Had the anchor suddenly turned toward the camera and addressed them by name, informing them that the whole thing was an elaborate, experimental psych-experiment, they could not have been any more dumbfounded than they already were.
“You didn’t use your card, did you?”
“No, like a proper call girl, I’ve been pocketing the change from your cash.”
Joshua scoffed at the suggestion. “It’s our cash.”
“Will it still be our cash if I stop sleeping with you?”
“If there’s a line at the entrance gate, I’ll turn this pad into a giant urinal cake, I swear to the American white daddy god!”
He poured what remained of it down his throat and relished its cleansing fire while also hoping it would knock him back into the recessed cushions before his mind could escape its cage. But it was too late. Thoughts, like nocturnal critters, had already started to roam the boundless night. Scurrying, gnawing, and then burrowing into those hidden recesses from which they would later ambush him when least expecting it.
Nor did he notice all the people glancing at him as he stared vacantly into this portal-no-more. They wondered what he was looking at and whether they should inform someone and although they knew the unwritten rule about not making a fuss of it if they observed Utopia’s preeminent scientist and product developer and creative genius—among other monikers and superlatives—to be acting strangely or glitching out, there were times, such as this, when Dr. Reyes put this rule to the test.
“How in the hell does a failsafe function, or any executable for that matter, which is written to run on a contained computer system, somehow make the jump from cables and switches to manipulating human behavior—not to mention natural events—on a mass scale?”
Agent Rodriguez’s nose wrinkled as if provoked by an acrid odor. “Are you pretending not to understand what it means to have an infinite dataset with infinite processing capacity?”
“But it’s isolated—partitioned.”
“And how, exactly, does one isolate, or partition, something infinite?”
“Yeah, why get all worked up about murders when most people heroically abstained from doing murders.”
“Well, if you go around looking like a card-carrying member of PETA, you’ll probably be harassed. But if you go around looking like you might be featured on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch list, then you’re golden.”
“So, I’m supposed to believe that the person who achieved quantum supremacy didn’t realize that two infinite systems were really just different vantages of the same system, by very definition?”
Karen just shook her head dismissively. “Listen, this is all just basic eschatology. Kalki and Hinduism, Nanahuatzin and Aztec mythology, and especially Abrahamic religious messianism. Humanity has been fetishizing the end of the world ever since we invented its beginning. It’s just easier to destroy it than to heal it, I guess. Chalk it up to our intellectually lazy nature, am I right? I mean, did I incorporate these concepts into my book? Sure, that was one of its major themes. And I might even be inclined to agree that my book was prescient if it all wasn’t so goddamn foreseeable.”
“Not that kind of fantasy. Although it would have been better if that’s all it was, to be honest. At least then I could chalk it up to that involuntary rush of blood that goes to that mindless meat stick between a man’s legs when a hottie gives him the time of day. I mean, that’s just biology. You can’t even help something like that.”
He was leaning his entire torso out the passenger-side window, his long and grubby hair triggering eerie flashbacks to some lost decade deliberately forgotten and then reimagined.
“As the fleeting glints in this machination, we can fret all we want about what ought or ought not be. About the prospect of nuclear annihilation or the next super virus or how to conduct ourselves as expendable lifeforms on a planet that will ultimately be scorched to a lifeless, floating rock once its patron star exhausts its store of hydrogen. The grand production of it all barely worth a flicker on the surface of a supermassive black hole’s event horizon. Either way, the characters we inhabit and the storylines we enact are byproducts of byproducts of an endlessly projected mirage. Little more than the sparks that fly alluringly—but even more so fleetingly—off the glowing iron with every strike of the forger’s hammer, only to come to rest on the ground as negligible flakes. That is us. We are the slag of creations far greater.”
Joshua glanced sideways at Karen thinking that maybe she would reach over and take his hand to assure him, just as she had on the trail, that even if nothing mattered, they mattered. The two of them an entangled pair defiantly forging an existence through the unpropitious fog of the unreal. Two ideas that only found footing in the reflection of the other.
But she never did reach for him. Or lean into him. Her stare, her thoughts, lost to the sea.
The river moved as an inexorable singularity, commanding the deific reverence of the spruces and firs crowding its banks as its eternal witnesses.
A little farther along and they came to an intersection marked by a pile of rectangular steel beams where the border wall had been torn down. The beams were largely rusted despite having been erected only a few years prior. The sad wreckage of it gave the impression of a metalwork think piece in an open-air museum.
“The bitter irony being that they claimed the land for conservationist reasons, designating the territory a national park. But they broke this promise too, not only to us this time, but to the world, as the glaciers they named the park after are now all gone.”
“Daddy, where does that bird need to go?”
By the way several of the programmers were chewing on their lips or squirming in their seats like they were trying to hold off a combustible brew of diarrhea, she knew she had lost half of them already. This brought a smile to her face.
Like the clouds that churned and frayed and reconstituted into one surreal shape after another, he was that fine, animate strand which threaded itself through all that there was or could be if only to know what it was truly capable of.
Pure Creation:
The nexus where a sublime idea meets a purity of intention,
Along the dimensionless web of transcendence.
The convergence being so powerful,
A sense of a past, future, and an entire universe,
Spontaneously explode upon the emergent mind,
To glorify its resplendence.
And then he started to tremble, realizing just how close he had come. He hastily stuffed the pillbox into the drawer next to the typed-up and notarized letter and took a moment to compose himself before lifting his gaze once more to behold this miraculous artifact of mass production which had somehow found its way through the global supply chain to come to the rescue of figures of a material more delicate.
“I always suspected you were real,” he told the doll in all sincerity. “As real as anything.”
“I always knew I would return. Even when I didn’t believe it, I knew it.”
“Why?” she often asked of herself in the days of their detention. “Why do I prolong the boy’s suffering? Why take another step on this miserable dirt upon this miserable rock that spins inexorably in miserable and uncaring darkness?”
“You have no idea the kind of work I’ve done. I’ve created paradises that would make Beethoven forget what music was.”
Fluctuations. Random excitations. Energy constantly undulating. Always seeking new outlets. New ways of being. Transformation by annihilation.
Steady, he told himself. The slightest twitch could end it all right then and there. This was where time went into abeyance. Sometimes minutes compressed into seconds and sometimes it was the seconds that stretched into minutes but it didn’t matter because he had unchained himself from that tyrannical gearwork of things moving too fast or too slow and always changing but rarely for the better. And that was the beauty of it. But there was no escaping the ache and the tension that were burrowing their way into his wrist and his thumb and setting fire to the joints and all that held them together. His grip and his very life slipping away. Oh well. He bit down harder on the metal. He relished the way it made a fine grit from the incisal edges of his teeth. The way his nerves became live wires and that acrid taste filling his mouth. His heart was racing wildly and tears could be felt rolling down his cheeks. But these things were very far away. Much closer was the dizzying reel of a life replaying in fast-forward to that familiar soundtrack of his favorite songs from forgotten days resounding audibly in the great amphitheater which was the Big Sky. A visceral reminder that beauty still existed in the world, or his mind, or whichever.
When she finished, Adrian could find no words to utter. No thoughts to grasp onto. Not a breath to reset himself. All he could do was sit there numbly, without expression, waiting for the algorithm to serve up its next distraction.
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