Stories for Chip

by Nisi Shawl

  “Ow,” she said, stretching and rubbing at the sore spot on her back. A dull cramp radiated through her sacrum and into her abdomen.

  Dan turned from the laptop and gave her a half smile. “Morning, gorgeous. You’ve been out for hours.”

  “Have I? My back hurts.”

  “I’m not surprised. These chairs weren’t meant for kipping in.”

  “I had this dream. I was swimming in the sea and there were these sharks after me. It was pretty scary.”

  “Did they catch you?”

  “No—I don’t know. Loads of other stuff happened I think, but all I remember at the end is I was standing on the beach looking up at the moon, only it wasn’t the moon. It was the Earth. Are there any sandwiches left?”

  “Half a ham one; I saved it for you.”

  “Gosh, thanks, I’m honored.”

  She stood up gingerly. Her legs were half-dead from being in the chair. Dan picked up the sandwich from the trestle table and handed it to her. Their fingers brushed together as she took it from him, and the wobble in her legs grew momentarily worse. He turned back to the screen and pointed at the lines of scrolling data. She controlled the wobble, but still felt slightly strange.

  “There’s definitely something here,” Dan said. “The readings from the active sensor are far more complex than the ones from the baseline sensor. There are three spikes of activity, here, here, and here.”

  Growing evidence suggests that crucial EIFs are characterized primarily by their complexity rather than overall field strength/amplitude. Only small windows of frequencies seem to have potent consequences for neural activity and anomalous consciousness, and these can generally be described as being within the spectrum of the human brain. The low-amplitude, low-frequency, complex nature of these fields seems important in order for them to be integrated into, and alter, the overall current perceptual gestalt.

  The feeling of strangeness passed, and work took over.

  When they’d packed the equipment into Dan’s rusty Escort and set off down the road through the woods, dawn was still hours away. In a service station café somewhere off the M6, Dan gave her the background on the hospice.

  “It was closed down 16 years ago, as you know. The main reason it was closed was because the people who came here mostly seemed to get worse instead of better. Oh, I should tell you—it wasn’t a hotel, until late on; it was a country house, and then a sanatorium, and then a hospice. Quite a history.” He waved his fork and a bit of egg slid off and onto the tabletop. “So of course it took them a long time to work it out because that’s always been pretty normal for mental hospitals. You know, deterioration. Specifically, people with hallucinatory symptoms reported more severe symptoms than they’d come in with, and people with no hallucinations—depressives, what-have-you—started to experience them. What makes it interesting is that the staff sometimes saw things too. The place got a reputation as being haunted by the ghosts of earlier inmates.”

  Megan huddled down into her overcoat and made “I’m listening” noises. Dan took a sip of coffee and rattled on.

  “So then they closed the sanatorium and opened it as a care hospice, but things didn’t quiet down much. Finally it was turned into a hotel and health spa. The survey data’s skewed though, I expect, ‘cause most of the responses we got were from folk who stayed in the spa. Didn’t last long. People went away disturbed. The reports cover all sorts of things; night terrors, children crying, figures walking through walls, unaccountable sense of dread, all the usual stuff. Nearly half the people who filled the survey out said they still have haunt-type experiences quite frequently since having one here, even when they’re not in a common haunt location.” He looked delighted.

  “Mm-hm?”

  “Yeah, and that’s way above average. I was thinking about what you said about all the factors not being accounted for.”

  “Really? I said something worth thinking about?”

  Dan raised his eyebrows at her playfully. A cold shiver ran up Megan’s spine. Damn, he really was something. So much for getting tired of looking at him. She sighed.

  “Well, it does happen from time to time. Anyway, it struck me that you could almost make a case for there being something there. It follows on from a paper I was reading last night; remind me to email you the reference. But listen, if the gestalt of your consciousness exists in an EMF, maybe other kinds of EMF are inhabited by other kinds of consciousness. It’s a stretch, but it’s an interesting idea. Or there could be some interaction between the place and the person, such that traces of one are exchanged with traces of the other.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “Of course not. Hey, I was up all night, while you were snoring prettily in your chair. I had to entertain myself somehow.”

  “Sorry,” said Megan.

  “Don’t be,” said Dan. “You needed your sleep. How is your mum, anyway?”

  ◊

  She looked away from him, and instead carefully inspected the plate in front of her that had lately held an omelette and chips. As she did every waking moment, without even thinking, Megan forced her feelings down and away into the corners and corridors of her mind. She’d had years of practice at it.

  “About the same. You know how it is; it mostly doesn’t change from day to day.”

  Her stomach cramped again and for a second she thought she heard whispering at the very edge of her hearing. Some vague feeling gnawed at her, something she didn’t want to think about. She looked at Dan’s fingers curled around the white china mug. An image of it shattering in his hand flashed across her retinas. On an impulse she didn’t recognize as her own, she reached across the table and touched his wrist.

  “Actually, it’s been pretty rough lately. They—I think she’s kind of given up on it all. Life, that is. You know, I could use some decompression time. We could—would you like to go out for a drink tonight?” She smiled, felt it come out lopsided. Tremors shook her. Dan set down the mug and twined his fingers into hers, and his eyes crinkled as he smiled back.

  I won’t let you go. Something screamed and tore inside Megan, and a multitude of voices with a single face—her own face—darkly rejoiced. Every nerve was alive. The captivity and the freedom of the meat. The trapdoor of death was still a door. She ran her tongue across her teeth, enjoying their sharpness.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Dan, pathetically.

  “It’s OK,” said Megan. “Everything dies.”

  Eleven Stations

  Fábio Fernandes

  1.

  I started to levitate on the eve of my suicide. It wasn’t on purpose. I was fairly relaxed, mind unfocused, as people who have made up their minds to do irreversible things probably feel. I was standing in the middle of my small, cluttered scriptorium, looking at the shelves heavily laden with hardcovers and paperbacks, in search of some book, any book. I remember thinking of Egyptian pharaohs and the things they carried to their tombs. I also recall thinking I would like to be buried with books. Or burned. Maybe cremation would be better.

  Then, suddenly, my feet weren’t touching the floor anymore. I wasn’t out of balance. I wasn’t wobbling. I was sure that was no episode of labyrinthitis, and, more important, I had drunk no spirits nor taken any drugs. I had planned to go to into the night really gently, gently and completely lucid. Was I hallucinating? I wondered then. Or would it be a sign? If so, a sign of what? Of a miracle? Sainthood? A mutation? Superpowers, perhaps? Would I then be a supermutant Jesus? I also remember wondering if this strange occurrence would in any way affect my decision to take my own life.

  2.

  Every war only ends with a treaty. Treaties were created not only to enforce peace, but to serve as flags, markers, landmarks to tell everyone: behold, this war is heretofore ended. So that, when two former enemies meet, they don’t kill each other. (Sometimes the treaty means squat, but that’s another story.) Anyway, they are not supposed to kill each other anymore. And, if one of them d
oes it, there will be punishment. Sometimes they kill each other, and that brings the story to an end—but not this story, alas. What does one do when the war is inside?

  My condition is not as simple as schizophrenia (simple in the sense that you can medicate the patient, that is, that there is a palliative treatment). My condition is legion. Treat yourself like the enemy. Exorcize yourself. Barbiturates, slit the wrists open, all these are dumb, brutal methods—and utterly ineffective. For all you can do is reach a kind of truce. This way lies negotiation. And negotiation is not an art. Negotiation is death. So I must find another way. Another door to me.

  3.

  I stayed awake for most of the levitation night looking at old pictures. My mom holding me as a baby. Standing to her right, in a black suit, my grandfather. A gaunt, stern man in his sixties then, he wasn’t a bad fellow. But he wouldn’t be caught smiling. His upbringing. But he was a good and fair man, or that is the way I wish to remember him. A member of the Church of the Latter-day Saints. I’m not a member of any church. But these are my last days. Will I be a saint, after? A ghost? Pigments and pixels in pictures?

  4.

  Finally, I slept. And she was holding my hand right next to me in the airplane during the turbulence, and that was when she said for the first time the words I love you. And even though the plane shook a lot and I was frightened, I could not help but smile, because I was beside myself with joy. I was witnessing an occurrence rarer than a plane crash. And she said it again, this time with a smile in her sad eyes (her melancholy eyes were her trademark; to this day I wonder if this was why I fell in love with her; I teased her once, telling her the real reason was that I had seen her gorgeous legs when she walked into the classroom that balmy evening in October, but to be honest, I think I will never know): “In case anything goes wrong now, I just wanted you to know that I love you. I love you. I love you.” She said it three times. I couldn’t have been happier. We kissed then—a shaky, trembling meeting of lips, no more, but that was more than enough—and we held hands for thirty minutes more until the turbulence subsided. And we had not died. And she was still there. And I was still in love with her. And she was.

  5.

  And she was telling me, the door is cryogenics. She saw in my face, even via messaging, my resolve to end things. We were too distant from each other to protagonize a love scene. I wasn’t in the mood for love anyway. I would regret it later. I was out for war. If it had to be a cold war, so be it.

  6.

  Break my body, hold my bones. Grind me into powder. Scatter what is left of this dust to the wind, so that soon there will be no visible particle left. It will be better this way. To have and have not. To be or not to be. Veni, vidi, vici. I went, I was, I had. It was not enough, but it was all I was allowed to get. Now I am a dead man walking. I am the incredible shrinking man. I am the man who folded himself. For I have touched the sky. I loved and was loved back. Once, this was a noble truth. Not anymore. No regrets. Nothing else matters. Please kill me.

  7.

  No sleep tonight anymore. I can sleep when I’m dead. Who said that? Churchill? Fassbinder? It doesn’t matter. All that matters now is the past. Another photo: in the center of the image, a father holds his infant son. The father is smiling; he looks nervous. This is his first child. It will not be his last, but he doesn’t know it yet. (He will have a daughter three years later, but his wife will get pregnant before that and will suffer a miscarriage. Some things are better left unknown for now, however.)

  The father is standing between two well-tended bushes in a rose garden at his aunt’s house. The father is a very tall, thin man, and he’s wearing a well-cut suit. He looks rather uncomfortable in it, but handsome all the same. The son is just a baby. Forty years after that snapshot, the son, a poet dying of cancer, will write a story about that photo. About those two people frozen in time, in the cold sleep of memory.

  8.

  I hardly felt the second occurrence of levitation. Most miracles go unobserved while we’re busy living our lives. I am visiting the avenues of my death, all the houses, the open doors.

  Cryogenics is not rocket science, you told me. You were right. Rockets go somewhere. A frozen body is a thing of beauty, a joy forever: it will never pass into nothingness. And quoting Keats without knowing it, you killed all the poetry. That, I remember, was when I stopped answering your messages. Either way, I would never see you again, and I couldn’t bear it.

  My feet bound to the ground again, I start having second thoughts about taking my life. Maybe I’m bound by some invisible force. Maybe this force is more tangible than everyone around us can possibly suspect. The force of an oath, even if it’s an oath I make only to myself, after a life of suffering, when I reach a safe harbor, a haven, and I can finally disembark, put my feet ashore and thank heavens (or Fate, if I suffered so much that I can’t possibly believe in any gods anymore) because I have finally reached safety, at last I have the supreme joy of finding a place to stay, a room of my own, having some food in my belly, maybe even a stray cat to pet when I’m feeling lonely, and the beach to gaze upon when I want to feel lonely. But then I’m never really in solitude, because of my oath.

  What do I know? What I still know is nobody belongs to anybody, and in the end, this is all well and good, this is as it should have been all the time. But having this knowledge does not ease my pain, for deep inside I would have you as mine and I would have my heart as yours, but our timelines crossed each other in some twisted angle, or maybe in parallel, and that was not to be. We did meet, though, and it was good. But ours was only a node in the wider net of life, and who knows when we shall meet again? Not us.

  9.

  My body is not my temple. Every health freak worships this figure of speech more than their own blood-sugar levels. They are wrong. A body is not fit to worship; too messy for that. Nor is my body a city. Every age seems to have the metaphor it deserves.

  In the times of Diderot, D’Alembert, and La Mettrie, L’Homme Machine, the Machine Man. God was the Architect of the Universe. Everything was cogs and coils, nuts and bolts. For a thing to work, it should be mechanical, they reasoned. In this they weren’t so far from the truth. All things break down. Even bodies. Especially bodies.

  In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Gernsback Continuum, the WASP dream of reaching the future by purification of the species. Citius, Altius, Fortius. Faster, Higher, Stronger. Able bodies. We know what Hitler did to the unable ones.

  Today, what do we have to show as a metaphor? The Gibson Continuum, maybe? Post-post-cyber hybrid hacktivists flaunting their cyborginess as the beginning of a brave new world? Aside from the notion of the brain as a computer, the idea of body as machine remains the same. They are not enough, all these metaphors. They were never able to convey all the complexity of flesh and blood. Better to widen the scope and say just this: the human body is a battlefield. Of viruses and bacteria; of hatreds and passions; of external pressures, tangible and intangible. The human body is the fucking Battle of the Somme repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseam every single day of our lives. I know mine is. There is only one way to stop this battle.

  ◊

  10.

  The capsule.

  11.

  Before sleep, a last thought: one day I will be out of cryosleep and the world around me will be unrecognizable. I will barely be able to utter any sentence—any word—in a way that makes sense to the generation who will wake me. Maybe they will have translating implants. Maybe they will be post-humans, genetically modified to understand virtually every old language the peoples of Earth ever spoke in its history. Maybe humankind simply won’t exist anymore and I will be awakened from cold sleep by machines, robots or artificial intelligences, incorporeal entities for whom the act of levitation is more an archaeological footnote than a true experience of something called flesh so far removed from their reality. I don’t know. Yet. All I know is one day I will be out of cryosleep and the world around me will be unrecogniz
able.

  But maybe, if I’m lucky, some symbols will be available that can be understandable by both sides. Music, for example. Not lyrics, but notes. And voices. Maybe Elizabeth Fraser singing. Anything. I would like that. It would be a good awakening in the distant future.

  «Légendaire.»

  Kai Ashante Wilson

  Having seen the reggaezzi perform, the righteous of Sea-john shake their heads in wonder. They will then murmur severally or as one, <>

  [Tonight]

  The cavalcade forms up. In beats, without words, the drummers argue a bass line. While higher registers wait in silence, contraltos and bassos scat and moan, improvising the tune (the lyrics never change). The soulful melodies these deeper voices come up with are much too cool, and none capture the hot quiddity of their subject. “Make dat shit bump, y’all,” a counter-tenor exhorts. “Put some stank on it!” So the music picks up funk and swing. A girl bounces and stretches with the other dancers. They have black skin, or brown, or golden; hers is gray, waxen, and flyblown. What ails this girl, her bones slipping so weirdly in raddled tissues? It’s death: she died three days ago. But so long as weary flesh lasts she has the right to choose it over imperishable spirit. Thus can her body rise again, and she dance tonight with living brethren. The boy she loved, dead these years, not days, reappears as another name among the beautiful lights, and plays guitarra with the same prodigy as before, when he lived. Dancers up front, players and singers trailing, they’ll process down Mevilla, the witches’ hill, and up and over the great breasts of the Mother, middle hill crowded with shanties of the poor, and onward to the furthest hill of Sea-john, Dolorosa, where rich families live in gardened houses and foreign powers keep grand embassies. A boy nicknamed El Supremo is about to join their host—he lies tossing in his bed, way over on that easternmost hill. No one will see this parade pass, few hear it. The performance is for that one boy alone, whom the reggaezzi will gather to their number at last, tonight.