by Chris Kelso
But I know that no matter how much he seems to fight my existence, deny it, he knows we are intimately linked by a shatterproof bond, because - wherever there is light, there is darkness. He lusts for the darkness as much as I covet his inner glow.
I’m not special, shadows never are. Everything casts a shadow. The presence of a shadow does not even indicate the echo of something that’s alive. After all, a fucking toaster casts a shadow. A corpse casts a shadow.
I’ll keep dwelling in night, when everyone else is asleep. I’ll hang out in places most people are too terrified to venture. Kad and I can survive if we bring our darknesses together.
I see names drift by, buried deep in the filaments of the cloud – Rick Deckard, The Shrike, Offred, Hari Seldon - all men who have seen their own gods and were able to live a real life because of it. They are fictional characters, shadows, but are as real as their creators.
The great science fiction artwork of David Meltzer and Hannes Bokay float by in composed ice crystals….
A sheet of cirrostratus covers the sky. The names disappear and my head empties of all its retained contents. I remember something of the old world, before the city.
RULES OF THE PEOPLE
TWO
The People protect the right to keep and bear arms – as long as they are never turned on or used against any of The People members themselves.
Three -
‘Our lives are full of all the genres. Fear and hope and sadness.’
- Nicolas Roeg
I feel that, somehow, my life alludes to all these fairy tales that are embedded in the collective conscious; specifically deriving from a genre you’d call ‘science fiction’. There are all these names of writers looming over me, Philip. K.Dick, Samuel Delaney, Isaac Asimov, and Octavia Butler…all recorded in the filing cabinets of memory storage. The agglomerations hover spectrally in the atmosphere, floating in a shared pool of configurable computing resources.
I was born with these stories already in my head. I remember more from them than I do events in my own life. I am a prisoner of fiction. I use it to shape me.
But these stories, they’re significant somehow. As if these are the writers of my story, of every story ever told or worth telling. Christ, it seems as if my life has been steeped in falsehood, boiled down to a series of tropes and clichés that I’ve been inextricably bound to in the process. Every day I meet a Dick Turpin or a Dr Benway - whoever those people are!
Well, whoever they are, I feel like they are important to the canon of literature inscribed on my limbic system.
I need to get off the streets, these macho streets. The beast wants to rape me. The sun is pumpkin-orange. Mournful plains beckon me. There is only ever the awful, unknowable present.
There are people, dark dwellers, having an open garage sale – sexual paraphernalia, guns, chains, their souls stuffed into gherkin jars, those sorts of thing. I take in the pheromones of fear that hang thick in the air. People can change.
Although I am a shy, withdrawn, incompetent man, I fancy my chances going it alone out here, more than with the three teenage witches in the alleyway. Dunwoody’s face appears suddenly on the side of a glass monolith. The giant billboard screen lights up the streets, an electro-kinetic sculpture of the surname ‘DUNWOODY’ appears in a complex pattern of stainless steel planes and exposed superstructure.
The smell of liquid lard and gelatine makes itself apparent. This city does what it wants, when it wants. Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe it’s a slave too, a prisoner of its own creator?
I walk towards the assembling crowd and smell the buddleia that has overrun the old railway lines. Dunwoody is making a steeple with his fingertips and resting his lips on his knuckles. He looks deep in thought, reporting to his herd from ziggurat-shaped living quarters.
I need to get off the fucking streets before he starts the transmission. I don’t trust myself. Jesus, if I can’t trust myself, where does that leave me? All I know is that I can’t afford to hear his lecture. It threatens everything I am, the reality I think I trust.
Grinding metal and burnt paint, damp cloth…
Dunwoody opens his mouth to address the crowd.
‘This message is for my little firecrackers who shun the light.’
My ears fold back. He’s talking directly to me. Can he see me? If rumour is to be believed, he can see everyone, all the time. Dunwoody is omnipresent in the very fabric of this city.
‘There are still so many of you who enthusiastically dwell in the darkness, who choose to hide from the true reality of things. I need to tell you about the insects. They’re coming. None of the objects around you are your own. Your own body is not your own, not really. I have seen the real world, you would hate it. The BrainGate is as close to hell as you will find.’
- Careful, he can overhear my thoughts.
I catch the soft computerized inflection of his voice bleed into the chambers of my mind. I need to resist this. Dunwoody stands up and the camera pans back.
‘Ailsa Bloom, you are a disabled monkey in that place. Can you believe that? Here you are a beautiful and capable, if stubborn, young firecracker. Kad C, you are merely a severed cat head hooked up to a hypercomputer. But here…’
Kad is a decapitated cat head? What the fuck must I be? Dunwoody keeps talking. I keep listening. Getting sucked in.
‘You see, in the outside world, the scientists use this technique called intracortical brain–computer interface. I don’t expect you to understand what I’m talking about, how could you?-but just listen. I am the only one who can go between worlds. I too am a man-made abomination, but I have managed to surpass the humans. The scientist want you to suffer, they want us to suffer, but I do not.
By implanting neurotrophic-cone electrodes into the subjects’ brain they can induce any kind of reality they please. It’s me who created this beautiful city for you all. I am the architect. They want you to dwell in the dark. I say we should make the most of this life, I can offer you happiness. True happiness. I am the computer virus that wants to help the inner circuitry rather than fry it.’
- A computer virus?
Then I see people vomiting this black treacle over themselves, onto the tarmac. I need to get off the fucking streets.
I’ll go back to the Aerial Hotel, beg Kad to take me back. All I want is to be in her company again while all around me people choke on their own effluence.
Gargled animal noises fill the air. Howls and barking resound in the night’s echo. Dunwoody looks straight at me from behind the screen.
So, am I just a Down syndrome chimp, or am I a man? I’m someone else’s dream made flesh in the mind of a diseased animal?
- Maybe it’s turtles all the way down.
Dunwoody starts talking again.
‘I am the only decent cosmological argument my little firecrackers. I am the unmoved mover. Even though, when you really sit down and think about it, I supersede a Christian God in every aspect. I am transparent, I show you everything there is to be seen. Even the buildings are see-through. I provide answers, unlike God. I provide solutions, unlike God. I care, unlike any religious deity you care to name. You should also bear in mind that I am not responsible for your situation. I would never make my disciples miserable. That god is weak, he is an old man. I want you to enjoy this city, enjoy its unique haute couture food and clean air…’
I can’t help but admire his power. Dunwoody is a master scam artist who uses his vast fortune to host elaborate demonstrations and create new means of thought reform that have effectively brainwashed over half the city. That’s not easy! The zombies are victims of an induced dependency.
The internet explorer sign pops up on all the street signs.
I see a child, a young boy separated from the crowd. He gestures for me to follow him and runs towards a coffee shop, away from the gang of vomiting Dunwoody partisans.
I sneak off during the retch-fest and Dunwoody’s fifty foot talking head follows me all the w
ay.
***
The coffee shop is called JAVVA LOTUS and is an exceptional example of biomimicry. It has fluid, curved vectors that seem to fold in on themselves. I don’t recall ever coming here for coffee.
It’s empty when I enter, except for the young boy who is helping himself to a blue nitrogen ice-cream – and of course there’s the customary visage of Miles Dunwoody staring back at me from every available wall in the establishment. I sit on the chair opposite the kid.
I read somewhere, I can’t remember which magazine, that the in-store chairs of JAVVA LOTUS omit an electromagnetic field, designed to make the person sitting in them feel calm and centered.
Fuck, maybe Dunwoody really is our savior after all? Everything his family built or had commissioned seems to’ve been designed with the express purpose of helping the citizens of the city. That said, I don’t feel any better than I did out there on the streets. Not really. I’m far too unsettled.
A robotic barista asks me if I’d like a flash-frozen alcoholic beverage. I tell him no. The chairs are ribbons of white plastic weaving out in continuous bands, plastic capillaries connecting the savior to his own innovations. I feel him watching me even now.
The kid laps at his blue cone. The backlit translucent Plexiglas behind him makes his outline glow. He is pale though, like he’s never seen a red blood cell in his life. And his eyes are all puffy. I can’t tell if he’s been crying or if he’s had an allergic reaction to something.
Outside I can hear the booms and chirps and cahs and growls of the various zombified citizens, turning the city into a mirror-glass jungle. Perhaps you could compare their fanaticism to an infection, an epidemic of the mindbody. This doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Their moans fill the electric spectra of night like hideous creatures who have somehow managed to survive the abortion process and I’m reminded that human indoctrination is as powerful a weapon as any.
‘Who are you?’ – I eventually get out. He stares at me, protracting the silence to suite his infantile sugar craving.
‘Who do you think I am mister?’
- Here we go again…
‘I honestly have no idea.’ – The kid slurps away until there is only a flattened peak of blue ice-cream hemorrhaging over the rim of the cone. He looks at me and talks.
‘People are strange. We’re all so scared and confused.’
‘I’m not scared.’ – He says confidently. I believe him.
‘No? Well you’re a braver man than I am.’
‘It’s better than the other place.’
‘What other place?’
‘The labs. The men poking around me. Even when I ask them to stop. The men aren’t here anymore. They can’t get me in this place, they can’t mister, I checked.’
‘You mean…the scientists?’
The kid nods in confirmation. Steam from his ice-cream has pooled at the ceiling of the coffee shop like swarming ghosts.
‘Hey, listen, what’s your name?’
‘I don’t have one. I’ve only been me for a couple of days. You don’t have a name either mister.’
- Why the little…
‘Listen kid, which side are you on? Be straight with me, come on. Why did you pull me into this coffee shop? Do you know about the light and the dark?’
He nods again but doesn’t answer any of my questions.
‘Hey, what happened to your hand mister?’ – He asks, motioning towards my claw with his diminished ice-cream cone.
‘An accident. I was playing with a very dangerous weapon.’
‘No, you weren’t. That’s not how it happened.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘They did this to you too.’
‘Who did?’
‘The people in the lab.’
‘You mean the scientists?’
He nods again.
‘Someone tall with blonde hair and a foreign accent. He took a finger for each of your sins, 1, 2, 3, 4. There’s someone who wants to talk to you mister. Someone important. He knows your name.’
The kid blinks at me in slow-motion. Something’s not right. The smell of death tickles the recesses of my nasal cavity.
‘Okay. Who? Who wants to talk to me?’
- Answer me you little fucker!
He keeps blinking his heavy lids at me. Suddenly, black tar starts leaking from each cavity he has to offer. It runs down his cheeks from the eye slits in liquid veins, from his mouth and from his nose and ears.
- Tell me this is another optical illusion?
I stand up and take a backwards stride. He’s having some kind of seizure…then talks…
‘Relax mister. You have a right to the truth and a right to happiness as well. You can be one of my little firecrackers.’ – The voice emerging no longer belongs to the pale kid. It’s Dunwoody. The Absolute Benefactor. His tone is almost machinelike, there is no trace of an accent. It emerges brisk and impersonal with all the charm you can expect from an ancient city’s stale bureaucracy.
‘You think I’m the bad guy, but I decided to use my virtual role as a real estate billionaire to provide a better world for the prisoners of the BrainGate…’
I inch forward. The image of the oozing child-vessel is distracting and upsetting.
‘By creating the Schism? The People?’ – I ask. A melanoid bubble forms and pops as the tar pours from the kid’s maw in a ceaseless gush. He continues to talk through the spew of afterbirth.
‘Yes. It is human nature to accept what is in front of them. The people here think they have lived life outside this city, but they haven’t. There was never a time before coming here, only a false memory of other places. Just because you aren’t really a person doesn’t mean you should be denied the illusion of contentment. Don’t you see, they want you to mistrust me! The only way I can get through to a human being is by making myself god. It’s easier if things are just simple, black and white, good and bad. All this ambiguity, it leads to a kind of soul sickness. I made things easier. There is light, which is good, and dark which is bad. Infinite regress, when you overthink you diminish.’ - His speech is so difficult to love, it seems incapable of expressing rich emotions - but his face and his confidence are alluring.
‘If this is true, you’ve still done more harm than good. By creating a divide, the city is in fucking ruins. Here, you’re either a brainwashed idiot or a starving nomad. You’re just like the Christian god, Miles. At least he had the brass neck to be honest about things. We all know that cunt hates us.’ – I almost can’t believe my own balls, talking to this powerful entity like he’s a dumb teenager. My hand is quaking, I better just calm down.
I’m sure he could eviscerate me in a fucking heartbeat if he felt like it. I’m way out of my league here.
‘You think this world is so bad? Let me tell you something about this place. Two days ago this world was encased in flames, sunken in shadow and crawling with all the repellent creatures your collective nightmares could conjure…until I resurrected it, raised these beautiful skyscrapers to cast light where there never was any before. You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the old place. It was a hedonist’s paradise, full of aberrant sexual practices. You would’ve had to walk through the working-class cannibals of an H.G. Wells novels. I am hope, the only hope left in your world.’
‘Then who am I?’
‘An avatar. I estimate that you’ve probably been online in the BrainGate for about three days.’
‘That’s it?’
- That’s it, eh?
‘Thereabouts. Ever wonder why you can’t remember much of your life before? You’ve only been a man for about three days, you’ve never fucked, never truly exorcised your intellectual thinking. Let me tell you something about man, and I’ll relate this to the divide you see in the city now - Plato and Aristotle characterize man as driven by conflicting forces, you have a dual nature. You are as much driven by reason as the ‘appetitive’ aspect of man, desire, emotion. You want to be a man, well here is the constant
struggle. The constant battle of reason and desire. This is what it is to be a man.’
‘Am I a man?’
- A three day old man?
‘I can’t tell you that right now. You need to join me first, let me trust you. Walk by my side and help convert the others. I only need one thing from you. I need you to relinquish control, just a little bit. Enough to let me in. In time I will tell you everything about the real you, should you still desire that information. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.’
‘And sometimes it’s a fucking cancer.’
The kid’s mouth opens, and a shriek emerges that shatters all eight-hundred light-diffusing glass panels in the floor of the JAVVA LOTUS. Covering my ears, I run through the exploding shards beneath me until I’m back outside.
A mob of maybe fifty brainwashed men and women have formed into waves, glowering at me with hunched spines and bloodless faces. Eyes leering like great periscopes and imbued with their sense of civic duty, the swarm of fanatics take chase.
Up above, where the mirror sentinels climb into the billows, I hear a screech like an alien instrument being untuned. The beast.
- The People are gathering … Isn’t this ironclad proof he’s telling the truth?
I am now terrified and convinced that Dunwoody will find me. The nocturnal light strikes off the flanks of the giant rectangles that reach skyward. Even a man’s reflection can change. I look down at my hand and the fingers are gone. All of a sudden, I hear a woman’s voice.
A familiar one.
Kad…
- I want to tell her I love her…but I am only allowed to think it.
I am the dying dreamer
Stuck in a perpetual ring
My castle is ever out of reach
I bet my happiness lives there
Day - 5
