by Julian Gough
Do this . . .
His hands move down his body, in life and in the game, until his right hand touches his rapidly stiffening penis, his left cups his scrotum; his testicles pull tighter together at the touch, and suddenly mapping is off and the game murmurs that adult content has been blocked, and his hands are by his sides in the game.
The game won’t let him feel what he knows he feels.
The ghosts of his real hands twitch, somewhere, off the map, and now he’s getting two sets of signals; the game and reality are totally out of sync.
The mismatch between the gloves’ signals and his real hands is painfully wrong, and he turns off the game in a fury, pulls off the thin layers of ultrafine mesh, and throws the gloves across the room.
Strips off the micromesh suit.
He could override parental controls, of course he could, it’s his code, he helped build all the safeties, to keep the game legal; he could visit the gameworld’s adult realms, and generate any imaginary partner he wanted, he could even hook up with other gameworld players, in the anonymous zones, and do it with a real person. But if he played it in adult mode he would have to lie to his mother – or tell his mother the truth – no, either would be intolerable.
In the dark, still wearing the dead helmet, he touches his now erect, quivering penis again, with his real hands, touches his scrotum, feels his testicles move inside the purse of skin. Explores, cautiously. Feels, hidden under the scrotum, the plump tube of his penis continue back, beneath the loose pouch of skin, and halfway around the curve, ending between his buttocks. Something he had never noticed before.
He sees images of Sasha, very strong and clear. And memories; her in the doorway, taking off her helmet, her jacket . . .
He reruns some video that the helmet had taken; to refresh the memories, to make sure he is imagining her right. Then he switches off the video, closes his eyes. Goes back to the moment he said no.
This time, he says yes.
And now images of Sasha come to him that aren’t memories. Images of him opening her zippers; pulling off her boots; taking off her clothes. Her taking off her clothes. Images of her hands, of her mouth. Of her body.
All the parts are confused.
Things swap around in a way that has no proper order and isn’t logical.
He doesn’t know where these images are coming from; not the game; not memory. No, there are memories in there; his mother’s breasts, which he has often seen when she is drying herself after a shower.
But he doesn’t want to see his mother’s breasts, he groans involuntarily and lets go of his penis at the thought; and so he imagines them bigger, then smaller; he changes the skin tone, darker, lighter; he alters the size and shape of the nipple, the areola, as though adjusting an unsatisfactory image in the game.
His hands return to between his legs, to adjust his penis, which has begun to ache. It is startlingly hard, like a velvety metal. His testicles, too, are aching. He recalls his sharpest memories of Sasha, and only realizes, now, how often during their conversation he had stared at her chest, memorized the small curves.
He customizes the imaginary naked breasts again, to fit the clothed curves he remembers. Customizes smooth, naked hips. His thoughts grow confused, and the images begin to leap about with a life of their own, all kinds of angles, and his hand begins to work away, up and down, until there is a kind of pain he has never felt before, or perhaps in dreams, yes in dreams, not a pain. Like a pain. As intense as a pain. But not a pain.
And when it is over, she isn’t there. And the game isn’t there. It is just dark. It is nothing else. The sheet is wet and cold. Evaporation.
He’s never going to see her again. He’s never going to speak to her again.
He should have said yes.
His mother will be back soon.
He should have said yes.
He has no idea how he feels. No idea at all.
Tired. He feels tired.
He sleeps.
40
‘Existence is something tremendous, and day-to-day life, however indispensable, seems an insufficient response to it.’
— Thomas Nagel
Nevada is a desert. Almost totally empty, until a hundred years ago. Even the Paiute and the Shoshone – pretty tough, resilient people – didn’t particularly want to live here. They stayed close to the few small lakes and rivers. So what changed? What brought a million people to Las Vegas, this dry valley, in the last few years?
If you asked them, they’d probably say something like ‘work opportunities’, ‘Las Vegas is the fastest expanding municipality in America’, ‘there’s incredible demand for engineers . . .’
And if you asked a million red blood cells why they were rushing towards Colt’s penis as it grew erect, they’d probably tell you ‘work opportunities’ too. ‘It’s a fast-expanding region . . .’ ‘Incredible demand for oxygen . . .’
But the red blood cells – all proudly separate, all fiercely individual, all tumbling chaotically along their own unique paths – are being channelled there by the system of systems that is Colt, by the laws of physics, in the service of something happening at a higher level of complexity than they are equipped to understand.
That doesn’t mean that Colt knows why he does what he does, either; summoning all those red blood cells, burning all that oxygen. He’s doing it; he has the illusion of control; but he in turn is being driven by the next level down, the DNA in every cell, and the next level up, the system of systems that is made up of humanity, arranged in a society, with all its memes and mating rituals; its habits, expectations, and laws.
So if you’re troubled by Las Vegas and ask me, why are all those people moving to that valley in the desert; I know and I don’t know.
And if you ask Colt why he’s doing what he is doing, he will know and he won’t know.
It is happening because mammals commonly form breeding pairs after puberty.
It is happening because the old sperm have been sitting there too long, and may be defective. They need to be cleared out, and new sperm made quickly, because his brain chemistry is targeting a fertile woman, and locking on. He may need fresh sperm, and lots of it, next time they meet, which could be anytime. The body is reprioritizing.
It is happening because Colt can’t get to sleep otherwise.
It is happening because he’s falling in love.
All of these are true. They just use different metaphors to describe a reality that is more complex than any metaphor. A supertruth that is connected to everything ever, and infinite in all directions.
Using a metaphor, a simile . . . it’s like riding a horse. It can take you far in the right direction, but when its legs start to go, get off. Get off before it staggers sideways and takes you over a cliff. Don’t fall in love with your horse.
A lot of religious people have fallen in love with their horse. They think their religion is the truth, and everything else is a metaphor.
A lot of scientists have fallen in love with their horse. They think science is the truth, and everything else is a metaphor.
A lot of artists have fallen in love with their horse. They think art is the truth, and everything else is a metaphor.
But everything is a metaphor. Science, religion, art, they’re all just ways to describe reality; and any description of reality is massively compressed, with almost total loss of information.
The guy who thinks he’s writing this book, why is he really writing it? Because of DNA; because of the human need to make satisfying patterns; because of his individual personal history; because of his cultural traditions; because of the laws of physics; because of the transformation now reorganizing all the lifeforms of earth; because of the evolution of the solar system; because of whatever mysterious thing the galaxy is doing; and on and on and up and up and out.
The answer is a supertruth that is connected to everything ever, and infinite in all directions.
Everything’s playing at once.
&n
bsp; Keep focused though, on the important thing.
This story is true.
41
The next morning, he switches the game back on as soon as he wakes, and pulls back on the gloves, and the micromesh suit, and his clothes, and without washing or eating or drinking he walks far out into the real desert with mapping on as the sun rises, and sits there thinking, just do it, just do it, until it’s way too hot and he can smell his own sweat.
Eventually he goes back in, and showers, and eats, and codes, and tries not to think about Sasha, about last night, about his shame; and all the time an urgent voice in his head murmurs do it, do it, do it, until he stands up so abruptly his chair falls over, and he says, ‘OK! OK!’ in the silent house, and the house AI says, ‘Pardon? I missed that,’ and he shouts, ‘Nothing!’ and strides back out into the desert again, and sits on a rock until it grows dark.
Nothing happens, and everything’s amazing. It’s the world, but subtly improved by him, by his code. He sits there, just breathing. The dry, clean air, the sun, the heat, the dazzle, and eventually the stars.
This might be the last time I see all this. Feel all this.
When the last light’s gone from the sky, he stands up.
And then, as he walks back to the house, he calls RoboCabs (‘Part Bar. Part Car. All Cab. The Future Of Transportation’), on his mother’s tab.
They tell him there’s a problem with her credit, but he can have a free ride from any of this week’s featured sponsors.
He picks a bank from the list, because their ads are usually far less stressful to endure than the ones for dramas or drinks or cars or casinos or football.
The RoboCab turns up just as he gets home.
As he climbs into the cab, he glances back at the moonlit house. The one-way privacy glass makes the windows into sheets of silver.
The RoboCab takes him to the lab in a dreamy whirl of images of money and security and health and love, as he drinks his complimentary non-alcoholic drink.
At the bottom of the hill, just below the big, brightly lit sign for the Casey Biological Research Facility, he asks the RoboCab to stop, and he gets out. He tells it not to wait, and it obediently whispers its way back towards Vegas.
When it’s out of sight, he walks quietly up the hill in the moonlight, across the deserted parking lot, and breaks in through the freight door, with his mother’s access codes and some analogue hacking tools.
The security system welcomes him inside. He’s hacked it so thoroughly over the years, unnoticed, while his mother works, that he could have just asked it politely to open the front doors; but he likes picking locks.
When he’s finally in his mother’s office, he sits in her chair. Spins in it till he feels dizzy.
Stops, and closes his eyes till the whirling in his head stops too.
He’s done all the research. He knows how to do this.
And then he does the thing he’s been dreaming of doing for so long.
42
When she gets back to the hotel, there’s a few of them, and they are furious. As she had hoped, they hadn’t been able to get a tail request through the bureaucracy in time.
So, human spying on citizens still requires a court order, she thinks, and enough paperwork to cover a giant bureaucratic ass. Good.
It’s been so hard to tell, since the executive lost control of the old NSA. Since the NDSA took over. She feels a little safer.
For two days, they put on pressure, play good spy bad spy, with one guy threatening, one guy sweetening the deal. Naomi stands firm.
It helps that she knows Colt is OK, because she can feel his heartbeat on her pulse. She knows he is calm, and it calms her. She worries, at one point, when his pulse grows hasty and erratic for a few minutes, but it passes, and soon his pulse is calm and slow again. Some excitement in the game, she thinks, to reassure herself. It’s nothing.
The questions go on, and on.
The sex, and the fact that they don’t know about the sex, helps too. She feels she has a self, a private self again. Something to protect.
They don’t know her, and they can’t tell her what to do.
Sometimes she zones out, during the questions, and deliberately remembers, in vivid detail, moments from that hour in that hotel room, and bites her tongue not to groan. At those moments, she pretends to herself, in a kind of guilty confusion – to get Colt out of her mind – that the pulse she feels against her wrist belongs to the man in the hotel room.
Then someone somewhere – Ryan? – changes tactics. She can go home.
On her way to the airport, she tries to ring Colt, but there is no answer and no message.
He has changed all the codes, so she can’t break into the game.
It is a long flight home.
43
Home.
My God, it’s stuffy.
She leaves the front door open, to air the house.
It’s normal, normal. He never airs the house.
No point shouting, he’s probably in the game.
Walking past the fridge, she opens it automatically, to check has he drunk all the smoothies.
The light in the fridge doesn’t come on.
Of course, the bulb.
She leans in, to see better, and the warm stink makes her gag.
Oh, Colt.
She steps back, and now she can see the smoothies are all gone from the bottom shelf. On the other shelves, the same jars and cartons as when she left.
A sludge of rotting lettuce leaves in a see-through plastic bag.
Mould crawls out of an open yogurt carton.
On a plate, a slice of pizza, dried out, greasy. Curling up at the edges.
Pizza?
And no mould. Must be full of preservatives.
She carries the yogurt carton toward the sink. Halfway there, stops.
He isn’t in the house.
She throws the yogurt into the sink and runs outside. Circles the house, nothing.
She circles again, further out.
Now, on this pass, she notices a cable.
It must have been covered in sand, closer to the house. There was a storm . . . But no, he said he was fine . . .
She follows the cable towards the top of the ridge. A third the way up, it’s plugged into another extension cable. The joint is wrapped in plastic, and hotglued.
Should be safe, you couldn’t get a shock from that . . .
Why is he using mains electricity, instead of a solar battery? What could need that much power . . .
She follows it higher; another weatherproofed joint.
A yellow cable . . . that’s the extension for the fridge, oh I could kill him.
And on the ridge . . . he isn’t there.
Footprints. Colt’s. Crisp, dry, deep.
Must have been muddy up here, after the storm.
At the end of the cable is a small booster box of some kind, wrapped in a bag. The little red LED glows dimly through the bag’s thick white plastic. Switched on. She touches it.
Not hot.
Of course, he never could get signal beyond the ridge. Iron, a lot of iron in the rock.
From the top of the ridge, she can see him, about half a kilometre out. His back to her.
To everything.
Sitting on a flat-topped boulder of red sandstone, in full sunshine, in his fucking helmet.
She slips and skids down the ridge in her city shoes. Catches her breath at the bottom. Walks out towards the rock in the sun. She should go back for boots, for a hat, for water . . . too late now, forget it, forget it.
I should never have left him.
He isn’t moving.
3
A Butterfly Waking In Winter
‘For an enzyme to be functional, it must fold into a precise three-dimensional shape. How such a complex folding can take place remains a mystery. A small chain of 150 amino acids making up an enzyme has an extraordinary number of possible folding configurations: if it tested 1,012 different config
urations every second, it would take about 1,026 years to find the right one . . . Yet, a denatured enzyme can refold within fractions of a second and then precisely react in a chemical reaction . . . ((it)) demonstrates a stunning complexity and harmony in the universe.’
— Richard L. Lewis, The Unity of the Sciences Volume One
‘Many physicists point out in wonder the self-similarity between atoms, cells, planets, galaxies, and the universe as a whole (self-similarity among different levels is one of the hallmarks of a wholistic system).’
— Colin T. Wilson, Whole
‘All stories are true.’
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
44
It takes Naomi twenty-four hours to rehydrate Colt, but by then he’s burning up with a fever, hallucinating, speaking words she doesn’t understand.
The fever dies down; but the old Colt doesn’t come back.
He’s reacting strangely to her, to food, to everything.
Naomi knows she worries too much about Colt.
But she’s pretty sure he’s never been like this . . .
Eventually she sits him down in the kitchen.
‘Look, Colt, I have to go back to work. And I can’t just leave you here like this until I know what’s wrong. You’re acting . . .’ She struggles to put words on it. ‘Something happened, while I was gone. Tell me. Tell me what happened.’
Colt studies his mother’s face like he’s never seen it before. After a while he says, ‘I met a woman and I liked her and I messed it up.’
‘You met a woman while I was gone? How? Where?’
‘It doesn’t matter, Mama.’
‘But . . . what has that got to do with this?’
He won’t give her any more. He’s collapsed back into himself. It’s like the inside of his mind is more interesting. If she didn’t know Colt, she would think he was doing drugs of some kind.
‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘Call me if you feel bad.’
‘I kind of feel bad all the time, Mama.’
‘Then call me if you feel worse.’
45
The lab is a disaster, she shouldn’t have gone to New York.