Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  * * *

  Malware Park. In through kitchen. Low voices at ground level. Hesitate outside the room. But it’s empty. Half expect to find them still entangled. Tape on pause. Instead, a sensation they have been recorded over. Erased. Downstairs, Moll crouches over blueprints. Balding head burn-pink. Radiation flakes. Grey, fungal wisps. Schematics cover the rotten floor. Baxte is on a wrecked couch. Retro addict. Got me into videotape. Even now. In an ancient business suit. Shiny loafers, preppy prescription spectacles. All antiques. Jumps when I enter. Talking code. Fast bursts, no pauses. Know this side-effect. Very specific neuronarc spectrum.

  “Yes oh yes it’s you it’s you hello my buddy my friend hello.”

  Close up, suit is soiled. Silk tie crumpled. Triangular bone face furry.

  “Seen Phaedra?” I ask.

  “Fucking drone wouldn’t put it on she’s out down fucking drone.”

  Baxte sits again. Goes quiet. Notice a winged insect. Fidgeting on a tabletop. Flash micro. Iridescent carapace. Side-stepping swamp stains. Ash hillocks. Trawls surfaces with a segmented tongue. Vomits anticoagulant. Moll’s scribbling. Like moths in a light. Baxte’s going to talk again. Can feel it.

  “Riding the loop no more can’t drive that fucking looping cross-world eating narc mid-swing no more it fucking kills me that car.”

  Extended pause. Exit micro, look Baxte over. He’s staring at me red-rimmed.

  “I’m moving in here permanently,” he announces slowly, fighting the urge to code out.

  Face him. Stay quiet.

  “Doing an experiment you know on myself so I can so I can do something something to myself so I can do something.”

  Stands up.

  “Come see,” he splutters.

  Insect lands on his face. Vomiting on his face.

  “Come see.”

  Ushers me down spiral stairs. Previously disused room. Filthy. Broken floorboards. Everything beneath polymer sheeting. Naked bulb. Retro waterbed. Enormous black television set. All antiques. Neat pile of videotapes. Mini-gen power. Baxte gestures grandly.

  “Twenty-inch dual tuners stylish design Sony KV-214 VU dual tuners video plus PDC timer programming teletext.”

  Waves a remote control.

  “Front panel auxiliary input sockets NTSC format playback auto/manual tuning on and off timer automatic head cleaning auto-repeat optimum picture adjustment except long play…”

  Trails off. Removes spectacles. Rubs them in extinct silk. Blows nose wildly. Black mucus loops.

  “Fourteen-inch single tuner version was also manufactured,” he flusters sadly.

  Turns, faces a blank screen. Speaks slowly. With great effort.

  “Trying to eradicate sexual responses through masturbatory therapy,” he manages. “So that I can reach a stage where I can spontaneously ejaculate when I see this particular advert.”

  Aims remote. Gear comes to life. Subdued hums and clicks. Unpleasant sensation of being caught in the components. All this new hardware in my head. Still aches. Screen flares blue. Fade in. Vintage advertisement. Smooth doctor’s voice-over.

  “There are unseen microscopic bacteria living and multiplying in your toilet’s cistern…”

  Baxte mouths the copy. Cartoon bacteria thrive in flash frame. Synthesised danger music.

  “They are in there and they are dangerous.”

  An ancient, gleaming toilet. Flushes slow-motion. Baxte starts explaining.

  “Jerking this advert maybe two hundred times daily in control no more impulses it fucking kills me so spontaneously ejaculate and no fucking hologram in me so I can no other stimulus no more it fucking kills me.”

  Bacteria blossom. Cut back. Pristine bowl. A blue lozenge. Triumphant orchestral hit. Blue gush obliteration. Bacteria wriggle and die. Picture skips. Smooth doctor’s voice-over. Advert loops. Become aware of something. Noises. Wet, frenzied. Baxte’s unzipped his fly. Moving frantically. Back to the screen. Bacteria blossoms. Slow-motion blue water. Baxte grunts. Collapses, rolling on the waterbed. Muttering.

  “…just just just just just…”

  I leave. Moll scribbling upstairs. Insects vomiting anticoagulant. Outside. Tracker activation. Can’t get a fix. Car holo-location has broader range. More precision. Upload. Get a ping. No servers or projection network here. Car launches three thumbnail projector-drones. They flit off, triangulate. Projection throws a life-size ghost of Phaedra. Circles in the distance. High in the air, above her location. Walk out through ruined streets. Closing on the hologram. Drops incrementally on approach. Rises if I stray further afield. She’s far. Maybe four blocks. Never walked this far. Desolation shock. Erased facades. Hidden chasms. Retro everything. As though the glitch-fog has finally resolved. No more analogue head split. High-res immersion in the past. Phaedra lies naked in a trench. Lower half dotted with insects. Climb down to her. Dark in there. Dim light of her ghost above. Turning at streetlight level. Catching black water. Drone stinks of burned plastic. Internal fluids. No chassis damage, though. Attempt manual activation. Failure. Start dragging her up. Slow going. Weak from surgery. Resort to adrenal jumper. Subcranial function. Works better than usual. Must be the new hardware. Enhanced muscle signal. Drag Phaedra through broken streets. Cars slash above. Try wrists first. But ankles work better. Her thigh slams the car. As I’m wrestling her in. Auto-bruise flowers. Drive back topside. Numb haze. Dead for twelve years. That was the script. Dead, but alive. Random memory glitches. In the elevator. Feeling of being trapped in moving components. Ancient video machines. Phaedra slips from my grasp. Collapses. Purplish auto-bruises everywhere now. Easy to manipulate spread and contour.

  “They are in there and they are dangerous.”

  The words form along her belly and hips. Thought-to-text transcription network must be open. More of Phoneutria’s meddling. Hook arms under Phaedra’s ribs. Trawling her down airless corridors. Get in the lab panting. Dump drone in quarantine. Falls twisted. Backward, foetal position. Head cracks on the white tile floor. Walls are identical. Ceiling too. Vacuum resistant ceramic insulation. Lock pressure seals. Bathe Phaedra in microwaves. Obliterate everything at a microscopic level. High-pressure water nozzles. Leave them blasting. Steam ghosts the reflective chamber. Stagger off stripping. Incinerate clothing. Collapse on the slab. Whiteout.

  * * *

  Wake to distant high-pressure jets. Quarantine is superheated. Perform a cold blast. Till temperature equalises. Drag Phaedra out. Hook her up. Easy jumpstart from main console. Colourless eyes flit open. Dial jade green. Scheme 456. Sweet smile. Drone rises, kisses me softly. Pads to the slab, arranges herself. Waiting. I stagger away, sink down a wall. She enters a holding pattern. Was a time this pantomime could distract from Neurocropolis. Mannequin scripts. Carbon fibre comfort. Phoneutria obsesses me now. Her becoming. All I dream about. No different flavour. A true wilderness taste. Distillation of forgotten worlds. Ancient voices. Dead gods speak to us, from time to time. Some of us answer. Lie down on the floors. Waiting for more surgery. For death, perhaps. For whatever Phoneutria chooses to bring me.

  * * *

  Faster I drive, slower I seem to go. Highway crawls. Counting cat’s eyes. Self-drive disengaged. Full manual control. Dawn exposes car interior. Gel immersion. Underwater light. Green filter glow. Phaedra undulates above passenger crash-couch. Red lollipops. Stained fingers. Bubbles escape her joints. Collect, divide like mercury along the ceiling. Aquarium harmonics. Moving so fast we slow down. Inverse proportions. Approaching freeze-frame. Point zero. Catch myself staring over barriers. Start to turn head. Translucent red ovoid passes before left eye. Vivid tendril trails. Dissolving candy. Caught in Phaedra’s currents. Far ahead, highway splits. Bisected by a concrete buttress. Phaedra rocks in space. Each shudder of the car. Vomits coagulating bubbles. Belly pressed against roof. Turn my eyes. Buttress is gradually ionizing through engine grille. Chassis rivulates. Consistency of thick oil. Splits. Blooming in time-lapse. Flowers of oblivion. Phaedra’s legs, arranged against the c
anopy. Halo spread of spider cracks. Fractals. Back of car lifts. I also enter anti-gravity. Gel compresses like a syringe. Gets heavy. Impact solution. Safety solidification. Hypnotised by Phaedra. Fusing with the shattering glass. Emerald catches each crack. Brilliant networks. As the car tilts, a jagged mosaic. Completely engulfs the shield. Nuclear glare rotates beneath filters. Shadow of Phaedra’s hand across my face. Light dappling through fingers. Tiny bubbles cling to my eyelashes. Quake in unison. Windows expanding on either side. Depressurization. Whole world turns. Tinted deconstruction. Fracture point. Phaedra pirouettes into space. Cocktail dress fluttering in synch with her hair. Exposed spinal arch. Tarmac glides above. Perfect detail. Counting cat’s eyes. Car follows Phaedra over the barrier. Architectural abyss. Gyroscopic city. Distant weight across my chest. Harness constricting. Turning to lead in the g-force. Alchemy in reverse. Flashes of chemical skies and concrete. Tonnage of car activates an aerial ballet with Phaedra. Soar beneath while she ascends. Drifting diagonally across the canopy. Camera poises haunt her mid-fall. Transfixed by the flex of shoulder blades. Needle heel chaos gradients. Everything momentarily aligns. Phaedra frames full-body in the passenger window. Above, an inverted city skyscape. Then she is slipping trajectories. Moving away. Turning like her ghost did. Vertical highways replace Phaedra in my blind spot. Time slows even more as I plunge. The weight and density of the car in me. Every rivet. As though vital to my functions. Notice my hands on the wheel. Immobilized by solid gel. Doll-riding. I’m riding the vessel. Beyond street level. World goes black. Car fragments. Through the safety net of paralysis. Into a rapid-eye ocean of memory. Sunken city sink. Phoneutria is with me. In the basements of my mind. Soft-bodied virus. Vacuum of slowly fading afterimages. Endless spaces. Terminal velocity.

  * * *

  Eventually quit the lab. Whiteouts all the time. Wake up halfway across the world. Sleepwalker highways. Extensive surgery cascade. Endless procedures. Micro-work. Phoneutria’s design. Changing every day. Metamorphosis. Nothing topside for me now. Move to Malware Park. Permanent move. Phoneutria retrieved the vessel after the crash. Completed my work. Then cannibalised for upgrades. Torso elongation. Multiple limbs. Enhanced sensory. Maybe some centipede she observed. Learned, then incorporated. Optimizing for terrain. She penetrates deeper, further. See it all clearly now. Dead gods. Some grow hungry. Centuries of neglect. Temples shrink. She’s taken over Phaedra. Recreated in her image. Dimensions of a bodily cavity. Empty days in the dark. Watching them in dreams. Mind-walking the underworld. Don’t leave the house for months. Phaedra brings meat. Cooked in superheated machine-wombs. Groundwater mammary feed. Walls get tight. Venture out one day. Physical upgrades. No more glitch-fog. Erased facades. Right to the edge. Heavy containment. Security walls. But I know every breach. Just like the spiders do. Seen them. Crawling beyond. Into immense darkness. Night-vision vistas. An uncontained universe. The old world. Matriarchal void. Where all memory is born. Never been here before. Been here so many times. Somewhere after the future. My natural habitat.

  Rumi Kaneko

  (translated from the Japanese by Preston Grassmann)

  MAI sat back in the chair of her office, watching bright cascades of data stream down the eager faces of her colleagues. Although she was the only woman left at the accounting office, no one seemed to care. They were hunched forward, gazes held by the screens in front of them, some of them unable to turn away. At times, they seemed to be fighting their condition with hard-blinking eyes or tremoring hands, their muscles given over to operations they could no longer understand. But that didn’t last for long.

  As the virus grew, so did their attachment to the systems around them. In between their assigned tasks, they would type random numbers or say them out loud—a kind of numerical Tourette’s. But the worst part of it was, their bodies were slowly changing. Folded on their desks like unfinished assignments, she saw the discarded remains of their old selves. Some of them had already shed most of their skins, revealing metallic interiors, mechanisms pulsing in time to joined rhythms.

  There were speculations that it was some kind of nanotech virus from the micromachine farms of Chiba, programmed to seek out the Y chromosome.

  At least, that was what her co-worker and ex-boyfriend—Maeda-san—believed. He claimed that the plague had been started by an underground society of women who wanted revenge for workplace harassments. He should know, Mai thought. Since they’d broken up, he’d been vindictive and vengeful, trying to get her fired with complaints. But his attempts had backfired on him badly, until his colleagues slowly began to avoid him in the hallways and exclude him from their after-work parties. After that, he’d retreated back into his old obsessions. They’d met in film school, brought together by their admiration for the films of Shinya Tsukamoto: Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man. It was during the making of their fan sequel that his true face had revealed itself—a singular focus and domineering attitude that eventually pushed her away. Where she had been drawn to its themes of technological anxiety, he was more interested in its transgressive imagery; what he called its “eroticism through iron.”

  What irony, she thought—this transformation of his body into something he had once admired. And as his condition worsened, so did his paranoia, until he was certain that Mai was a part of the conspiracy.

  “Why don’t you tell me the truth?” he said.

  She turned back to her desk, but he slid his chair closer, his breath against her ear. She could smell burning plastic and bleach.

  “There’s nothing to tell you,” she said, pushing him away. She looked around for help, but her colleagues were preoccupied as usual, staring at their screens.

  “I think you’re lying,” he said.

  “I’ve told you many times—I don’t know anything about this plague.”

  “If you did, you wouldn’t tell me,” he said. His eyes had changed—his pupils were layered like the folding apertures of a lens, irises gleaming like burnished metal. There were tiny pulses of light flickering behind them. “Why do you think it is that women are immune to the virus?”

  “How should I know,” Mai said. She noticed tiny hairline fractures across his forehead, revealing a glowing pulse behind it.

  “Do you think I’m that naïve?” he said, shaking his head. “You know something…”

  “You think I’m part of this because I’m a woman?”

  “You live in Chiba,” he said, his hands and eyes glitching as he fought against the addiction. “You still go…” he began, holding one hand up against his eye. “You still go into the factory.”

  Mai felt a moment of apprehension, watching him now—he’d been stalking her. A fevered look began to rise in his features.

  The hairline fractures began to glow more brightly on his face, the tiny cracks pulsing as if about to explode.

  “You went into the Tetsuo factory,” he said. He was still using his own name for it. “And then you… just disappeared.” His face trembled as a whirring sound came from his eye. “What were you doing there?”

  The old factory building had been requisitioned as a nanotech laboratory, but since no one had been able to confirm the origin of the plague, the whole city of Chiba had been designated as ground zero. As an amateur photographer, Mai would often walk through the abandoned factories at sunset and take photos of the rusting steel towers and pipes or wander through the newer industrial plants. There were warning signs to keep out everywhere, but very few authorities to enforce them.

  There was one factory in particular that had fascinated both of them when they were together—one of the film locations of Tetsuo: The Bullet Man.

  “What I do is none of your business,” she said.

  He lifted his hand to point toward his face. “This is my business. And if you or anyone you know is behind this, I’ll find out.” As he turned away, she heard the whirring sound again, something electrical working behind his flesh. “One way or another,” he said.

/>   She got off work as early as possible that day, careful to avoid Maeda when she left. She looked behind her several times to make sure he wasn’t following her, and merged with the plague-altered crowds on their way to the station. She marveled at the paradox of the new world—how the virus had changed so many things, while most of the workers around her still went about their daily lives. Sometimes, she could see them staring absently at machines in pachinko parlors, or puzzling over uneaten food in cafes and restaurants as if trying to remember who they had been before it all started. As she moved with the crowd, Mai could feel the slow syncopations of their passage, the measured metronomic movements of their limbs. Some fought against it, trying to preserve their human selves. She watched a few businessmen on the train, each at a different stage of transformation. There were many kinds of machines, and attempts were made to classify them, but the scientists were just as clueless as everyone else.

  * * *

  As she arrived at Chiba station, she took one last look behind her before taking a detour through the industrial site near the station. Even from a distance, she could tell that something had changed—the shapes of the pipes were all wrong. At first, she thought it might be a trick of the light or the direction of her approach, but she knew that wasn’t it—the change was too dramatic. If they had been put into this new arrangement, what was the purpose? As she reached into her bag to take out her Fujifilm X-T4, she heard a sound coming from the pipes behind her. Something began to flow through it, making an organic churning noise that pulsed through the pipework maze. But just beneath it, she heard a familiar whirring and the receding patter of footfalls. She dropped her bag and jumped back, her heart racing.

  “Maeda,” she called out.