The Official Report on Human Activity

by kim d. hunter

  “That’s, that’s that crying, hoodoo music,” he finally managed. “You trying to kill somebody!”

  With that, the man scrambled to his feet. Lying on the floor, he had seemed a good size, but standing, he appeared huge. Everyone was so surprised to see him rise that they were unprepared for his amazingly quick lunge at Nat. His hands were like a sandpaper vice around Nat’s neck. The air rushed from Nat’s throat in a second. The other men were awake but tired and, even working together, could not pry the man’s hands from Nat’s neck. The Prisoner summoned guards, but Nat had passed out by the time they arrived.

  Nat awoke in what he would later learn was the detention facility, the prison within the prison, the place where altercations or rebellions would land you. With its opaque walls, it was more like a regular room than the cells. In the cells, you had to look down through the layers and layers of glass to see anything as opaque as the walls in this room.

  Besides the opaqueness, the humidity was noticeably higher in this place than it had been in the cell. The floor and lower parts of the wall were moist to the touch. The ceiling dripped in places. He heard thunder and what had to be rain just before he fell back into unconsciousness.

  When Nat awoke again, it was to the sputtering and sparks of a huge flat screen that had been jerry-rigged into the moist, dripping ceiling. The puddles on the floor distracted him from the sparks until coughing erupted from the screen, and then a voice.

  “Just wanted you to know—”

  There was a jagged flash of electricity between the screen and the raggedy hole that been cut to put the screen into the ceiling. Nat tried to rouse himself to find a dry place on the floor.

  The voice in the screen was speaking, but not to him.

  “. . . and if he dies in there, it won’t do us any good whatsoever. What’s the difference?”

  With those words, the screen and the entire room went black. It became harder to find dry spots on the floor. Water seeped into his shoes, no matter where he stood. The thunder was close enough to rattle what he’d thought were very solid walls and shake more water from the ceiling. Short bursts of noise leapt from his throat out of his control as he sloshed from one corner to another. He walked along every inch of wall and floor to somehow find a place where the water was not rising. There was no such place, and when the water reached his thighs, even the noises in his throat died.

  Soon, the water was high enough for him to float and then just high enough for him to touch the ceiling. He could try to pry the screen from the ceiling to see if the hole into which it had been so sloppily placed actually led anywhere. Even the fear of possibly electrocuting himself meant nothing in the face of certain drowning. He had to feel in the dark and quickly. He wished he’d had the presence of mind to get naked before the water had gotten so high. His heavy, wet shoes and clothing felt like animals working to drag him under. His arms quickly became tired as he paddled to stay afloat when he wasn’t flailing about, feeling for the screen in the ceiling. Water slopped into his eyes, nose, and mouth.

  Feeling around the ceiling, he grabbed something hot to the touch, the prong-shaped object. He couldn’t hold on. His limbs stiffened. There was water in his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. He was gulping water and it was becoming harder to reach for the ceiling. He realized it was because the water was suddenly receding. He choked on a mouthful of water and hoped his strength would last until his feet could touch the floor. As he began to fade there were voices, snatches of words.

  “Slower”

  “No . . . Warden . . . death . . . scandal.”

  ***

  He was happy that the room they placed him in was overheated since they’d taken his wet clothes and given him a thin blanket to wrap himself in. A guard dressed in a uniform Nat hadn’t seen before brought him dry clothes.

  In what he assumed was the Warden’s office, he suddenly felt the urge to stand even though his legs shook with nerves and weakness. He’d had no sense of time in the black room where he nearly drowned and had come close to electrocution. How long had he been paddling, treading water, reaching for the screen? There was some soreness in his right shoulder from grasping to try to pry it loose, and numbness in his hand that might have come from the blood draining out of it as he had been holding it up, or was it from the electrical shock?

  There was rumbling outside, above. He didn’t want to think about thunder.

  The person he presumed was the Warden walked in flanked by two armored guards. Nat had heard about guards modified with armor. They even showered inside the shells that had become extensions of their virtually impenetrable skin. He decided to sit down. The three men continued to walk to the Warden’s desk area. Their steps sounded sharp but did not echo. The room had been conditioned, no surprise there.

  The Warden went behind his desk and produced, with a touch, the smallest, sleekest printer Nat had ever seen. It was perhaps four feet wide and no more than a foot tall, clearly specialized, very quiet. But there was a smell. In a moment, it produced the most magnificent, seemingly wooden guitar Nat had ever seen. It was all he could do not to reach for it.

  The Warden smiled at Nat’s obvious desire. Nat stood, staring at the guitar, as one of the guards walked it over to him. It was cold to the touch, smooth, almost to the point of being soft and perfectly tuned.

  ***

  The rooms where Nat played for the Warden and his guests were strangely conditioned. Sometimes, they were quiet and comfortable. Sometimes, there were voices of people who were not present. Sometimes, all the other people in the room were white. Sometimes the Warden was one of maybe two white people in the room.

  When Nat wasn’t performing, he slept in a part of the prison he’d never so much as knew existed. He had his own room. But he spent most of the time in the common area trying to talk to people, though he got the feeling talking was discouraged.

  The rooms were regular rooms with opaque walls. But the light in them seemed like sunlight and it was impossible to tell from which direction it came. The tables and chairs were a mishmash of materials and styles. The inmates had developed gangs and cliques. Nat was one of the few who had no clique. He felt vulnerable, naked.

  He tried to talk to a man with a very strange looking stringed instrument. The man had grooves in his cheeks that had been intentionally placed there. His instrument was a big round gourd that had been sliced in half so it had a flat surface. There was one big pole sticking out of it with taut strings and two smaller poles. The man would sit the big gourd on the ground between his legs, place his fingers on the two small poles, and pluck the strings with his thumbs. It produced the most melodic and harp-like sound.

  The man was friendly enough, but did not speak English. Nat didn’t even know what language the man spoke. Nonetheless, it was clear that he wanted to be friends. So he and Nat found a corner and began to try to play together, which was much easier than talking. Nat learned the instrument was called a kora. When Nat asked the Warden if he and the man with the kora could play together for one of the audiences, the Warden simply smiled slowly without opening his mouth. Nat never saw the man with the kora again.

  After a few days, Nat was plagued with nightmares about the kora player in the water room with the screen in the ceiling shooting bolts. The water rose and did not recede.

  Nat took on more and more of what he discerned were night performances. He had little sense of day or night. But he realized the nightmares were fewer if he just took catnaps in the common area.

  The Warden had Nat playing more and more often. The audiences varied in size but they always wore extraordinarily refined clothing. He was usually close enough to see diamonds or gold in their discrete piercings, close enough to see what could only be the finest animal furs woven into their garments, close enough to hear conversations before the show about exclusive travel arrangements or live performances featuring people that the masses could only see via hologram if they were lucky.

  Try as they might, no matter
how grand the room, the technicians assigned to it could not completely block the rumble of thunder. So the topic of conversations that most intrigued and worried Nat was the one he heard the least. He gathered there was a huge storm either coming to the area, or already there, or perhaps a nearly continuous series of storms. He didn’t need to overhear conversations to know who would be dying by the boatload as a result of the storms. All he could do was worry and hope for the people he knew.

  While some members of his audience were more knowledgeable about the music than Nat, many seemed content with the prestige of the event. They were the ones who simply wanted him to play louder and faster to distract them from the rumble. One even brought in a freestanding unit to amplify Nat and the guitar. That person was removed when the Warden discovered it.

  One fateful performance, there were some very somber looking women in the front row. They all had very fine dark clothing. The only thing that announced they were in uniform was that they each had identical ear units with barely visible links to the eyes running just below their eyebrows. There were three of them, and the Leader could have been the daughter or perhaps granddaughter of the dark-skinned woman from the emporium, Nat’s teacher.

  The Warden attended to these women and the Leader in particular. This was the only time Nat had heard him ask permission to sit next to anyone. The Leader’s smile showed clear indifference to the Warden’s request. During the show, she surprised Nat with a request for a song by Memphis Minnie.

  I works on the levee mama both night and day

  I works on the levee mama both night and day

  I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away

  Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good

  Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good

  When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose

  Nat was impressed that such a young woman knew such an old song. He smiled at her. She smiled back and grasped the hand of the woman next to her.

  “She was singing that song when I met her,” the Leader said after the performance.

  Nat couldn’t imagine where anyone would have been playing Memphis Minnie in public and so imagined a private setting. But why “When the Levee Breaks?” It was not the most romantic song he could imagine playing. In fact, he tried not to channel Memphis Minnie’s plaintive, hopeless resolve because it affected him so. The song of the rising water made him think of the end of the world even before he’d almost died in the room with the ceiling screen.

  By the end of the show, the rumbling was too loud for Nat to be heard. The Leader and the Warden were in a corner of the room having an intense discussion. One of the few things Nat grasped from the conversation was the leader saying, “It’s that or the war.”

  The next morning, Nat found himself in a rescue simulation trainer after being told he would have a great opportunity to reduce his prison time. The news of his being assigned to a rescue flight somehow made it down to the general population. There were others assigned to the mission as well. The inmates who had not been assigned to rescue mostly avoided the handful that had. Others shook their heads, smirked, and chuckled derisively at the “chosen few.”

  The two hours in rescue simulation were jarring enough. At one point Nat came close to throwing up, as he was certain that the severed limb on the “floor” was real. But those two rough hours weren’t nearly enough to prepare him or anyone for the actual flight.

  The open sky with storm would have been a fearful sight from the ground. But to be thrust directly into it after many days of incarceration was bloodcurdling. The co-pilot “trainer” wasn’t much help, as he was almost as frightened as Nat and thus barely communicative.

  It was hard to believe the storm was “on it’s last leg” as the co-pilot said. The rain was relentless, horizontal. The wiper shields kept the windows clear, but that almost made things worse, as they had a very clear view of just how bad things were. Nat was certain two gray-black masses of swirling air to the east and west were tornadoes. They were filled with what could have been people or debris. The copilot broke his near silence to tell some convoluted lie about the funnels not being tornadoes. Fortunately, both of the deadly swirling masses were moving away from them.

  “Don’t be looking in the distance,” the copilot admonished. “There’s gonna be people right below us. That’s why we’re here.”

  With that, the copilot began tagging buildings with his scanner, marking structures with the numbers of living and dead where either were close enough to the exterior to be found, and zapping the odd stray animal in the process.

  When it came time for Nat to take the controls, he was fitted with a round band that bit into his head. He couldn’t tell what it was made of, only that it sent waves of pain through his skull. He could barely keep the machine aloft even with the copilot “helping,” in part because Nat now had access to the copilot’s mental state and the amazing fear the other man tried to fight off. Controlling the craft also took a backseat to thinking about the pain from the primitive probe.

  Nat’s direct mental commands did nothing to control the flying machine. But playing music in his head helped him level it off. It also helped when he tried to imagine what the Leader and the Warden had been talking about at the concert. That is what he was thinking about when the copilot disappeared, vanishing in thin air. Had the trainer not been there to begin with? If not, why had he been so frightened?

  After flying alone, marking buildings, and even transporting the odd surface survivor, Nat heard the Singer.

  ***

  The Scientist was desperate to hold his job. His wife the Author’s work hadn’t taken off quite yet. The Girl had yet to edit the story down to something simple, something that did not both eat and birth itself simultaneously, fascinating as the Girl thought that was.

  “If you can’t make or sell widgets, you have to sell the story of widgets, not the real story with the missing and overlapping pieces, but the straight story, the story story.”

  “The missing and overlapping parts are the story story.”

  “Mom, please, you know what I mean!”

  The Scientist caught only bits of their back and forth and was prone to ponder them for much longer than he thought was productive. But it was a way of connecting, in a manner of speaking, to the rest of his family, reminding himself why he was completely alone.

  What made the Scientist rise obscenely early in the morning was the desire to somehow craft a way to tell people what it was he did. It would have to be some combination of hologram, speaking, and writing, or maybe music. If he could find music that was slow and serious but could still lay in the background like a dark wall, music that drew just enough attention to itself, but not too much, that was the goal. Or maybe just a simple hologram of him singing the explanation of what he did would work. Or maybe he could learn to work one of those dead, android-like things and pretend it was talking instead of him, and have them both in a hologram. He was scanning his implant, thinking he would pursue all of the above, when something snagged his attention. The singing he was listening to lagged over from an almost skipped image. It captivated him so. He put it into the room there with him. He knew the sound was opera, that it was another language, Italian. But what he knew for sure, though the language was beyond him, was that the singer was pleading.

  Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore,

  non feci mai male ad anima viva!

  He was soon inconsolable over words he could not translate.

  Nell’ora del dolor

  perchè, perchè, Signor,

  ah, perchè me ne rimuneri così?

  In the spotlight of what seemed like a small room was the singer with a veil, dressed in white, with red gloves and red cloth shoes and a red waistcloth. Standing on her lap was a dead android figure with leaves over its breasts and vagina. It was supposed to be singing. The real singer’s face barely moved. Occasionally, she would look to the edges of the light where other people’
s clothing and silhouettes were just visible.

  ***

  The Scientist was almost afraid to find the translation of the song, lest it prove to be not as moving as the sound or, though it seemed impossible, more moving than the raw sound of the music. But he did learn that the figure whose lips moved as the singer sang was called a “dummy.” Even after learning that, he couldn’t help but think of the word “surrogate,” though he knew it was dead, virtually hollow, as he determined that the singer had her arm inside the figure.

  She would have a hard time recalling where she had last heard the song. Then, later, on the way to prison to visit her father, it would come back to her, in waves.

  ***

  Initially, the Scientist thought the dummy would be a good filter through which he could finally speak without inducing sleep, though he was also concerned. All of the surrogates seemed so strange and comical. How or where in the world could he possibly find a figure that would not make people laugh?

  No one laughed when he spoke, and thus, the perfect dummy would be one that looked quite like him. He could print one from a combination of his photo for the face and, for the body, images of other surrogates.

  As was noted in the early twenty-first century, before advanced printing, there is a space in human mimicry that leaves humans unsettled. The early devices produced mimics that were ghastly, not quite complete, not quite copies, not quite human. Children in particular felt a great discomfort seeing these creations that fell into the eerie zone between human and non-human faces. These days, it is difficult to reproduce those sorts of undead, nightmarish features because the printers reject them or jam up and have to be cleared.

  But the Scientist, almost like an adolescent male prankster, overrode the printer because he was so desperate to get it right. Ironically, he got the same frightening results as the pranksters, dummies with freakishly disquieting facial oddities. In this case, the dummies had subtle but horrible creases around the eyes that made them seem less like facial features and more like creatures in their own right. Try as he might, he could not stop himself from stopping the machine before it had finished printing and so all the results were horrifying. His obsession with interrupting the printer’s cycle was powered by something at the bottom of his thinking, something kept just out of reach by frustration, something welded to the experience of fixing the interview machine that had malfunctioned during the Author’s interview, the great and fortuitous accident that had brought them together.