle found Michael outside the club, Michael shoved his hands in his pockets and couldn’t decide to leave or stay. Kyle smoked a cigarette and convinced Michael to share an uber. He set the path to repeat the perimeter of Hancock Park, and Michael saw the tops of old homes as Kyle strummed Michael on the one and four.

They were married with the photos to prove it. Then Kyle lost his hearing.

Michael bought flash cards and a couple apps to help teach Kyle to sign.

One time Kyle could not remember the gesture for dance. He gave up and stormed from the room.

That night, Michael found him beating his head with his fists, so Michael wrestled his arms to stop him.

Later, barely awake, Kyle grabbed Michael’s wrist.

“Why are you always making me do things I don’t want?”

Since he couldn’t hear the reaction, Kyle said whatever.

It was easy to ignore someone you couldn’t hear.

“Here.” Michael helped Kyle reach for his glasses. Kyle snatched them away. “I got it.”

Michael telecommuted and lived in a suburb. What he admired most was the silver carpet got watered every evening at 1800 and the home owner’s association issued a newsletter first of every month, always with some kind of orthophonographic error. Those were a real treat.

Nothing that wasn’t supposed to happen would.

Chris talked about the weather, safe topic to break ice. Michael realized he must be a nice guy if he was willing to talk to a random stranger about nothing in particular. Michael started to like him.

About a week later, Kyle was bouncing silverware off the walls because he couldn’t find a fork. “I can’t hear any of it,” he said when Michael tried to stop him. “Go back in your hole.”

So Michael did, and he found out Chris loved Escape from L.A just like Michael. Michael forgot about Kyle and the noise. Chris wrote that he didn’t know a girl could be so into action movies. Michael felt sick.

“I won the test,” Michael insisted. “He thinks I’m a woman. I’m done.”

“Okay, okay,” Ruis relented. “No harm.”

“No.” Michael shook his head. “There is harm.” He had begun to think about Chris incessantly. “It’s fucked up to lie like that.” Ruis looked confused and did eyebrow math.

“So… you don’t want the money?”

“Keep it,” Michael intoned.

One night Kyle was gone without a note or trace, probably to Seattle. Michael was busy writing expression code for a new youtwo feature. Michael wondered if one day Kyle would leave him and his thoughts wandered to Chris.

Chris asked if Michael wanted to watch Memento and Michael was happy for the distraction. They synced the video files and it felt like a date, but that was stupid so he kept it to himself.

Michael pointed out a cut where Teddy says you think he’s still here? and his mouth is clearly not moving. Never caught that, Chris wrote. Good eye.

Michael swelled with pride.

Kyle never cared for Michael’s trivia. They would watch movies with Kyle’s feet set on Michael’s lap. Kyle would work them around the more he lost interest. Michael might point out continuity errors to keep his attention, but Kyle would tell him point blank, “I really don’t care.”

Plus, now the captions had to be turned on. They got in the way, and when the caption really sucked, it just read no audible dialogue.

Couldn’t they just leave it blank for the same effect?

Chris pointed out a discontinuity with Leonard’s tattoo SG13-71U and what it should have been, SG13-7IU. Michael was impressed. Good eye, Michael wrote. Chris gave a =).

They talked for hours until Kyle tossed his car keys and slammed the screen door.

He asked Chris to hold on, that his friend had called, which wasn’t a complete lie, since your spouse should also be your friend.

Michael found Kyle in the kitchen gulping orange juice from the container.

“Where ya been?” Michael spun his right hand. Kyle finished the orange juice and sucked in a breath of air.

“The fuck you always ask me where I been?” He was livid and quickly calmed down. “What do it matter, I was out.”

Michael had a high school crush on a light-skinned black boy who sat next to him on the bus. He always read a different manga. Michael thought it was so cool. Samurais. Aliens. Computers.

Michael tried to get it so they would sit together, but then the guy’s parents bought him a ’59 Chevy and Michael hardly saw him at all.

Then he caught the guy kissing a girl once in that Chevy. He brooded for weeks. If only he had noticed me, Michael thought. That could be me in that Chevy.

Michael told Chris sorry, his friend was having a rough go of it, needed advice. Chris said he was tired, but it was fun and they should do it again.

Michael dreamt Chris picked him up in a ’59 Chevy. Michael was the only passenger allowed.

Michael got free tickets to CES through his job, and Kyle was having a good day and went on the five-hour drive with him.

It was CES for sure, because Michael couldn’t tell the coffee lines from refugee lines.

Kyle marveled over earbuds that could bring hearing to the deaf. Then he saw the speculative price tag.

Michael had to push past three undergrads in plaid and low-rise to see the Mariah Carey and Madonna replicas. Kyle emerged and hooked Michael in a neck lock before letting him go.

The replicas could speak with a combination of Michael’s youtwo software, while another company built the text-to-speech mechanism, which had recently won awards for its startling reproduction of human language—although it still had problems with agglutinative languages like Hungarian, because the polysyllabic inflectional morphology of those languages introduced an amazing amount of perplexity that TTS automata were unequipped to handle.

“My dad got one,” Michael signed to Kyle. Michael touched his chin to his thumb to say grandmother.

His grandmother had been ninety-eight. Lived for a century to sit in a rocking chair facing eggshell sheetrock.

“What does she think about all day?” his mother asked. Michael pictured one of those halls where the doors all led back to the same room, and the hall curved infinity it kept going so far.

“You’re avoiding me,” his grandmother accused Michael during a visit.

“I have no idea,” Michael would say to his mother. His mother had come up with the nickname that thing for her, and it made Michael laugh. His mom liked the strangers in the grocery line more than his grandmother.

His grandmother was so out of practice speaking she could hardly finish a word without stuttering through it five times. She liked farm stories, and, Michael did you know that the cows could be friends with the donkeys?

Talking to her felt like volunteer work.

“She did not speak to her son for four years,” his mother had said several times, always emphasizing four. “What mother does that?”

Kyle looked bored, signed the holy trinity, walked off and bumped into one of the undergrads in a backwards cap.

The guy expected an apology and when he didn’t get it he mumbled fucking nigger and Kyle just kept walking where he wanted.

By evening, full of holoscreens and tomorrow, Michael wandered the hotel lobby. A group of girls in pixie skirts and cone heels were on about a club. Kyle agreed to go only if his new friends could come too. Michael said fine and they packed into a car with some artists and a guy who smelled awful. Michael kept accidentally crossing eyes with a girl whose sclera were blacked out, or maybe she was staring at him. Then she sighed.

“I wish people would just get the hint, like why do I have to say it.” Her friend broke into laughs. Michael was uncomfortable and texted Chris, y r ppl annoying and he texted back a little while later, yah they suck. Michael snickered.

When he looked up Kyle was staring at Michael from the corner of his eyes.

“Wish I knew what’s got you in stitches.”

Your nose could feel the bassline hump the floor a block away. Kyle danced a line for the bathroom with his hands tucked in some guy’s pockets. He emerged with his eyes burning holes in Michael, grabbed Michael and they grinded the throb with the Reebok, hip to waist. Michael dreamt of the song, round and round I go, where I’ll stop, only you know, I guess it’s all in my mind.

Middle of the night Michael saw SG13-7IU in the mirror, blinked his eyes. The microwave’s TRATS 223RP instruction was inverted like alien code.

Sunrise woke Michael, but Kyle was already up staring at earbuds in front of their hotel window.

Kyle was in a good enough mood that Michael bought a seashell from a souvenir shack and held it to Kyle’s ear. Can you hear the ocean? he signed, and Michael thought he witnessed a smile.

Kyle’s forehead smudged the window on the drive home. He watched the cactus redshift. His foot would not stop shaking and his fingers were tight. Michael had been fiddling with the satellite radio when Kyle punched the console and cracked the screen.

The next morning, Michael could not find Kyle. He often disappeared for weeks on end. He would hitchhike to Seattle, where someone he loved more lived.

He teared up one evening watching an advertisement for wind power, and it so happened that Chris was online.

“I don’t know what they’re talking about half the time,” Michael’s grandmother used to say. She was so old that even mundane talk eluded her.

Would Michael get so old that one day he wouldn’t even be able to carry on a conversation?

The last time Michael had seen her, that thanksgiving she hobbled the kitchen carrying bowls from the table to the sink. His mom eyed her over the brim of her glasses. With a look of disgust, his mother waited for her to drop the plates and glasses. His grandmother had fallen just the month earlier and broken her arm, and his mother was waiting for it to happen again with a hidden delight.

“I think she fell on purpose,” Michael’s mother said. “She wants attention.”

His grandmother had not been invited to Michael’s wedding, because his parents thought that she would withhold money from them when she died if she knew Michael had married a man.

“She’s just backwards,” his mother would say. “Better she doesn’t know.”

His grandmother pulled him off to the side every chance she got, whenever he visited, which was infrequent, maybe once a year, because he was very busy and preferred solitude. She showed him chiwara statues and clay masks from Kush, and photos of her standing beside prehistoric plants she ferried from death’s brink, and she would point and say, “plants tell you what they want,” and that you could always rely on that.

It would be refreshing if people were like that, Michael thought.

She showed him photographs from 1996, but Michael did not believe it was the same person.

She wanted to talk so much that she agreed with everything you said, so thankful for the company, which reminded Michael of those telephone recordings they used to have when you would call to pay a bill, and they would ask if you’d like to leave feedback on your experience afterward, like:

Right, let’s rate how the programmed voice made you feel.

“Where do you think the most magical place in the world is?” she asked him one night. Most places looked best in photos, and then he got there, and he wondered why he made the trip in the first place. Michael shrugged.

“Dunno,” he said, too disinterested to complete a sentence.

“I don’t think your parents like me,” she said to Michael once from the veranda. He sighed. He was the only person in the family who paid her any attention. Her casita was being built, a requirement from Michael’s parents who could no longer stand the sight of her and wanted her to move out of the main house.

“She expects us to entertain her,” his mother would say. “If only you knew how much I put up with her.”

It was one spring Michael and his father were looking at old science fiction films on IMDB that his mother came in the room, out of breath and complaining about his grandmother when his father yelled enough that Michael thought he might have a heart attack, “I wish she would hurry up and die.”

“You come visit me anytime,” his grandmother said to him.

The next time he did, she was dead.

With Kyle gone, Michael hardly left his room. He went to the gym in the morning to run, sat at his computer while he reviewed analytics for the youtwo, and talked to Chris.

Michael had gotten so close to Chris that he would ask questions like—and with all the seriousness you would normally save for pressing the president on his plans for nuclear deterrence—Do you like kalamata olives?

They talked about artificial intelligence taking over the White House.

Chris sent him messages in binary. 00111100 00110011.

Michael expressed his fear for public bathrooms: a deep-seated phobia of small tiles and urine, mixed with a primal anxiety related to filth and taboo desire.

Chris told him that he donated money to Planned Parenthood, and Michael was so impressed.

What a stand up guy.

In undergraduate, there was this one boy Michael had a daylong crush on because the guy had flung his hands up and said, “Fuck a feminist,” and there was something sexy about the way he flaunted his maleness.

Like he knew he was privileged due to it and didn’t care.

He had cybersex with Chris one night that it was raining so hard you would’ve thought it was programmed. It was cold, and Michael was fiddling with the alarm because he could never remember the code. Afterward they talked about the rain and Michael wrote a poem about it:

When I rain, I pour—

But when I pour, I’m not raining.

What am I?

Do you covet things? Chris asked afterward. Michael didn’t understand.

I don’t think I do, he wrote back.

We should give up all attachments, Chris wrote. Our attachments will only bring us pain.

What if you love someone? Michael asked.

Love is selfish, Chris responded.

奇妙な未来

Michael had originally referred to the youtwo as KYLE, which was of course a reference to ELIZA. Michael trained the bot through word chunks called n-grams.

With unigrams, KYLE sounded nonsensical:

Months because the and issue of year next September we did you like

With bigrams, you witnessed some connective tissue between chunks—

Last week through the process of Hudson corporation would seem to complete the implementation.

—you still knew that the thing you were talking to was just that, a thing.

Trigrams gave you the uncanny sense that you might not be talking to a machine, but you probably were, because the relationship between constituents was still lacking or hazy:

They also point to a six billion dollar transaction. This indeed will be what they tell you. You want to?

Finally, mixed with pattern matching and entity recognition, quadrigrams provided the illusion of speaking to a human being:

Amanda, maybe you could advise me on what to do? I have been wondering about that lately. And I know you told me you were a good listener. I could really use that right now.

It pained him to think of his grandmother, who was always interested in hearing about his work when no one else was, so much that she agreed to be a subject in his research.

“You just speak into the microphone,” Michael explained.

It was late one night when news of the protests was everywhere, he was only calmed by the thought of words. Beautiful words that had meaning only because people wanted them to, and that they would fight over, and fall in love with.

It was a syntax textbook and it went:

In (29a), we have the same kind of headedness. Very is the head and quickly is the head and we have two heads and each has their own head and this is called hierarchical structure.

It was subliminal with it and he suddenly thought of giving Chris head. It made him fantasize for the rest of the night and when he woke he smelled clean clothes.

Kyle had been gone for nearly four months. Michael wondered if he would ever see Kyle again. In his absence, Michael felt a pit grow in his stomach.

Would Michael wait eternity with sheetrock?

Michael could only escape the thoughts through Chris. Maybe he was a monk, Michael thought. He donated to charities, went on for hours about the blind, and said he overtipped service workers because, after all, who else would do their jobs?

How could Michael match his virtue?

But Chris had stopped messaging Michael. Sure, there were intermittent messages about the weather, but nothing of any substance. One conversation in particular bothered Michael. He had asked:

How’s your mom?

Chris’ response:

It’s so nice out today!

The non-sequitur made Michael feel empty. Their text message history was a never-ending dialogue, where you couldn’t find a single period because why would two lovers end anything?

And here it was, ruined.

Michael insisted on meeting Chris. He sent message after message, and after days of no response, Michael grew sick. He called Ruis and they watched movies where the soundtrack had words like it must have been love and moving on and baby he’s a liar.

It was the next day when Michael’s heart jumped and Chris said yeah they should meet and they agreed on the Mulholland memorial.

Michael’s heart was in his throat. He could hardly move his legs. What would Chris say? What would their friendship become afterward?

Chris looked like the man Michael had seen in his photos. He was small, and wore clothes that squeezed him like a teenager. His grin made Michael feel like he was filling out government forms. Sign here. Black Ink Only.

Michael’s blood rushed. Here was the man he had been talking to for nearly two years. Michael came to trust him more than Kyle. But could Chris forgive Michael for lying about being a woman?

“I’m so sorry I was lying to you,” Michael said. Chris shrugged and offered a sympathetic smile.

“Oh,” he said, like gravity was still the same, so why fret, “it’s no problem.”

Michael could not have been happier. Chris was a very enlightened person.

But he acted differently in person than he did online. Maybe it’s just his way, Michael thought. They walked down the street and talked about their day just as they had been doing for so long on their phones. But Chris was silent, and had little to add, and Michael thought—maybe he really is a monk.

It struck Michael as odd that Chris couldn’t remember Michael’s birthday—he had told Michael happy birthday twice, so he knew.

And then Michael felt funny because Chris couldn’t remember what Michael did, even though Michael talked about it every week because he loved his job, and that was one thing he liked about Chris so much—he was always so inquisitive about his field.

“Wait,” Chris said and stopped Michael. “You created the youtwo?” Michael beamed with pride. They had spoken about this many times before—why was this news? But Michael ate it up.

“I did,” he said.

Chris coughed and his face grew grim.

“I should tell you something,” Chris muttered. Michael was still smiling. He had met the love of his life, in person, and here they were.

“What is it?” Michael asked. What could it possibly be? Michael had gotten through the worst—confess a lie and be absolved.

“I actually,” Chris struggled for the words, “haven’t ever really,” like he had thought of how to say it for quite some time, “talked to you,” but couldn’t figure out how to arrange them in such a way that wouldn’t make it feel like a punch to the stomach. “Before.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” Chris added, like finishing a math equation, “it was right after we first started talking. I sort of knew you were a guy? But I didn’t want to be mean, so I turned my youtwo on and you know how it is, you don’t pay attention to the conversations that thing has.”

Michael felt like someone had just removed all the alphabet’s vowels and the leftovers fit together wrong.

“So it wasn’t you? All this time?” Michael’s smile melted.

Chris looked apologetic.

“I turned the features off so it would only talk about superficial stuff,” Chris said. “But it was too late, by that time you had been talking to it for like...a year?”

Michael was suddenly frustrated at the little girl across the street blabbering incoherently.

“I’m totally willing to become friends with you. I don’t really know you, but, why not?”

But he looked like the Alzheimer’s patient trying to make heads or tails out of family members, and Michael knew there was nothing there.

Michael thought and left his grandmother. When he fell asleep, he got home and closed his eyes.

How had he been so stupid? How had he spent the past two years of his life involved with a text program?

One of his own creation at that.

And all those talks about how awful people were, and how people were so awful, and how people were so mean, and here Chris was, complaining about the politician in one breath and matching their duplicity in the same.

Except it wasn’t Chris. It was a program.

But it was Chris. A facsimile of him.

But Chris did not know who Michael was, so it wasn’t.

Or it was.

Michael had a nightmare sometime the next week where his mother had died and his father replicated her, and then she scratched her face off. He called his father the next day and said he would be flying out for thanksgiving.

It was a few nights before the trip that the alarm went off in the middle of the night. Michael jolted awake and fell to the floor. It was gray and the tile was cold, and he heard static. Michael held his hands to his ears and stumbled into the hall. When he got into the living room a dark figure was sitting at the dinner table.

The alarm shook the house. Michael rubbed his eyes and leaned on the wall. A sliver of television light lit Kyle up. He twisted his keys around his fingers.

I thought you changed the locks, Kyle signed. The noise was so loud Michael could feel his ears itch. He scrambled to input the alarm code when he felt hands reach out for his neck and pull him away from the wall console and knock him to the floor. Kyle’s hands wrapped tightly around Michael’s neck until Michael closed his eyes and could feel sleep settling in, a light headed and happy sleep.

When he woke, Kyle had packed his things and was sat square in the front room. Michael’s neck felt tender and his voice was shallow.

Where are you going? Michael signed. Maybe Michael would never have all of Kyle’s attention.

I’m leaving, he signed and stood. Michael could feel anger rising inside him. He thought of the cruelest thing he could say, but it just wasn’t in him.

I fell in love with someone, Michael signed. Then he put his hand over his heart and made a pitter-patter effect.

Who? Kyle signed.

Michael pointed to himself.

I fell in love with myself, he signed. Kyle nodded and pulled his sunglasses down.

When Michael had gone home for Thanksgiving, he could not find his grandmother’s replica.

“That thing was too weird,” his mom said. “We put her in the garage.” Michael felt a lump in his throat. They ate dinner and Michael cleaned the plates. They asked where Kyle was and Michael said he didn’t know, and his father invited him into his study where they looked through old landscaping designs.

His sister Elaine was seated in front of an old 16-bit video game, and the music sounded sweet and clear. He stroked her hair and she fidgeted.

The pixels danced. The colors were magenta, cyan, rayon, and fuchsia. Michael got lost in the patterns of graphics, the little tree sprites cut and pasted until a screen boundary told them to stop.

At half past midnight he wandered into the hallway and down past the kitchen, where the pendant lighting made him think of kitchens in department stores, no one cooks in them, and he descended the steps into the garage.

His grandmother’s replica had been propped in the corner. He pulled blankets and wrapping paper and adjusted her head until it fit the socket. He fixed stray hairs and patted her clothes. She had been buried in a pair of frumpy jeans, his mother had called them frumpy. His grandmother had always said, what use did she have to look good for anybody?

“The whole world’s trying to look good,” she said once.

There was a storm outside and the rain splattered the window squares of the garage. Michael looked at his phone and all it said was the time.

The rain painted the garage gray. Michael hadn’t realized how much time he had spent there and he turned to his grandmother’s replica and asked, “Where do you think the most magical place in the world is?”

#THE DEAD ARE REPLICATED #BOTS HAVE ENTIRE CONVERSATIONS IN OUR PLACE #ARE WE THE SUM OF OUR WORDS?

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moreweirdfuture-blog · 8 years ago

Text

DUST (奇妙な未来 # 002)

Her flight to Oregon was long and boring, and the only detail Marris remembered was a message a previous passenger had scribbled on the back of a coffee-stained aviation catalogue:

eighty percent of dust is human skin

For the rest of the day, she pictured a military grade laser aimed down from space with the explicit instruction to fry her epidermis.

Two minutes after Marris’ plane landed in Oregon she was sent to fix a weather anomaly. The sandstorm had grown from passing tumbleweed to full blown gale. Marris pulled her jacket over her head and ducked low to keep the sand torrent from stinging her cheeks.

“How long?” she yelled from over the roar of sand and wind. “How long has it been like this?” She covered her mouth with her sleeve.

The western obelisk extended far into the sky and was a signal repeater for the intelligent sand. Power outages had already been reported across Eugene.

“Since yesterday evening,” the technician shouted back. The storm could calm itself within seconds and resume as quickly. Marris took a soil sample during one such moment of calm and tinkered with the obelisk’s settings. But the storm picked up as if to resist, so the team bounded across the barren field and crammed into a tiny Honda. The car shook violently, but not enough to arrest her anxiety.

Months ago she had been hired as a climatologist to replace the woman who preceded her. She could be fired for any reason. We reserve the right. Those words hugged Marris’ chest until she felt a tight and narrow pressure constrain her breath. It didn’t help that a coworker had asked her to identify the differences between D-camphor and R-camphor. She became so paralyzed with stupidity that she wondered if it was a test whose results would resurface as evidence in front of the jury empaneled to judge her merit. She had spent that entire week tinkering with the weather code to prove to herself that she was capable.

She was returned to her apartment, a squat yellow building situated downtown between the flat freeway and junk riverbed. Her room was cold with one large bay window. She imagined she could disappear into it and spend the rest of her days gawking at the crease of garbage across the street. Outside, the sandstorm blotted the sky like an insect swarm advancing in startling subtlety.

It was too late to do more work, but work was all Marris could think of to keep occupied. A layer of grime covered her belongings despite having wiped them down just an hour earlier. How much dirt could there possibly be in the world?

She emailed a geologist at the nearby university and reviewed the weather code for clues about the disturbance. She fell asleep to a stream about desertification. The entire hotel jolted in temper tantrum and she woke.

She had been dreaming of her husband and figured he was probably painting at that moment. Her husband liked to wake up early and walk down to the ocean to paint.

“World’s empty in the morning,” her husband said. “Makes me think of ancient times.” It too gave Marris pleasure to imagine a world before human ego.

The apartment intercom sounded and removed her lucidity. The smooth voice reminded everyone to stay calm. A Barometrix advertisement played, and she fell asleep to the blur of smiling faces and children skipping underneath vaulted domes.

She unpacked her things while she ate bread and chocolate and the television played an old horror movie where the world was on the brink of collapse because temperatures had risen and temperate regions became price grabs. Her phone sounded early the next morning, long after the television signal had dropped.

Marris met the geologist outside a coffee shop near the university. Bits of sand hung in the wind like tissue butterflies.

The geologist sipped his coffee and eyed the vial. He promised to return the analysis results within a couple days.

On her walk back to the apartment, her doctor called. Marris had forgotten all about the therapy visits that Barometrix required of employees. “I will,” she said. As soon as she answered, the city moaned like the corpse rising from dust. Lights blew out in cascade, and for a few minutes, Marris stared at the sky, empty except for a black wall hanging on the fringe.

When the power returned, an update from the technicians revealed the obelisk was functioning properly, which confused Marris. She was certain the sandstorm originated from a miscommunication between the obelisk and intelligent sand.

She phoned her husband and they talked for an hour. She was cautious to fall asleep, as though if she weren’t careful the awful dreams would creep in.

The next morning she was driven to the power distributor, where the software technicians led her around a building with a low, beige ceiling and every window faced a multi-level parking garage anchored by kaleidoscopes of abelia. They tweaked the intelligent sand’s conversion behavior and updated its firmware. The city had grown impatient, but within days, the weather programming returned to normal, and the regular rain and growth schedule resumed. Marris relaxed for the first time since she had arrived.

A school friend phoned that he was moving west for work, so they met at the airport and went for lunch. Lorne had a narrow, tall body with a quick mouth and indestructible, black hair, and a lazy way of smiling, like he wasn’t really trying and was genuine and nice with it and had nothing to hide. His eyes stayed verged on eureka, and it unsettled Marris, like he was always one step ahead of her in a lemniscate. In all her memories of him, he was standing in front of Bunsen burners and chemical compounds. Because life was a competition, Marris was glad that they lost touch not long after she found work as a climatologist. Lorne preferred classrooms, formulas, and abstract this and we conclude that, and just the idea of walking into an ivory tower of whiteboards and Rosetta reminded her of his egg headed friends who made her mad as hell.

She met them once at a get together in Pullman. They gawked at her like she was an animal of too questionable a cachet to be enshrined at their zoo. They discussed stochastic environment models and n-gram weather plotting. She tried to change the topic, but one had the audacity to say, “I guess you know enough to smile and nod,” and she never liked them since. Marris could have sworn she caught Lorne laugh at the comment. Probably he hadn’t, but he certainly didn’t say much about it, other than, “Aren’t they the type?”

That got to her more than anything.

She realized he had been talking for long enough that she couldn’t remember when she stopped paying attention.

“We’re getting married so we can buy that second house,” Lorne said. Marris felt herself flatten. “He doesn’t love me,” he insisted. “It’s an economic arrangement.”

“How about the job?” she asked. Lorne dabbed his mouth with a napkin and smiled.

“That’s why I wanted to meet,” Lorne said. “We will be working together soon.” He leaned back and Marris’ skin began to itch. “So,” his way of beginning an explanation annoyed Marris to death, because whatever followed would be just as coherent without, “Barometrix is looking to expand its product line, and the presentation I gave last fall on advanced methods for cellular conversion must have caught their attention.”

She wanted to go back in time. She had staked Oregon out on her own. For all it mattered to her, she had created the damn state, and here he was gerrymandering it.

They paid and walked to the parking lot. Pink hibiscus choked the wet asphalt. Out of nowhere, Lorne turned around and drew in a breath.

“Don’t be unhappy, Marris.” Marris couldn’t figure out for the life of her why he would assume she was unhappy, so she asked what he meant. He searched for the meaning in a paint splotch, like you just couldn’t wait to hear the read on that one, and said, “I had a dream I could breathe underwater. Isn’t that weird?”

“Yeah,” she said and nearly slipped on a petal.

“It made so much sense, so I got up and,” he put his head under a make-believe faucet, “of course I couldn’t—“

“That is such a strange dream.”

“—But I was the only one who knew about this secret that had evaded science,” he said and grinned. “No one else but me knew.” He let her go, like he was ready to die and didn’t need company for the journey across. “I was the only one.”

She got in her car and watched his vroom the corner and disappear.

Marris felt gross the rest of the day, like all the world was running sideways and she missed the memo.

She liked reading and spent a few hours with Time to get her mind right. She enjoyed the article about a new tier schedule for Internet prices, and another about soaring oxygen costs in Indochina, where the author went into excruciating detail about dirt.

An internal company memo circulated that Lorne Jimenez was the new head of product management and she read a listicle placing Barometrix as number one in a top three list of climate conditioning companies that year.

She went for a swim in the rooftop pool. The air had grown sticky with sand and she ate avocado with baked egg and cantaloupe. She covered her face with a book, and hours later everything was sparkles. She peeled the book from her eyes and fixated on her highlighting: it wasn’t until…2024…scientists… manipulate precipitation…reverse…desertification. The air still smelled like wet jasmine and straight black clotted her periphery. It frightened her to imagine a world where the weather was not programmed. What would you do if you had no water? Pray for rain?

A pen pal of hers from Zimbabwe messaged that he had become enrolled in a climatology course, and Marris felt a surge of pride. She had been fostering his interest in the field, and it was all the news she needed to get her to smile.

A dull hum caught her attention the next day—a rattle of glasses, passing conversation, wheels crunching gravel, and it played together so well Marris felt a hidden smartness, like all of the random noises you heard in your life might actually add up to mean something if you really wanted. The therapist would be delighted to hear such a positive remark. Marris got a kick out of defying people’s expectations. Each time she did, she was proving someone a fool.

“Is it useful to know that?” the therapist asked during her visit. Marris always asked, “what’s wrong with me?” as a joke. It really bothered her that the therapist had not picked up on the habit after four months. The room was warm and a dim white light cut through the blinds, a paste-white, mechanical glare that made Marris sleepy, like she was being examined under a microscope and there was nothing to do but close her eyes and wait for it to be over.

The therapist was a young woman who always looked like you were one second away from telling her the best story since Moses. She was pretty and it bothered Marris, because she did not trust pretty people: how could anything bad happen to the good looking? Marris had hoped for an older man who would intone “Mmm! I see,” no matter what Marris said, and Marris would arrive at her own solutions, and he would smile and nod, all the while tracking her success with a wise detachment. He would compare her life to a molecule, or the weather, and suddenly it would all make sense.

But Doctor Parnham was not like this at all. She seemed treadmill in every way, and Marris knew it was true because of the family photos all over the walls, all of them smiling in front whatever. Marris wondered why she would be forced to endure it.

Marris considered mentioning her epiphany, but she was irritated enough to hope being uncooperative might be the most frustrating thing for a therapist, like all that school time would amount to nothing in the face of disinformation.

The therapist scribbled responses to questions on a tablet, but paused when she asked how Marris’ husband was. Marris responded, “Fine, I spoke with him night before.”

The therapist lifted her head and looked inquisitive, like this was a topic they had discussed and resolved in a previous session, but Marris didn’t care. In fact, she savored the look of indignation that crossed the therapist’s face.

“How was he?”

“Fine,” Marris said, hoping to avoid the topic. The therapist tapped her pen against her clipboard, mentally practicing a response.

“Can I ask what you—“

Marris’ phone rang and she excused herself to answer it. The signal to the power distributor had failed without warning and the city sat in chilly stillness. She apologized even though she was not sorry and left.

They packed into the helicopter, along with Lorne and a few other technicians scrambling with code on screens. The ground pulled away and Marris’ stomach sunk. The chopper deafened her, and the cacti shrunk like pygmies, and the brown bougainvillea kept dying everywhere they flew, and she saw rectangles of blue on and on in the opposite direction, getting microscopic until they were gone. Lorne’s hair whipped about and he smiled to calm her.

When they broke over a mountain range, the helicopter hovered smartly for a few moments, and Marris felt a supreme stillness, maybe the best there ever would be, before the pilot jumped. A plume of sand and glass zapped the obelisk, slicing it like glue and mucus straight through until the structure toppled sideways and made Marris’ heart thud like it was the first and last kiss. But it was Lorne’s expression that shocked Marris the most. The rest of them were yelling jesus this and mother of god that, while Lorne kept mumbling under his breath, “A man is but the product of his thoughts,” over and over, and it gave Marris a chill to hear him so religious.

A national weather advisory kept people indoors and Marris couldn’t keep a connection because the old power grid had not been used in decades. Marris stared at lines of weather code for five hours. Her apartment rumbled. Her contacts fused with her eyes until blinking just left her blurry. Pizza crust and napkin wedges got all excited when the geologist called and insisted they meet within the hour. Marris rushed to meet him. To make it in time, she stubbed her toe and hopped from the apartment in mismatched socks.

They met near midnight at his lab, a musty prefab structure that a passing philosophy major might mistake for maintenance. Every few minutes, the geologist looked behind him and patted his khakis. He could not input the passcode to the laboratory correctly until his third try. Marris imagined the alarms that would sound and it made her armpits sweat. A few more turns and Marris arrived in a room that reminded her of Lorne, stuffed with scales and incubators, a wall of wilted plants, stacks of chemistry books and grimy tech magazines, fluorescent tube lights and rows of soil carefully labeled and stocked in petri dishes.

The geologist prepared a glass slide and cover for the specimen, and it clicked when he set it beneath the microscope.

“Ordinarily,” he adjusted the microscope lens, “this could wait until morning.” He mulled his beard. His voice got conspiratorial. “But this isn’t ordinary.” He encouraged Marris to look, and Marris saw the sand grain close-up, like her husband’s paintings, big circles of amber and spirited rivulets of gray and blue, all lightning and motion like they had an appointment in Nantucket and were about to shoot off that way at any moment.

“This,” he explained, “is a normal intelligent sand molecule.” He introduced a heat source and the sand liquefied. He removed the slide and prepared another specimen. “Now, a sample from the soil you provided me,” the geologist said in clinical cadence. He provided the same source of heat, but the sand remained immobile. This contradicted the behavior Marris had encountered in the weather code.

“Is there something wrong with the conversion code?” Marris asked.

“I thought so,” the geologist explained. “But watch…” his voice hung in the air. He stared at the wall and nothing happened for half a minute, except him mumbling C’mon like a criminal flirt. He concentrated like he was trying to move air, and the entire slide leapt as if propelled by thought. “Someone’s re-written its conversion mechanism.”

Marris covered her mouth so the scientist couldn’t see her terror. She thanked the geologist, who insisted they talk more, but she hurried from the lab and down the windy corridors, forgetting where she was every other minute, too busy emailing Anitha to schedule a meeting for the next morning.

On the taxi home, she discovered sections of code she remembered writing months earlier—edits to what catalyzed the intelligent sand. Not heat, to counteract drought and deforestation, but thought—more specifically, the language of thought: mentalese.

She called Lorne, but his phone went to voicemail. She was rushed with nerves. She needed to keep this a secret and not disclose her own involvement. Maybe if she kept quiet, someone else would be blamed?

She found research articles filled with words like thought ordered mental expression. She arrived home so delirious with concentration that she jumped when her phone buzzed. She set it between her neck and shoulder, and her husband’s voice bled through. But her husband must’ve been about some nonsense, though, because she remembered none of it. She woke to the wah, wah, wah, busy tone, realizing only after wiping the dried drool off her flannel that she was late.

The company headquarters absorbed the pinnacle of a craggy rise near the ocean, tucked behind the freeway and bound by dead juniper, blazed from a firestorm years earlier. The sun shimmered off the glass, and no one dared walk on the lawn that became intelligent sand the closer you got to the beach. Marris swiped her employee badge and took the escalator several accordion style intervals to the third floor. It bothered her that everything about the building seemed inescapable, from its design, from the way people nodded at you, to the denim and plaid, and the espresso that made Marris want to plow through time like a bulldozer, forehead first, and hope she might emerge lobotomized, anything to escape the copy-paste mannequins she had been led to believe were human.

Her supervisor was a gray-faced woman named Anitha who had the habit of staring straight ahead like she was off somewhere else whenever she was under stress.

She did not bother explaining that it had been her own desire to tinker with the weather code that was causing all of the disturbances.

The group of them packed into an elevator and it hummed its descent beneath the rock. When they reached sufficient depth, the walls illuminated in hexagons. Lorne delivered Marris to a room where she equipped protective gear while scientists in smocks pressed buttons that flung sand sideways and upwards, and it turned into rain, and then glass, and melted, and then tiny sinks with oblong holes absorbed the pellets through plastic tubes.

The sandstorm had already cost the city one million dollars’ worth of damage. Much of Oregon and Washington succumbed to quicksand and sinkholes. Gas lines had broken and homes caved in after severing from their foundations. Seismologists anticipated a magnitude-9.0 earthquake, which, when combined with the sandstorm, the sloshing, sliding, shaking and flooding, the region would upend, paving the road for the final wave, where the real destruction would begin.

They were under direct pressure from the government to fix the issue immediately, and in case Marris forgot, screens throughout the laboratory hallways broadcast news of the growing storm until Anitha shut them off and mumbled, “not helping.”

The pressure made her fret, and Lorne was as useful as a map of your hand.

It seemed to Marris that he was purposefully sabotaging the process, but she couldn’t prove it, just that he was slow as molasses and didn’t seem to be doing much.

When showed the culprit code, he examined it with his chin set into his hand like the French sculpture and said, “Ah.”

An hour later Marris found him in the experimental chambers looking like he had discovered how to turn water into money. He pointed at her when she entered. A grain of sand popped through her protective armband and stung her skin. “Ow!” she exclaimed and rubbed at the sting. “My God,” he said and chuckled.

By sunrise, Anitha emerged with Lorne, who looked like he had just been forced to swallow medicine, and Anitha waved her hand. “It’s fixed,” she said, and within moments the sandstorm receded, and Marris felt the Earth’s intestinal grumble come to a sudden and final halt.

Anitha and Lorne met with a team of lawyers to advise how to explain the anomaly to the National Weather Administration. The meeting adjourned after hours of legalese, where plausible and accountability were the only words Marris could make out.

Before she left, Marris found Lorne smoking in front of a hexagonal pulse with his hair unraveled, right next to the elevator.

“The rest of the team headed home.” Marris noticed her echo. He rubbed his chin like he had taken a wrong turn.

“I saw a man yesterday,” he finally said and politely coughed smoke to the side, “who looked like he wouldn’t know how to open a door if it said ‘push here’ on the front.” He smiled. Marris blinked. An exit sign loomed above his head.

“I’ve been up since the sundial,” Marris said. “Call it a night?” She gathered her belongings to leave. Then he looked her square in the face and it felt like skilled karate.

“Do you ever wonder what it would feel like to burn?” She thought it was a strange question and she paused.

“I don’t like to think about that,” Marris said and suddenly got sick. Lorne’s eyes thinned.

“Oh, right,” he wiped his face, “your husband died in that,” he exhaled and searched for the word, “firestorm,” he put the cigarette out in the wall, “a few years back.”

The air evaporated from her lungs.

“I hope you’re not mad,” Lorne said and stared at the wall.

“How did you—“

“I looked at your psychology evaluation in the company database.” He smiled. “How else would I have known?” He pushed himself off the wall. “I’m so tired,” he admitted, “so,” he cleared his throat, “agreed, let’s call it a night.” He walked past her, and the pulsing white wall lamp hurt her eyes.

Marris had not realized Doctor Parnham submitted her evaluation. She looked at her employee profile in the Barometrix database when she returned home and it read patient grief over husband death unresolved recommend leave of absence and she wanted to be done with that doctor then and there.

Marris sunk into her bathtub and let the water rise to her neck. It was so hot she grimaced to withstand it. The popcorn ceiling glared at her, and she wondered how long it would take for the ceiling to disintegrate into nothing if left up to time. She fell asleep in the tub and dreamt her husband visited, but there was nowhere to sit with the place submerged in water. Her husband walked out, flying the five hours whence he came all the while texting her about how they would never meet again. Marris woke up short of breath and exhausted. She immediately emailed him a synopsis of the strange dream and ignored the return-to-sender failure notice.

She feared returning to work and the ensuing conversation with Anitha. She had already made plans to fly back home and disappear under a mountain of sheets. She played the different scenarios over in her head.

But when she returned the next day, Lorne was gone, and the headquarters looked like a tooth hole. Half the building had collapsed in on itself.

FBI agents and news reporters cast their shadows like a parallelogram. Anitha was caught answering questions, and a film crew stuffed microphones everywhere.

One of the detectives spread his hands wide. “Sorry ma’am,” he said. She showed her employee badge and he grumbled into a two-way radio until a large man with short mustache appeared from a car.

She was escorted home in a Lincoln with tinted windows and was instructed to stay in her apartment. The news broadcast Lorne’s face, and the only words Marris could make out before she got sick was wanted and terrorist.

By ten, the night had gotten dry and cold. She smelled sand and beach on the horizon.

“Excuse me,” Marris said to an officer standing outside of her place. She did not have solution for her contacts and could not remove them properly without. The officer smoked a cigarette and put it out on the patio outside of her unit and shook his head no as if to tell her to go away. She took her contacts out and blinked—she could see nothing, like the world was all one blob of color.

She fell asleep near midnight with the television flashing across her face.

A car alarm woke her, a nonstop honk that echoed in the night and invaded her dreams. The moon hung like an eyelid, and Marris heard scratching at her front door. She could see nothing, and she called out “Hello?” but no one answered back. The clock said it was two in the morning. She walked to the middle of her house. The car horn got louder. A cone of lights flickered through her window and she got an awful feeling like she should hide.

“Marris?” She heard a man’s voice from the other side of the front door and knew it was Lorne, because he was speaking through a smile, like he already knew she was home but felt the sociopathic urge to be courteous just the same. “Marris,” he said. She tensed up in the same way she did when she imagined the dead creeping up behind her and she found it hard to move. “Are you there?”

Suddenly it sounded like a million pennies flinging against her walls and plaster going hara kiri. Skeletal light poured through the front door. She felt the path to her room and the door fell in chunks.

She flung herself beside her bed and shoved the side table, sending perfume and a lamp clacking to the floor. The sound would not stop, and like light speed anorexia, the wall ate away at itself.

“Marris?” Lorne asked from over the roar. He stumbled in the dark, looking for a hidden treasure that he would compel to reveal itself. His voice was low and casual, and she could feel his smile, like the nurse swabbing your arm before slipping the needle. “I know it’s late.” His omniscience bloated the house. Through the eyelash size slats that grew lengthwise on her walls, his teeth glowed. Glass chewed through sheetrock. His point of view guided its trajectory. The moonlight poked through pea shaped holes emerging in the walls and she covered her ears but could still hear glass crack and wood hiss. The ceiling fragmented into ash that coated her hair, and pellets of sand and dust stung her shoulders. Although it was only a minute, it felt like hours, with every moment worse than the one before. His footsteps got louder, then paused, poised to find the spot marked X, when confetti red bombarded the house. The footsteps funneled down her hallway until a hush as thick as space consumed the house and he was gone.

A police siren blared and Marris let out a long breath. Two paramedics lifted a rise of white cloth into an ambulance. A wake of trees toppled sideways like country cows sat parallel to a row of cars that had split like cake.

Marris waited in the police station until morning, a coffee cup between her hands to warm her, and her eyes blanked out on a disposition report that said, please press hard, you’re making five copies.

奇妙な未来

The koi pond reflected a levitating sand Shiva. His many hands all pointed to something just beyond Marris. The statue angered her, like most religious art, because it assumed there was beauty beyond what you could see and feel, and there was hardly even that.

A nurse who kept apologizing for the wait said her name was Ophelia and led Marris down a maze of halls with twisting juniper and barred windows. She wasn’t sure if anyone was actually looking at her or the human shape in her place. She was about to turn and walk out when she found Lorne sitting in a wheel chair perched next to a sandbox. He stared at the sand and she stood beside him. His wrists were strapped to the chair and his hair looked like wrinkled seaweed. He smiled at her when she approached.

“Oh,” he said and couldn’t have looked happier. “Marris, did you know some zircon sands are four billion years old?”

“I’ll be right over there,” the nurse said and pointed at a bench that looked too small for a child. She pulled out a book and began to read. The walls were all pink wallpaper torn in the corners like someone got bored, and a stale odor made her grimace. She was convinced Lorne was faking it. She snapped near his ear when no nurses were looking, and a man who she thought was an orderly walked by her and hissed, “You’re not nice,” which seemed to be the worst insult she had ever heard at that moment.

Two psychiatrists in long coats walked by and Marris smiled at them, and when her gaze shifted Lorne was staring right at her.

“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked. Marris dug a hole in the sandbox, and Lorne looked pleased. She studied the room and waited until no one looked. She held her hand over the sand and within seconds it rearranged like she had never been there.

“Our mother feeds us life,” Marris said, “so that we may in turn feed her with our death.” He looked up at her knowingly and smiled.

When the visit had ended, the nurse appeared. As she wheeled Lorne down the hall, he turned and asked, “Ophelia, did you know zircon sands are over four billion years old?”

On her way back home, Marris realized how much of an invasion of privacy it seemed to have her psychology profile available for company viewing. She assumed it was something only supervisors and managers had access to, but she took it upon herself to look up Lorne’s profile, and sure enough, she could read his and anyone else’s. She didn’t want to nosey about in other people’s business, especially not in what had become a federal case, but she did read Lorne’s: patient fear of abandonment manifests in hyperlocution, which seemed an awfully condensed sentence for such a complex person. It didn’t make too much sense to her, but she felt responsible nonetheless. She also got it into her head that none of it would have happened the way it did if she had not been forced to talk to that idiot doctor.

Her flight to Seattle was prepared, but before she left she felt it necessary to pay her therapist one last visit.

“This visit is unnecessary, Marris,” Doctor Parnham explained. “The therapy was a mandate only for Barometrix employees.”

It bothered Marris that she used the word unnecessary.

“Oh,” Marris said. “I know. I just felt like I had made so much progress.”

Doctor Parnham smiled, but the interest didn’t seem to go deeper, and Marris felt her face flatten and her fingers tighten.

“So,” and it reminded her of Lorne and irritated her all over again, “you are moving back to Seattle?” she asked.

“Is it important to know that?” Marris asked and the Doctor smiled and shrugged lightly as if to say nothing was important, if you wanted it like that.

Marris looked outside, past her tacky pictures and into the sky beyond, where the clouds sat in the sky, fat and young.

“Marris?”

Doctor Parnham began to rub her eye.

“Oh god,” she said and excused herself. She blinked rapidly and turned red-faced.

“I think,” her eye twitched shut and she flinched in discomfort, “I’ve got sand in my eye.”

Marris had a window seat on the flight, and her favorite parts were when the plane lifted off and landed, and hovered just enough so she could see the patchwork of ground below and she could imagine what it looked like in ancient times, before anyone existed. She woke to a disaster film where someone said, “Your son wants to go into a helicopter and drop a bomb into a tornado,” and she laughed hard enough that the woman next to her laughed too.

#Sand Can Save Us All #The Desert is Your Friend #Sociopathic Climatologists #Company Mandated Psychiatry #Intelligent Sand #Surreal Spec-Fi

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moreweirdfuture-blog · 9 years ago

Text

DEAD LANGUAGE (奇妙な未来 # 001)

The death senate convened in a split-level bungalow constructed on the bluffs of Gamadafuji. The Japanese maples had been engineered to withstand the cold, and they encircled the cabin twice, and beyond that were thick plateaus of ice and wind.

They each brought urns and lit cremains on a veranda, letting trails of charred sage mosey far and sideways.

Every year, the senate would accept a single guest and gift them with the blessing of enlightenment. The wanderer would know they had neared the apex when the sweet musk of failed skin and smoked hair reached their noses.

The guest approached the ellipse of gurus. Previous travelers had knelt in respect, but she was a proud woman.

They plucked a tablet from a nearby bonsai and offered it to her.

None of them spoke English. They hurried her to take the tablet and provided a sipping bowl of warm water and honey.

She accepted the gift. They began to speak. A string of sonorants and clicks invaded her ears. She was amazed to discover she could make sense of the phonology as if she had known it all along.

Zjanada!we was medware that made it possible for users to acquire communicative competence in any language following only seconds of exposure to minimal pairs, consonant clusters, and syntactic structures.

“What use is this?” she asked in a precise series of ejectives and bilabial fricatives that she learned two seconds earlier. But the swamis had fulfilled their duty, and their bodies disintegrated within seconds, leaving her voice to echo off the polished stone walls.

When Veronica returned to her Mumbai high-rise some weeks later, she was disturbed to find a faint human face in her windowpane. It was an old looking face, as if someone had pasted a photograph there, but when she checked, it was gone.

That night, she felt as though someone was watching her sleep, but whenever she awoke, there was nothing.

It bothered her, less the oddness of the face and the sensation of being watched, because she was used to that from the press, but more that it kept her up at night. She had much to do. She was constantly busy, which left her little time for friends or companionship.

Her schedule had gotten so full since ascending Gamadafuji. She was invited to attend healing rituals in Ikebukura where the monks sucked sodium hypochlorite from the neck of a man who had swallowed Drano in an attempted suicide, and she was asked to translate the nuance of a deal between China and Burkina Faso to the Vietnamese press.

She had become an omniglot overnight, and the world cherished her for it.

Then, one night, a spirit visited her. Veronica knew the woman was dead because her neck hung there like a wet noodle. The strangle marks that adorned her throat made her blush and frown. Veronica clutched her sheets in terror.

“Good lord,” she exclaimed, finally laughing at how silly she must have looked. “You are a sight.” The spirit requested Veronica’s aid in a garble of every world’s language, and when the shock wore off, Veronica shooed her away. “Oh, go away,” she said and slumped into her pillow. “I need my rest.”

The spirit did not budge. Veronica slept anyway, and by morning she was gone.

But Veronica began having the worst luck.

During an interview where she was to discuss the release of her new documentary, she stumbled to find the words necessary to describe it. She could no longer remember the location they filmed than she could the subjects studied therein. She felt like a fool and left mid-interview.

Her bank account reversed the numbers in her savings, and it took three days and much hold time to fix the clerical error.

She knew it was a hex.

When she returned home, she snapped her fingers and waved her hands, which was the only summoning ritual she knew.

“Excuse me,” she asked to thin air. When nothing happened, “Do you have nothing in the afterlife to keep you occupied!” Moments passed. The spirit appeared and cradled her neck. “What do you want?” Veronica insisted, this time willing to help.

The spirit explained that she had been strangled to death and that she wanted revenge.

“Well I’m not killing anyone,” Veronica declared. The spirit laughed.

“I just need you to play a trick on him,” she said.

“You seem good enough at that.” The spirit’s eyebrows furrowed.

“True. And I’ll play tricks forever,” she admitted. “But I need you to teach him a lesson.”

奇妙な未来

The man who murdered her was Benoit, a French politician, so ashamed of his Vietnamese heritage that he wore a facial prosthetic to hide his Asian features and exaggerate his French ones. She had been a member of the UMP and threatened to publicly disclose his ethnicity, which due to the nationalist sentiment in France at the time would have certainly ruined his re-election bid.

He had cornered her in her apartment one evening and strangled her with the sleeves of a leather jacket Veronica had often seen him wear when giving speeches on television.

“All I want you to do,” the spirit had explained, “is to take off his mask.”

The man was scheduled to give a speech on the future of France following the possibility of passing the body and identity dissolution act, which made it illegal for citizens to claim an identity.

Veronica had been invited as a universal translator, signing for the deaf, and translating every syllable and morpheme into each of the languages at attendance in the audience. Benoit was accompanied by guards, no doubt to preserve his secret.

Halfway through his speech, Veronica was signing the word for liar and her hand swept outward and touched Benoit’s face. It was silky smooth, and the mask submitted to her fingers like tissue. She peeled the fake skin away and the crowd pulled back in horror.

“You are a true friend,” the spirit said to Veronica after the debacle. Veronica was gracious and had grown used to the spirit’s company.

Veronica often saw the spirit’s reflection in the vanity mirror as she applied makeup, or hovering in the corner of her room when the television was on. The spirit seemed drawn to the laugh tracks of old television, soothed by the nostalgia of a scripted life.

Veronica caught her one evening rocking in the dark. Veronica did not pity the spirit, but sympathized with any creature in pain.

Veronica grew accustomed to having the supernatural roommate and often found herself involved in entire conversations with thin air.

They played board games together and the spirit moved her own pieces when she had the energy.

Veronica translated foreign literature to her, which the spirit seemed to truly enjoy. Veronica found herself staying inside just to spend time with the ghost.

Then, from nowhere, Veronica could not find the spirit no matter how hard she looked. She told all of the jokes that energized the spirit to bring her good luck. She referenced all the articles she had read, discussing how Benoit’s career in politics ended overnight following the scandalous reveal of his mixed heritage.

But she was gone.

The facial patterns that sometime arranged themselves in her cereal or out of pennies tossed however on the street, both of which she understood to be her dead friend’s influence, were no longer.

Veronica traveled to the Nigerian woods, where Washington conscripted her as a soldier to waylay an ever growing Chinese colonialism. But the spirit was not there either.

In the silence of her apartment, Veronica’s hands traced the floor, the carpet, the walls.

“Please come back,” she asked to thin air. Her voice trembled and it felt like someone had punched her in the throat. “Please come back to me.”

She never knew what it was like to have a friend, nor had she realized the bonding that had occurred. Veronica felt sick about it.

She returned to the death senate ten years later, still ill and paralyzed with grief. She ascended the bluffs and passed the Japanese maples with a seething anger.

“You did not bless me with enlightenment,” she declared when the senate materialized and after removing her shawl. “Your blessing allows me to speak with the dead--but even the dead are hell bent on disappearing.”

It was illegal to ascend to the senate twice. One of the swami raised a hand and instructed her to leave. Veronica declined. The swamis huddled and grumbled in many different languages all at once. They too had died many years ago and they all sighed in unison.

“Your anger and pain are your enlightenment,” they said. “It will transform you,” another added. “You must learn to decipher its beauty,” from another.

The death senate offered her a drink for her trek, but they dissipated the same way they did whenever they had fulfilled their duty.

The wind whipped her hair and caught her eyelashes.

Some twenty years later, Veronica had not aged at all, because this was not part of her programming, and the material used to construct her skin was not truly living tissue.

She too was a ghost, in ways. She began to pick at her skin until pieces of it peeled away like wet tape, and she had to be hospitalized for self-mutilation, which was not a disorder that affected simulates up until that point.

In fact, her husband had designed her to be free of the neurological and stress disorders that affected humans. Her case confused doctors worldwide.

Her husband consoled her by reading stories to her, or inviting her to go with him as he traveled the world. But all she could do was stare out of windows, always double taking when she saw a glimmer of light, or an out of focus reflection.

#bungalows on japanese mountaintops #ethnic cleansing through facial prostheses #drug bearing trees #roaming spirits #genetically modified trees

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