How many times?
We may settle on an “answer”
but we’ll never know Why.
When the Strandbeest didn’t come home
The Hands assumed an obstacle—
hooligans or beach trash
a tourniquet of fishing line
or simply a driftwood stumble—
left the ‘beest pawing air.
So she herded the rest
of the wind walkers into
the warehouse and limped
to her dune buggy,
bouncing off into the winter
NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT
Step step step
Bump
My lullaby:
Turn
Step step step
sweet ‘beests pacing polished concrete
Step
ping-ponging like particles
Bump
at the mercy of Maxwell’s Demon,
Turn
until they dispel sufficient energy
Step
to achieve standby mode
Bump
Turn
so like my ricochet from doctor to
Bump
doctor,
Turn
my buggy bouncing over dunes
Step step step step
in the middle of the
step step
Bump
NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT NIGHT
The buggy’s headlamps dawned
over the prodigal ‘beest
stranded amid frost-flecked dunes
but upright, unencumbered by
anything but its own calculations.
Its scoop of tightly woven
plastic zip ties still hovered
halfway to the hopper,
like a soup spoon paused
en route to mouth,
full of gull bones and
mussel shards.
Star-lit, lupus-bit
The Hands reviewed the last few
screens of diagnostics, wondered at
the widening gyre of introspection
that paralyzed but
So sorry, ‘beest.
cold-scoured, stiff-fingered
she simply hit REBOOT.
I hurt
in parts you don’t have,
ache in ways
you can’t comprehend.
All I wanted was to go home,
don an analgesic patch, and collapse,
agony not silenced,
but mercifully muted.
When the Strandbeest started dreaming
The Hands kept it home for observation,
programmed it to patrol the quarter-mile
in front of HQ.
Once the clan dispersed, each
to its own zone of eco-rehab,
The Hands conducted
TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS
So easy to slip into clinical narrative
to recite the litany of symptoms
rehearsing, revising, repeating the story of
my sickness to PA, RN, MD, Ph.D.,
back and forth like waves. . .
In my mother’s tongue,
one cannot suffer in solitude.
“Me duele” implies an invisible [it]
that inflicts: My legs don’t hurt,
“Me duelen las piernas.” They hurt me.
The wave is not the water.
The pain, within, divides me.
HAVE YOU OR A FAMILY MEMBER EVER BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH. . .
ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 10, WITH 1 BEING ‘NO PAIN AT ALL’ AND 10 BEING. . .
PLEASE CIRCLE THE SYMPTOMS YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED IN THE LAST WEEK
WE SHOULD KNOW MORE ONCE WE GET BACK THE RESULTS OF YOUR. . .
TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS TESTS
The Hands should have known:
There’s no room for a bug to hide
in this ‘beest built from the bones of
forebears. The inherited pipes
may not glow like the stark white stilts
of younger iterations—
like the polyethylene-coated canvas,
they’ve been tanned
bone-yellow by the elements—
but they meet the stress tests.
The computer brain, though recycled,
gives all the right answers
when plugged into the test harness.
Only when assembled
does aberrant behavior arise.
The wave is not the water.
The wave moves through the water.
The Hands considers
memory leaks and “junk” DNA
how a confluence of ancestral ghosts
piggybacks on successful features
and may exert micronewtons of influence
until silent predispositions erupt,
chronic as consciousness
To sleep, perchance to dream.
There’s a ghost in your machine.
and, dysfunctional or ingenious,
that syncretism is too secret
to be seen,
impossible to excise
without consequence.
In this confusion we are kin.
Like the doctors, I can’t fix
what no one understands.
When the Strandbeest started dreaming
it needed an escape hatch.
So The Hands wrote a
PATCH PATCH PATCH PATCH PATCH PATCH PATCH PATCH PATCH PATCH PATCH
DEFINE REALITY_CHECK
BEGIN
The dream is
IF warning THEN mark and consult sensors to confirm
IF confirmed THEN initiate FLEE
IF not confirmed THEN
set aside,
LABEL marked warning “anomaly”
WHILE iterations < MAX_LOOPS
not refuted.
run diagnostics
consult sensors to confirm
IF confirmed THEN initiate FLEE and EXIT WHILE
The pain,
end
IF not confirmed THEN RENAME “anomaly” “dream”
SAVE “dream” to log
not silenced,
CLEAR warning
RETURN to MAIN_LOOP
END
only muted.
END END END END END END END END END END END END END END END END END
Facing the Sun
Bogi Takács
Teratology
C. Samuel Rees
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here—
—Emily Dickinson
“There always resides a monster,” Winter said, behind the toolshed, by the gutting tub, in early autumn. She gripped the brook trout beneath its fins. Twin flicking barbs cast fast-sublimating droplets against her face. Winter frowned and dug her thumbs into roiling gill slits, working with a familiarity gleaned from repetition, pulping and loosening inner workings, transfiguring the trout into a flurry of gasps.
Summer had been long in leaving and ambient heat still smeared our afternoons. But sheltered beneath corrugated tin and plywood, the sun sloping behind sweet birch bordering the farm’s northern fields, the late day teemed with an aberrant chill.
“Inside, outside, doesn’t quite matter. Unnatural is the only sort of nature we have these days. Where the abnormality manifests isn’t important. That’s not why we walk the streams and fields.”
The fish flailed, weakened, then draped dully in her hands. She hefted the limp mottled-green form, still twitching with the recent memory of suffocation, and studied its jaw.
“We’re composed of mutations, whether they’re submersed in flesh, hidden in genetic warrens, in molecular configuration, or in the lay of organs and subcutaneous tissue.”
“So we’re unquantifiable? Defying catego
ry and classification?”
Our exchange was redundant. Each afternoon we worked side-by-side and Winter made a point of running me through the project’s tenets, what she called “constants,” as we examined the specimens Maia hauled in from the lines. Winter always said, “Splice recollection with toil and what you get is a true breed of proficiency.”
Any first-year pysch student would crow to call it “conditioning,” but I had come to think of it as “accelerated evolution.” I posed questions, prodded for fallacies and tears in her hypothesis as an acknowledgment of a previous way of being: shared scientific certitude that life was, at its core, a blank chart waiting to be filled in.
Winter tapped her forearm where a hollow, translucent burl of flesh nestled among scar tissue tributaries crisscrossing veins from the heel of her hand to her elbow. Under my skin my own subdermal, barely the size of a leatherwing beetle, fed on a steady flow of biometric data.
“The Human Genome Project, CERN, the Large Hadron Collider, didn’t work to map our bodies, minds, and environment; they simply reassured us that no matter how fucked things seem, no matter how deep in the woods humanity was, we would adapt, reorient, maybe even conquer.”
“Terra incognita then.”
The human body was on constant display these days. Unfelt biorhythms dressed in polymer and circuitry. What was once allowed to ripple in patterns and cycles long familiar to muscle, blood, organ, bone, now babbled data-streams into encrypted clouds mined for R&D and universal health care.
Meat, logged and downloadable; the explorable self. From soft tissue to wetware in barely twenty years.
“More base than that. You’re still framing it with institutional thinking.”
I handed her the buck knife, pinching the blade, offering it to her handle forward. Collecting live specimens was our duty on the farm. Winter did the judging and gutting. I was expected to remain a creature of pure osmosis until she said otherwise: listen, adopt, adapt, abide.
She slid the knife into soft meat, slipped it up from anus to gills, hooked a finger in the jaw and pulled a loop of purple-grey viscera free in a single arch.
All that useless data.
“Superstition had something to it. Not verifiable truth. All of it was bullshit, misconception, ignorance, or all three in unison. But the way of thinking, its base supposition that all we experience is inherently beyond us, the work of something unseen, now that’s worth reexamining.”
She passed the knife back. Grey guts and dull blood clung along the blade like goose flesh. Grease stippled water in the washtub like lesions on skin.
“Like marking leviathans on a sea chart.”
“Bingo. Here Be Dragons. Except the serpents we have to watch out for swim in our genetic drink, deeper than blood. Inseparable from the very framework of human makeup.”
She waved the trout at me. I grabbed it with both hands. Scales pulled at my palms. I no longer wore the neoprene work gloves Cade had given me on my first day at the farm. Gloves mute knowing a fish; bare skin allows you to anticipate how one will thrash and cut.
“Nine months into this I at least have that constant down. Give me some credit here,” I said.
Winter sat on an overturned steel tub and rubbed her forearm where her subdermal once rooted. She often did this in moments when our tasks lulled and she took to elaborating on the themes and theories of our undertaking. A habit caught without its tool, like reaching to clean a pair of glasses after you’ve had your vision corrected or seeking to fidget with a ring on a phantom limb.
We all had them, the skin pills, the subdermals. At the age of thirteen we received two small incisions and walked away with two plastic pills left behind in the wrist and neck. Thus ran the slope of the modern age: in vitro corrections, biometric databases, patient-tailored vaccination regimes, hormone recalibration. The booster shots of the 20th century were simple dreams.
A kid catches a cold and his doctor knows before the first sniffle. Sees the deep unseen reactions of flesh and blood like some sort of data-stream soothsayer.
Without her subdermal Winter was an unknown continent. We could not decide if she purposefully avoided driving fifteen miles to Metro-General for the ten-minute procedure. Or if she believed it obsolete.
She squinted at the slouching sun.
“It’s easy to believe that we finally have an eye on our interiors. Some might think that it’s a necessary delusion to ascribe names to monsters waiting in our flesh. But humans are still wildernesses. I know this, you know this, and despite that it’s still my task to drive the fact home each session. When you get to gutting and collecting solo we need you to have more than just rote skill to rely on. A philosophy can do wonders for your work ethic.”
I squatted in the balding grass beside the tub. Winter was wearing thin and showed it. Maia caught her sleeping in the specimen hangar on a folding chair nightly, a bevy of dull-eyed brook trout appraising her from their tank. Winter rarely joined us for communal supper after our twilight duties. She’d haunt the lines and snares, a red LED headlamp strapped to her brow like a sleepless eye. Her weekly calls to the Fish and Game Commission, State Parks and Wildlife, the chairs of at least five separate university biology departments up and down the coast had devolved from cordial conversation to tense murmuring to near shouting matches over the last four months. Luce somehow convinced Winter to let her play proxy with the powers that be, relaying pertinent data, taking down notes, screening information, and passing it on.
Beneath the awning of the shed, the perpetual autumn’s light took on a still-life quality: suspended, clear. We could have been subjects in a Dutch master’s portrait exhausted from work and waiting for the sun to kill the golden hour and release us. The light illuminated the deep coves of her eye sockets. Crow’s feet scrabbled at their corners; fissures worried her brow.
“How about we swap roles then?”
Winter was like a moth-eaten sweater, light shining through in all the wrong places, so many tears already that anticipating another was no longer guesswork, but weary certainty. She shrugged.
“There is no such thing as pristine. That’s the biggest lie we live, thinking forests and fish and stones were ever untouched. By its very nature, Nature has always functioned on the principle of change through destruction. Schismogenesis. There’s fracture at the very core of being.”
More rote recitation. Winter had become almost indistinguishable from her routine: collect specimens, catalogue them, secure them in the hangar for observation, transfigure blood samples, observations, and measurements into quantities, hard evidence, data.
I pulled the plastic specimen bucket toward me: three mutated males in the water.
In the dirt five gutted females waited to be put on ice.
Untainted rainbow, brown, and brook trout, crappy, steelhead, rock bass, sauger, saugeye, and the rare pike ended on Winter’s knife and in Luce’s pan. We ate our rejects, all perfectly developed females.
The long term effects from ingesting contaminated species were yet to be decisively proven. There were similarities to other cases, namely the effects of DDT on eggshell density among bald eagles. DDT was banned a little over sixty years ago and in that margin of time the watershed was bombarded by God knows how many nameless contaminants. Pile on top of that the continual blurring of seasons and you had an Anthropocene slipping, year-by-year, into slow motion catastrophe.
The males of ten genuses of fish, two varieties of foxes, muskrats, three of the six types of weasel, and in one case a juvenile black bear Maia shot by the north end creek all displaying visible malformations and a significant decrease in fertility. Abnormalities ran the gamut from bone malformations to cryptorchidism to full-blown sterility.
Not enough data for academic vetting, but promising. More than.
I reached into our catch bucket. Cold streamed along the trout’s flanks, wavered in thin steaming gusts as it mouthed for water. I worked my hands as I’d seen Winter’s work. Grabbing firmly benea
th the fins, examining the jaw and skull.
“No visible signs of malformation.”
I lifted the buck knife from the wooden ledge above the gutting station while the trout whipped me. Pectoral fins dug into the meat of my palm.
The knife had dulled some since the first fish, but cut clean enough.
I examined the discarded heart, intestines, the arch and ridges of gore flecked gills on the ground between us. Organs once vital, rife with information, transformed into a coiled, abstract mess against yellowing newspaper.
“This one’s female. All the organs appear to be properly developed.”
“Double-check.”
I looked at Winter, meaning to give her a bruised sigh. Her eyes were closed, face turned up to the last vestiges of ragged light caught along the corrugated steel awning. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes like pits where mountains had been sheared, her cheeks scooped out by a lack of rest and an excess of work. She looked as if she had fallen asleep.
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation Page 4
