The Electric State

by Simon Stålenhag

  SKIP WAS ABSORBED in a comic book. I tried to find a station on the radio but it was mostly static; the only thing coming through was a voice singing I will always love you in Spanish, so I gave up. I sat back in the seat.

  Oddly enough, breaking the nose of my foster mother made things better for me. I ended up at Summerglade, where I met Amanda. She was in my class at Riverside and had earned her place at Summerglade by attacking her chemistry teacher with a stun gun.

  Vicky Sorensen was in charge at Summerglade, and she led us on long hikes around a small lake called Esquagamah. We carried heavy backpacks and pitched tents and learned about wilderness hygiene and getting up early and starting a fire and cooking breakfast in small aluminum pots, and then we packed up our camp and hiked around the lake again. Now and then we would stop to solve some fictional problem together so we could learn how to trust each other and break the downward spiral of destruction that stopped us from being happy and feeling hopeful for the future.

  Amanda and I rubbed a pair of panties in fish goo and hid them in Vicky Sorensen’s pack.

  A FEW YEARS AFTER Summerglade we were sitting in Tommy’s yard. Sean’s sister Connie was tearing aluminum foil from cigarette packs to make small wedding rings to put on Chris’s fingers, and I tried to hear what Tommy was saying to Amanda, and then Chris wanted to go to the limestone quarry in Neptune for a swim; when we squeezed into the car I ended up in Amanda’s lap, and next to her was Tommy, who immediately put his arm around her and started rubbing her shoulder. I couldn’t decide whether she liked his groping because she didn’t resist him, and when we went up onto the highway he started playing with her hair and I turned away to look out the window, but Amanda must have noticed because she immediately put her hand on my thigh in between my thigh and the car door where no one could see and ran her thumb up and down the fabric of my jeans, and everything was warm and I held my breath and didn’t hear what anyone was saying until we got out of the car down in the quarry.

  There was a diving tower in the emerald-green water at the bottom of the quarry, and Tommy and Sean dove perfectly from the top and Connie screamed when Chris stood balancing on the rail at the very top. Then they swam over to the other side and it was only Amanda and me left on the diving tower, and we climbed to the very top and dusk was falling when a breeze rippled across the water and beyond through the birch trees, the traffic on Lafayette a million points of light coalescing on the horizon, and Amanda said Michelle, you have the palest thighs in Soest City.

  She kissed me in the darkness below the diving tower, where no one saw, and I couldn’t stop shaking but I said it was because the water was so cold.

  In the fall, I taught her how to get into the Boneyard at Itasca, where I showed her how to extract dream glint from the neuronics of the Erginus wrecks. We crushed the dream glint and melted it and made pills that we sold to a guy on Vandeventer for five dollars apiece, and we recorded the sound from a porno on a tape that we left cranked up high on a boom box outside the church where Amanda’s father preached. We rolled our eyes through classes and skipped school and trespassed on private property and stole clothes and records together, and all of a sudden I didn’t want to run away from Soest anymore.

  THE MOUNTAINS

  MOST OF THE MOUNTAIN PASSES were covered in snow, so we had to drive almost all the way up to Carson City before we found an open path west over the mountains. I didn’t like going that far north, since the whole valley around the Carson River was a notoriously lawless area. We were finally able to turn southwest onto Route 88 at Gardnerville, taking us up into Alpine County and past the shantytowns of Fredericksburg, Paynesville, and Mesa Vista. Whole apartment complexes that looked like they were getting their energy from salvaged suspension engines had sprung up there. I was sure there were laws against that kind of thing, but any presence of law and order was barely perceptible on the windswept highlands east of the mountains. We needed to get gas and I had to pee, but when we arrived at the gas station in Woodfords there were several huge pickup trucks parked by the pumps, surrounded by armed men in camouflage pants and sunglasses, a couple of gaming drones secured to the beds of the trucks, so I just kept on driving.

  Finally I stopped the car at a turnaround for big rigs, ran down into the ditch, and peed. While sitting there, I noticed an emaciated mare in the undergrowth a few meters out on the plain. When I was done peeing I tried calling to it.

  Hey, girl, I said, and the horse pricked up its ears and turned its head toward me, and where her eyes should have been there were only two dark pits.

  WHILE WE LISTENED to one of Skip’s tapes on the car stereo, the terrain outside the car was becoming rockier, and elevation signs appeared more frequently. The road straightened out and stretched through a rocky valley where the shadows of clouds walked across the jagged ground. Down in the valley it felt like our car was a microscopic probe inside a snow globe. The wreck of an old assault ship reached up from a ridge between the boulders. Someone had drawn a cartoon face on the gun tower. Skip sat up in his seat and stared at the ship. Yes, I see it—Sir Astor, I said. Skip kept staring at the grinning face of the intergalactic space cat until it disappeared behind us.

  I thought about what might have happened to the blind horse. Maybe a disease. Now and then my grandfather had taken care of a dog in Kingston with only one eye. Cody. A small furry thing; I can’t remember what breed it was. It would walk into lampposts sometimes. He took care of it on the weekends. We used to go on walks with Cody around the artificial lake where all the mobile homes stood and where I once found a dead fish right on the trail. We would rent a pedal boat and eat at the Waffle Kitchen on the small island in the middle of the lake. There were big carp in the lake, tame and fat from all the campers feeding them leftover waffles. The fat carp would come up to the boat, and Cody would bark at them.

  There was a neurograph game in the restaurant, a coin-operated thing that no one ever used. The machine had a screen with a live feed of what was happening, and when no one played it just showed a video feed from the arena the machine was connected to. I would stand there with the small one-eyed dog in my arms and watch the video, wishing I could play.

  I saw Cody for the last time at my grandfather’s funeral.

  THE ROAD FOUGHT its way over the ridge into the next empty valley, where a sign informed us we were passing into a military restricted zone. Skip had fallen asleep, and remote-operated machines moved around out there in the valley, their long radio masts waving like antennae above the underbrush as they worked their way across the rocky terrain.

  My grandfather always made my bed in a special way. He sort of tucked in a pillow under the sheets, then a regular pillow on top of it. Then he had a top sheet with a lace edge that he folded over the duvet. He was very particular about how things looked in his home.

  I lived with my grandfather in Kingston for three years. That city reeked of some substance that spewed from the smokestacks at the shipyards, all day and all night. They built suspension ships in Kingston. Just like all the other older men in town, my grandfather had worked in the yards, and just like so many of the yard workers, he walked around coughing all the time. At night I lay in bed listening to his wheezing breath in the bathroom and couldn’t go back to sleep until I heard him snoring in his bedroom again. His coughing got worse in the last year I lived there, and one night we were playing chess in the kitchen when he coughed until he couldn’t breathe and fell down across the chessboard, scattering the chess pieces everywhere. Two months later I was living with Ted and Birgitte in Soest.

  ROUTE 88 TOOK US higher and higher along the Carson Pass, and my ears popped. The mountainsides were patterned with large slabs of snow, and the road was bordered by heaps of snow so dirty they were hard to distinguish from the gravel. Somewhere far away I glimpsed a huge smiling face—an advertisement that winked into and out of view and disappeared behind the trees. Power lines cut across the sky above us, and when we rounded a bend we saw that the lin
es shot out of a massive spherical building rising from the woods on the side of the mountain. Steam and water poured out between the ragged tree trunks, forming streams that ran down the wooded slope and across the road. On the side of the building there was a Sentre ad, and I assumed the whole installation must have been theirs. I guess there must have been millions of minds bouncing around inside that thing, and the power required to please them melted the snow.

  Someone should really heave those installations from their foundations and let them roll down the mountains into the suburbs, where they could crush whatever was left of all the gardens, houses, and responsible mothers and fathers and their SUVs and finally lay themselves calmly to rest in the abandoned city centers as memorials to humankind.

  WHEN DID IT ALL START? I can’t really remember. It started like any recreational activity, I guess. Like TV. Sometimes they watched TV, and sometimes they sat there wearing their neurocasters. I didn’t care. It was after the big update of 1996 that things got weird. Mode Six.

  After that they rarely watched TV anymore. The house was quieter. I remember that sometimes when Amanda and I came home from school, Ted and Birgitte were still on the couch in the living room with their neurocasters on. They were completely out of it, and one night we amused ourselves by dressing them up. Amanda painted a mustache on Birgitte.

  On the weekends they slept in late, and I tried to bring it up when we were all in the kitchen together for once. I asked what the deal was with the casters. They didn’t seem particularly worried and answered that there had been an awful lot of caster time lately. Ted patted my cheek and said:

  Good thinking, Michelle. We have to watch out for you!

  Then he pinched my nose and made a honking sound.

  ANOTHER TIME, Ted tried to explain why so many of his T-shirts and shirts were stained across the chest:

  It’s not dangerous at all; it can happen to some people, and it’s completely normal and harmless. Lactation is more common among men than you would think. It’s called galactorrhea, and it’s perfectly harmless. All the washing is a pain, though!

  Ted was in the corner of his home office later. He leaned back in his chair with the neurocaster on, wearing nothing but underwear. His mouth moved beneath the horn of the caster, and the corners of his lips twitched. I had to restart the modem because it had frozen, and when I leaned across the desk I noticed a small drop materializing on the desktop, right in the middle of the light cast by the lamp. And another. Then one landed on my arm. I thought it was saliva at first, that Ted had accidentally blown a few drops of saliva from his mouth, but then I saw something running down his stomach and chest—a white, milky fluid that flowed in little silent squirts from his trembling nipples.

  * * *

  Outside the car, yellow service robots moved, hauling massive cable rollers. They waddled like slow turtles across the road, following the conduits of the neurograph network through the ragged alpine trees.

  WE FINALLY MANAGED to get gas at Cook Station, and I took the opportunity to buy extra cans of gas to put in the trunk of the car. The restaurant was closed, but I bought a sandwich, beef jerky, and a few cans of soda in the store. The sun came out and we sat out back, and I ate my sandwich and gave Skip pieces of bread, and he ran around trying to feed the local chipmunks. You have contracted Chipmunkiosis, I said. After a while he sat down and put his head on my shoulder. Are you tired, I asked. Skip nodded.

  Me too. We can rest for a while.

  I woke up when it started raining again. Skip was standing farther away on the gravel lot, looking at something out in the woods. When I walked up to him I saw what had caught his attention. A dog stood between two tree trunks, a lonely little white chihuahua. It was wearing a tiny coat and was trembling and looking at us with its ears pointing straight up. Come on, Skip, I said. Come on, let’s go. I grabbed his hand and we walked back to the car.

  In the beginning, God created the neuron, and when electricity flowed through the three-dimensional nerve cell matrix in the brain, there was consciousness. The more nerve cells the better, and our brains contain hundreds of billions of neurons; that’s why we make better lasagna than chimpanzees. Like I said, no one really understands how all this works. The progress made in neuronics in the 1960s all had to do with our ability to read, copy, and send information into the brain, and the biggest discovery was how to send all that data between pilot and drone without latency. Neuronics was never really about our understanding of the mind. It’s basically a cut-and-paste technology, developed to create a suitable user interface for the advanced robots that were built by the federal army in the early ’70s. An advanced joystick, basically.

  So, if the human intellect forms in the interaction among one hundred billion brain cells, what would happen if you connected them to a few hundred billion more? Would it be possible on a neuronic level to link two or more brains? If so, what type of consciousness could emerge from such a vastly bigger neural matrix?

  There are those who believe that such a hive mind took shape inside the military neurograph network during the war, as a side effect of an unbelievable number of nerve cells linked to one another. An Intercerebral Intelligence, they call it. The same people also believe that this higher consciousness is trying to take physical form by influencing the reproductive cycles of the drone pilots. In that case, it was responsible for all the stillbirths during the war.

  They call themselves the Convergence. I would probably have dismissed them as yet another new-age techno cult if I hadn’t seen what I saw moving across the snow on Charlton Island seventeen years ago.

  THE CENTRAL VALLEY

  ROUTE 88 FINALLY took us down from the mountains, and we approached the fine mesh of the civilized and structured road system. On the surface it appeared as if the world on this side of the mountains hadn’t stopped yet. Cars and people moved in a slow stream below the red signal lights of the neurograph towers, seemingly in the middle of their daily routines, as yet untouched by the chain reaction that had started far inland. It didn’t make me feel any better at all. I preferred it when the police and curious people were distracted by other things. Technically, I had stolen the car as well as the shotgun; if we were stopped, it was over. I avoided the highways and tried to stay away from the larger communities for as long as possible, but it was hard down here. The cars crowded in and bunched up, and panic grew inside me: Someone is going to see us, someone is definitely going to see us, and the police will stop us. We can’t do this—we have to get off the road.

  My first thought was that we should park somewhere private and just wait in the car, but it occurred to me that the police love disturbing people sitting in parked cars. Our second option was to check into a motel, but that was expensive and we didn’t have that much money left, and, worst case, they would want to see some ID. Down here where there was a semblance of law and order, I didn’t want to attract any attention. It didn’t feel good at all; we were so close now.

  FINALLY, WE STOPPED at a little motel in a small town called Martell. They didn’t ask for ID. They didn’t ask about anything at all; the man behind the counter didn’t seem happy to interrupt whatever it was he was doing in his neurocaster, and as soon as I took the key from him he pulled the caster back down over his face and faded away.

  Nothing worked in the room; the TV showed nothing but static, and the AC was broken. Night had already fallen, and we didn’t have many hours before we had to keep going. Skip sat motionless on the floor with his toys lined up in front of him, his head hanging down. Skip, you sleepyhead, I said.

  Pick up your toys and sit in the armchair. I don’t want to trip over you in the dark.

  I set the alarm on the clock radio to three in the morning, and then I threw myself onto the covers and fell asleep.

  * * *

  The wooden floor of the patio had been stained with water. Birgitte’s cardigan was lying in the grass like a lemon-yellow lump. I turned the lights on and stood by the edge of the pool, loo
king down into the water. The surface was completely still; fuzzy pieces of potato chips swirled down there, and Birgitte was on the bottom, her waterlogged body heavy like a marble statue against the tiles, the LEDs on her neurocaster still burning like glowing embers. There was something going on with her mouth. It moved like the mouth of someone dreaming, and it didn’t stop moving until later, when Ted took the neurocaster off and she finally died.

  I CARRIED SKIP to the car. I had been forced to open the little hatch in the back of his head to read the display in there just to make sure he was still online. I don’t know—he had been cold to the touch.

  When we hit the road again, it was pitch-black, and the images in my head felt more real than the world outside the car. Birgitte’s eyes had been grayish, looking for something that had just been pulled away. How long had she been there at the bottom of the pool? Hours? She had vomited all the water from her body onto the couch, and then she had curled up, lifeless. Ted sat on the floor, dazed and heartbroken, with her wet body in his lap, holding her arms like he was playing with a doll. When the paramedics had taken her away, he sat down on the couch for a while. Red, empty eyes. Then he had put his neurocaster on and leaned back into the cushions.

  The sky was vaguely bluish, and out there in the morning light we passed a never-ending stream of small towns and suburbs. Finally we reached a city bisected by a large, six-lane highway; we turned west on a small country road called Bodega Avenue, and soon we had left civilization behind. Out in the fields, glimmering neurocasters appeared out of the darkness. Exhausted, they wandered in long lines, and I slowed down. Some of them stopped and sniffed after us when the car drove by. During the last weeks in Soest I had been awakened early in the mornings by similar crowds, shuffling along the streets in confusion—uneasy nocturnal animals on their way back to their dens and burrows in the suburbs.