by Ben Marcus
“Carl? Honey?”
“I’m okay,” Carl whispered, suddenly shy.
“I know!” Kora said. “You are! You will be! You are so brave. I can’t believe you are being so open about what this is doing to you. It serves them right.” She shook her fist.
Kora the Explorer. He wouldn’t think of her that way anymore. He actually appreciated her kindness, if misdirected. If incorrect. Did it matter?
She squeezed his waist, and he felt himself pee a little. His bladder seemed to belong to someone else entirely.
Later in the morning, an older man ducked into Carl’s cubicle, a man who seemed to have been designed, by experts, to embody sorrow and regret. He shook his head with deep, theatrical empathy. His name was maybe Murray. Maury? Perhaps it was Larry. He was a tech. He performed overnight adjustments to the computer displays that were slowly roasting Carl’s face, in the service of the greater good. Money piles for Mayflower. Loss of bodily function for Carl.
“I’m just thinking about you and feeling for you,” the man said to Carl, stooped in a kind of prayer bow. “And knowing that there’s no way I can really know, I mean, I can’t…” He paused. “What you’re going through. None of us can.”
“Everything we can’t know,” Carl said, shaking his head as cheerfully as he could. “Maybe it’s time to cry uncle. Mysteries one, us nothing. We lose!”
The man dipped his head again, pressed his hands together.
“Anyway, it’s what we signed up for, right?” Carl said, trying and failing to picture the exact moment when he’d agreed to take part in the experiment. Had it ever happened? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d written his name, said yes, nodded his head, assented. Maybe by simply staying alive he implied his agreement and cooperation? Simply by walking the halls at Mayflower, and not crawling into a hole, he was saying, Yes, yes, please test your equipment on me. Especially the equipment that burns. I would be most pleased if you would.
How sweet of this man to visit and thank Carl for his service. The old Carl would have smiled and thanked him, but his thanking utensil, connected inexorably to his face, was broken. He had the paralyzed head of a mascot. What he needed now, in order to engage in human congress, were emoticons on Popsicle sticks that he could wave around, lest everyone start to think that he was dead on the inside, too.
* * *
—
Boiled Carl, alpha tester in this freak show, wasn’t exactly sure how the whole UV feeding thing had even come about. Why would Mayflower’s cold commanders, motherfuckers extraordinaire, reveal their true road map to him, anyway?
He’d joined Mayflower’s wearables team five years back and had been whiteboarding applications that tracked emotions, or tried to, so that the world’s feelings could finally get accurately logged. And mined. And then probably ransomed back to the people who had the feelings in the first place. Using the data they collected, Carl’s team had been able to match users’ emotion narratives—the plotted vectors of what they felt over the course of days and weeks and years—with those of other users. Maybe even in their own apartment building. Certainly in their neighborhood. Unless they lived in the middle of nowhere. Or unless their feeling vectors were highly unusual. Carl’s team proposed a kind of mood pairing. Who else is bummed out? Who doesn’t give a shit? Who feels pretty good today, maybe borderline ecstatic, even though something bad happened in Angola? Who’s lost the taste for staying out late, wants to be alone and would like a silent partner in solitude? Who eats his daily caloric value in one sitting at 3 a.m. and has a special reaction to that?
This wouldn’t be just a dating service, even though, ka-ching, hello! Get paid, hashtag gritty times! They were pretty sure they were onto something. Carl thought that, with enough users shooting their feelings into the cloud, Mayflower would be sitting on a gold mine of data. It was the ultimate privacy grab, better even than a blood sample from every living person on the planet. Which the rumor sites also had Mayflower pursuing.
But management smelled too much choice. The whole thing stank of opt out. Self-knowledge was for the dead, they said. People don’t like themselves enough to have to deal with other people with feelings so similar to their own. It makes them feel less special. A product shouldn’t be trying to tell the truth so aggressively. That was a turnoff. Besides, the feeling sensors weren’t where they should be, technology-wise, and only young people would want to wear the neck collars that Carl was proposing. Management pulled the kill switch. Management being Kipler, Kipler, Kipler, and Kipler, depending on his mood. Depending on his sweater.
Creative staged charrettes. Disruption was the watchword. Carl and his team were pressured to lift their legs and pee-shame the status quo. For a cash-yielding invention to work, for it to leak gold pudding and really destroy the economy, in Mayflower’s favor, maybe even change the meaning of money, Kipler once said, it had to look inevitable, ridiculously obvious in hindsight. They all kept coming back to food. What a problem it was. And not just because there was so little of it left on the planet.
Carl was there when Kipler first brought the life hackers into the charrette. Brutal, loud, beautiful, aspirationally immortal. Just a bunch of ageless kid-looking creatures who were like Version 2.0 people. How old were they, really? Eleven? Kipler called them Mayflower’s future. Early adopters of every health trend, enthusiasts of untested medical protocols. They micro-fasted, binged on superfoods, fussed over their own blood tests, which they posted cockily on the longevity message boards. Carl once saw them tearing down a hallway, something clear and greasy on their upper lips. They seemed deranged. Soon the life hackers were obsessed with a service called Jug. Every morning, a jug was delivered to your cubicle. It was all you needed for the day. Nutritionally bozo. Freakishly optimized, and they could load your meds into it, just to keep all your material input in one receptacle. Sometimes the jug held a thick lotion, more of a cream than a drink. Other times it was slippery and clear, with a foamy head. It depended on your bloodwork. As you graduated through jugs, the color and the quality of the liquid changed, responding to feedback. When you finished a jug, you spat your last sip back into the bottle, to be analyzed before the next day’s potion was brewed. Or supposedly. The life hackers had brought their jugs to the charrette one day and swigged from them, burping a grassy steam.
The legend that developed is that Kipler smashed some jugs that day, swung one against his own head, grinning madly. Carl would love to have seen that. Some of the goo in those bottles looked as if it couldn’t even spill. It would just hang in the air like a cloud. He pictured Kipler cream-soaked, coated in white foam.
What did happen is that Kipler said that the start-up that had invented Jug had missed the whole point. They were drawing your attention to your food, giving you a heavy accessory, isolating you socially, et cetera—he went on for like ten minutes of scathing criticism. Kipler destroyed the premise, the execution, the future of this product, and the life hackers, poor guys, seemed to wither at the table.
“Get rid of the jug,” Kipler finally said. “Get rid of the liquid. Get rid of everything. What’s left?”
No one answered.
Kipler smiled.
“Exactly,” he said. “Nothing. There’s nothing left.”
He gestured into empty space, then pointed at the overhead fixture.
“We’re all sitting here, soaking in light. We could have been eating this whole time.”
Kipler was pretty quiet after that, and everybody was freaked out, looking up into the light, squinting.
* * *
—
Mayflower Systems regularly bought and destroyed small companies, mostly to crush progress. And maybe also simply to frighten the universe and increase world sadness? One of the patent portfolios that had come online at around that time involved grow lights. Using light as a delivery system for nutrients, not just for plants but f
or animals. A lightbulb went off, and a UV healing wand for sick animals became, at Mayflower, something utterly else and fucking wonderful. A nutrient-delivery system for the skin, for people skin. A goddamn human grow light, as Kipler put it, though he thought the word “human” sounded too technical. The way skin makes vitamin D from sunlight. Except this would be other vitamins, too, and micronutrients. And then, one day, the three amigos: fat, protein, and carbohydrates, who usually got inside us only through flesh eating and the like. The marketing hook was that meals were obsolete. Meals were a headache and a hassle. Meals were disgusting. Because of sauce. Because of stench. In the future, Kipler would yell, everyone would eat by accident, while doing other things. While working!
Who would volunteer? Who would saddle up and taste the greatness? Who was stupid? Who had nothing to lose? Who lacked a family to mourn him should things, uh, falter? Who wanted to be a hero? Who could withstand tremendous levels of pain without blacking out? Who could abide a chronic, deep itch under the skin that scratching merely exacerbated?
Those, in fact, were not the criteria. None of them. They blood-tested Creative and looked for subjects with gross nutritional deficits. In other words, people who ate like shit and had the blood numbers of a gremlin. The first goal was to see if the grow light could move the needle, boost a dude’s vitamin A or whatnot. Actually satiate. And not, you know, hasten to expire. And then luminous efficacy would be stretched. Light-form carbohydrate spectrum, rays of protein. Yup. Radical color temps and other par value mods to the spectrum. The talk got geeky. If all went well, they’d pilot a dark strobe, something like a noise gate that regulated the feed? Just pulse darkness so as not to turn the poor subject into some kind of demon, twitching under a heat lamp.
Carl’s bloodwork deemed him the most deviant, healthwise, and the applause he got, a king’s greeting, which must have been cheers of relief, sort of decided the thing. It was Carl who’d be going under the light. All you can eat. Everyone hollered to give it up for Carl and then everyone sort of did, vocally. The entire room, as if they’d planned it, yelled, “Bon appétit, Carl!” Flashlights were clicked on, and these flannel-shirted semi-strangers gathered around him, shining their beams in his face, as a kind of joke, Carl guessed, but it was sickening a little.
Mayflower put Carl on a detox. Not Jug. Just some potions cooked up in the cafeteria, sometimes administered to him in the men’s room, when privacy was called for. Bone-broth Jell-O. Quite a lot of citrus. Cold coffee shot into his dark parts. A vitamin lotion smeared onto his newly shaved head, because hairless skin something something, one of the nutrient nurses explained. Your pores just gape open. Oxygen, she explained, was richer when emulsified into a cream.
Carl felt shaky, poisoned in a way he didn’t quite mind, and when the day came he was ready.
The first time he ate the light, sitting at his desk starving his ass off, staring at his laptop screen, it felt like getting slapped. Rapidly. That was the nutrient penetration, they explained. Like shotgun pellets. To Carl, it felt as if someone had pinned him to the floor and was just pimp-slapping him into a puddle. Carl asked for goggles. His eyes hurt. His feet shrank and weakened. By the end of the first week his tongue clogged his mouth. Enough to foul his speech and make him sound like an animal. And he suffered from a bottomless, gnawing hunger. Maybe because he was getting only enough nutrition, at that point, to sustain a cricket.
It was hard, hard, hard to convert fat into light. The body, Carl’s body, wanted good fats, bad fats, a salt lick, a fat friend. His cravings went berserk. He dreamed of fat, thought of eating parts of himself. The tech for the fat conversion was pretty crude. Understatement. Carl pictured Madame Blavatsky at a loom. How do you speed up fat, make it invisible, but also really fast, really powerful? You could do it, but badly, and this sort of light just balls-out hurt going in. Hurt and burned. Or the reverse. The flesh was chilled by it, for some reason, and there could be rot. Of the skin.
There were some glitches. Display burnout, necrosis. The paint on the cubicle wall behind Carl’s head, which collected the light when he wasn’t sitting there, bubbled up and peeled. There were side effects, including the dark hardening of Carl’s face. They called it “blizzard face.” A team was already at work on a grow-light recovery lotion to market as a solution to the problem they’d created.
Carl felt like an astronaut, a child, a corpse. He asked the obvious questions. Why not some other patch of skin? Something less, maybe, facial? But Kipler was adamant. The face was already getting bathed in light all day by people looking at their computers and phones. “All day! Take what’s there and body-slam it!” he shouted. That was the entire point.
“We use the gestural habits that are already in place. What’s already happening! There’s nothing new to learn, nothing to do, nothing to think, nothing to feel. Victory! Do you not see that? Get out of my world if you don’t see that. People don’t want to think about eating. We are giving them a gift. The invention is hidden. It’s nothing! Think nothing.”
During an early charrette, after the experiment began, a tech ran in yelling about an update to the display, some UV dilation they’d pulled off to widen the protein band, muscling it into something called gray light. They’d crowded one more amino acid onto the spectrum, apparently.
“Carl,” the tech said, bowing. “Your presence is humbly requested in Albuquerque. We’ve freaking iterated the shit out of this display. It’s like pure food. We cooled the bitch right down. You’re going to feast, my man. Bring your goggles.”
And then, in a fight announcer’s voice, the tech boomed, “Let’s get ready for Pro-Tein!”
High fives all around.
Carl stood up and shadowboxed, ducking and weaving, but the effort left him dizzy and breathless. He sat back down.
When he returned from Albuquerque, he was hungrier than ever. He had a potbelly. A sore had formed on his chin. He’d enjoyed a small boost in his folate level. In iron. Magnesium. But he was still losing muscle mass, and he felt a tight bulge in one of his eyes. The medics kept waving him through, chortling about miracles. The project was considered a success. Carl was a great explorer. They pushed him in a wheelchair down hallways, just to keep his energy up. Sometimes he slept through a feed, waking up famished with a hot, tight face. Carl dreamed of the sort of hood used for falcons. Someone could push the shrouded man around and everybody would whisper, “That’s Carl. Look at Carl. Oh, my god, there he is.”
“I want what he’s having,” Carl would say to himself, in a voice he could no longer recognize.
* * *
—
When Carl finally sent his crotch shot out into the world, the testing had been going on for endless hungry, scorched weeks. The computer displays were fucking hot, and for a while, before the hardening, Carl rashed up. His skin tightened, his face itched, and something behind his face, the fascia, they called it, seemed to kind of break up. Which caused a kind of feature slide. He submitted to daily bloodwork. They gave him some drug called Shitazine, or that wasn’t exactly what it was called, which turned him totally off mouth food. So they could do a full nutritional assay. On weekends, ravenous and puckered, he got a smoothie, jacked with protein, just to keep him off life support. Monday mornings they chelated him, or something that sounded like that, to zero out his nutritional stats, so that he could sizzle-fry in front of the panels all week and they could clock what was coming in.
If he thought about it, having survived the genital share, there wasn’t a simple answer to why he’d sent the picture. But there wasn’t a complicated answer, either. To Carl himself, it seemed both obvious and mysterious, inevitable and random. He could embrace nearly any interpretation. But since no one appeared to have seen it for what it was, trying to understand it suddenly felt bizarre. He was embarrassed that he’d done it and also disappointed that he hadn’t done it well. He was ashamed and indifferent. Disturbed an
d content.
But most of all his body was empty and dry, and he was powerfully, powerfully hungry.
Carl was due at the lab on Thursdays, but this week they called him in early.
“You are technically malnourished,” the doctor told him, smiling. “But here’s the thing. So are most people, and they actually eat food. Being malnourished is not per se a concern of ours. You’ve lost a few pounds—well, more than that—but that could be attributed to stress at work. And, anyway, ideal body weight? Still not quite there. So okay. Pretty much. Muscle mass, sure. And your fingernails are brittle, which, of course. Well. What’s important, what’s kind of amazing, is that you’re not starving. Your magnesium levels are ridiculous. I mean, just a joke, in terms of not eating anything. This isn’t possible. What we’re doing. It’s not possible!”
“Okay,” Carl said.
“I mean, you’re hardly in ketosis here!” the doctor shouted, waving his clipboard.
Carl wanted to enjoy this news. Some carbs were flowing in. Whoopee. He was not technically dead. He looked at the two-way mirror, wondering who was back there. Kipler, no doubt, every single version of him. He had a lot riding on Carl. He needed this to work. Why was he hiding? Carl wondered. Afraid of a man whose face has died?
Then Carl did that thing he’d seen on TV where the suspect in the interrogation room gets up and confronts the two-way mirror. Pounds on it to call out the lurkers standing in judgment, deciding his future. Come on out, and all that. What are you afraid of? Except Carl did it sort of mildly. It was hard to walk. He tottered over to the glass, cupped his hands against it. He didn’t want to break anything. Just a few taps on the glass. Hello? he thought. Hello? Did he really need to say it out loud? How much of this shit needed to be spelled out?
