The little voice in the back of my head told me to sign the agreement. It didn’t feel right, but I suppose that was the whole point. After all, doing what felt right was playing right into their hands.
How did I end up here? I ask myself that quite a lot, but the answer bears repeating. Our descendants will remember this day, so let me spell it out, there is an important lesson here about Human ingenuity.
When it was time to sell the books, it wasn’t easy for me. I took boxes of them in, pared down the shelf to only those that really mattered to me, ones I would read again, ones I would give to friends to read. I could always buy more books. They took up so much space, and I needed the cash now. In time, they all went, each one a little pang, a little bit of anger at the world that wouldn’t let me keep the precious things I had acquired.
Anyway, they say getting rid of clutter is good for you psychologically.
The problem was not just that someone’s old thesis project held the keys to saving what was left of the human race. It wasn’t just that the little kit-box of electronics wouldn’t communicate with the network, nor that its only interface was a screen, a camera and microphone. No, the problem was that it didn’t want to talk to them.
To Mom for unbending faith and more money than I deserved and Dad for everything he taught, to both of them for damn good genes. To siblings for their perseverance and the examples set before impressionable young eyes. To every lover for every word and touch and gift that may yet prove I am worth loving. To friends for being friends. To all the above and to sheer good luck, for my health and strength and sanity. To Miranda for that privileged spot in her young universe, and to everyone who taught, everyone who gave, everyone who cared. Thank you.
Arley had been in car accidents before. Not many, and nothing serious, but there had been a few heart-stopping moments behind the wheel. The funny thing about all of them was that he could only really remember them as memories. One night, coming home late after a party, the alcohol warm and comforting in his veins, he had drifted over the center line and clipped the rear bumper of an oncoming car. He couldn’t actually remember doing that, but he could remember sitting in the car, heart pounding sobriety into his veins, and trying to replay the scene in his head to figure out what exactly had happened. It had been too fast, though, there was nothing except the nauseating shock of adrenalin and fear, and the -memory- of a hideous metallic crunch, a sickening lurch, spinning and the squeal of tires. He could remember remembering the wreck afterward, not the wreck itself.
Alysin watched the shadows near the burgeoning tomato plants, watched for the telltale signs of Yasuo’s shape among the leaves. It was subtle. The half-man, half-wolf shadow was just one more irregular darkness on a field of irregular darkness. The dim light flowing from the kitchen window from which she watched only added more shadows and twisted shapes.
He was utterly still and she knew the artificial chromatophores in his skin were painting him in shades of black and green, though they hardly need bother. His stillness and the shadows of the garden were enough, he assumed the camouflage not out of necessity but out of habit.
The room was warm and the atmosphere inside felt heavy and rich, scented slightly with sea water and machine oil, but all the richer for that. There was couch of black leather, a couple of chairs similarly overstuffed and glossy, and two open doors, one revealing a tiled floor and the other only darkness.
There was a layer of coarse black sand and round stones on the bottom of the swimming pool. I watched this out-of-place sea bed drift slowly towards me, until my head made gentle contact. The pressure was painful in my ears, but I bore it and resisted the urge to push myself back up through the water to the air above. There were shells down here, and there, just inches from my eyes, a bone. Yes, of course. There would more, many more.
It was time to take stock. It had been a long day, in which too much happened too quickly. I had to consider the possibility that I had been reckless – could I have found a more rational and clever way to deal with the situation? Possibly. Could I do anything about that now? No.
I considered my surroundings. These were, essentially, the echoing blackness of the inside of a sealed metal box somewhere in the front end of a very large walking robot, in form and movement quite reminiscent of a spider. I could faintly feel the gentle rocking motion of the smooth arachnid gait.
I was working as a programmer at the time, corporate infrastructure, boring but steady work. It was a big enough company to have layers of legacy code and infrastructure, but rich enough to be deploying newer technology. I specialized in that interface between the two, a specialization with a finite lifetime, but lucrative while it lasted. Mostly, I sat in a little cube with my haptic holographic interface, pushing blocks of code around and sticking them together like legos. Occasionally I got to turn on the old-style monitor and keyboard to massage the old code. I liked the old stuff, it was all hand-made, inefficient and baroque, but it had personality. Back then, the hand of the programmer left its signature, everything felt like it was created by a craftsman, or occasionally a mad genius. Horrible stuff to make work with modern systems, but it was a kind of art in its own right.
I had been in town for a few months, settled into my bland little apartment and finally slipped into a groove at work in which things were routine enough for the mind can wander during the day and predictable enough to know I’d be done with everything when it was time to go home.
Home was close by a long winding park that followed a creek along the edges of the city, it was my usual refuge from the sense of loneliness that was beginning to seep into my little apartment. I liked walking north, up into the wilder parts where the clear water ran over wide shelves of slate and the trail petered out in the trees next to the creek. The water ran wide and shallow over the smooth stone, and on hot days I would take my shoes off and walk through the cool ankle deep currents and hot sun-baked black rock.
And one day, one summer day heavy with humidity and the sound of cicadas, I stepped out from under the trees onto the hot slate and saw a body sprawled out in the water. It was female, skinny and long, thin white dress plastered over visible ribs and steaming out into the water. For a very long time, I stood frozen, the hot stone burning into the soles of my bare feet. What do you do when you see a body? Hazy scenes from first aid classes of my youth spun by in random order, and finally something solidified enough to release my body back to conscious control. Talk first, if she’s not really dead you’ll look an idiot when you call 911.
I have been studying for the Graduate Record Exam in Physics. I have devoted every spare moment to trying to absorb into ready memory what amounts to my entire undergraduate curriculum in the two weeks prior to the test date. I have put aside other projects, neglected writing and social demands, and stayed up far too late trying to remember principles of Quantum Mechanics and Optics.
I tried, oh I tried, to write a worthy story with the ragged remains of my creative energy. I wrote a page of rambling and senseless prose that I could not see any way to redeem. I stared at the walls, and then wrote more, failing utterly to make progress against the sleep deprived fog of fatigued neurons. Somewhere in the soft opacity were solid pieces of truth, beauty and literature, I blundered around and past them, seeing only that they were there but never discerning their actual outlines.
With the test looming up in the all to immediate future, I realized I would rather tell you this little tail of failure than slap an incoherent ending on the failure itself and post it as if it were a story. The books are piled up and waiting. Perhaps the truths and comprehension they contain will be as obscured by mist as were the plots and themes of the Story, but I will forge into that fog and try my best.
I watched him watch the tiny drop of super glue fall through the air and land on the skin of his forearm. He blew on it, very gently, then touched it tentatively. He moved the little bottle a few inches along his arm and watched the little clear droplet form on the end of the thin nozzle.
Little red riding hood walked through the old forest with her hood pulled down low over her face. She walked with a angry tension, almost but not quite stamping her feet with every step. The little wicker basket hanging from one arm emitted the occasional sound of glass contacting crockery as it swung unregarded.
It is not easy to design a joint for a fifty meter long steel leg. Not if you want to create a smooth, elegant curve of metal that can support your thousand ton arachnid robot and yet appear as delicate and simple as the leg of a back widow. Not easy at all, but whoever had designed this one had known his business.
I walked around in a daze for a while after convincing myself that yes, really, the lottery ticket numbers matched the lottery drawing numbers. My head buzzed with excitement and confusion, half-remembered daydreams and fantasies of time travel and super powers. After so long poor, tired, desperate, I worried that maybe the shock had unhinged me. The sensation of frustrated deja-vu finally drained away and I was left with a sort of tense elation. I banked the cash and went looking for something fun to do.
A table’s width of space was all the difference necessary between our two stations, for one to find glory and the other death.
But oh, death can be glorious too, and glory can be a bitter pill indeed.
The little white box sat on the coffee table, where Margaret had left it days before. I watched it change. Subtle flows and waves of pastel color shifted across its faces, at first so faint that they could be mistaken for shadows, only gradually becoming brilliant primary colors. The box made me uncomfortable.
The nurse that tended to me was pretty, in a young and stupid sort of way. An epitome of youthful vigor and vapidity. Her smile was broad and genuine, and showed white teeth that might have been props in an ad for toothpaste. I disliked her instantly, though this may say more of my state of mind than of any fault she possessed. I was looking despondently down at my bandaged wrist when she chose to insert her cheerful good nature painfully into my well of sorrows.
It was on a long dusty desert road that Eric got his name. I was driving, enjoying the feel of tires riding lightly, and a little too fast, over the loose gravel and sand when Linda asked me, “So, what is its name?”.
“Eric,” I said, loud enough to carry over the road and engine noise. It came to me the moment she asked, as if from Eric himself. We drove up into the hills in that blue Jeep Cherokee, now christened Eric, to experiment with the delicacies of four-wheel drive and vehicular personalities.
It was a simple white box. I was startled to find it in my room when I woke up that morning, but not especially afraid of it. Surely it would turn out to be a surprise gift from a friend, or something similar. I went to it and opened it without a second thought.
Click to continue reading “14 – The Box, or, How I Met My Wife”
