(Chapeau, Mr. Al’Hatif.)
He walks, now, from the back of the platform to the front of the revamped Buddha, straight through the translucid idol. It seems surprising that he doesn’t encounter any resistance once inside. I would think it would be like walking through a molded gelatin. But he passes into its spectral body easily. For a moment, he merges completely with his statue and is quintessentialized by the light. The statue warps itself around his features, his curves and troughs, his clothing, oozes about his person as he moves as if it were a cascade of golden oil. He is completely transformed by it, and then he is through to the other side.
The crowd is surging, people have left their seats, some milling about, some dancing, and arguments are breaking out. Shoving and so on.
And here he comes now, squeezing through the crowd, and I’m flattered that he’s seeking me out, me of all people, and he smiles at me with what could be seen as a wry form of pride, and he leans in to speak, softly: “You know, this crowd, onlookers, paparazzi, even those local panjandrums, there, are, in fact, bought and curated for the occasion?”
“Pop-up crowd?”
“Pop-up crowd.”
“Huh.”
“Even this brawl, now breaking out, over there—fake—and so too those fake security forces attempting to quell it!”
Of course the unveiling is the project. Of course it is.
“What about the fellows,” I ask, afraid of the answer.
“What about the fellows?”
“Are any of them, are all of them—”
“Mr. Percy, that would be mad.”
But he is the man of the hour, and so Mr. Al’Hatif is interrupted; whisked off to a reception, where the hired multitude will playact an entire party in his honor. Whisked off by fake officials, before I can genuinely follow up.
As for the rest of us fellows, we gambol and frolic among the dunes late into the night, hunting for more Buddhas—desecrating ruins and trampling brittle bones, shards of pottery and other remnants crackling underfoot in order to find them—many of these Bodhisattvas of light discernible only on our devices, in location-based AR, each Buddha taking a different form (fox, octopus, komodo dragon, clown, so on), each with different sponsors, each possessing different stats and abilities (collect them all), a vast and lunatic Easter egg hunt, the revels only ending at morning light, when the admins came to round us up, and bring us, and all our amassed treasures—finally, home.
But there’s one seat empty on the final bus.
Bus seats to be indicated by quotation marks
,, ,,
,, ,,
,, ,,
,, ,,
,, ,,
,, ,,
,, ,,
,, ,,
,, <-------------This one is vacant.
,, ,,
,, ,,
I’m watching the glow of the party fade into the rising light, as my own small, recently commandeered vehicle reenters the ring road, heading in the opposite direction from the Institute. The city in front of me: a wasted fire, an ember or two still lit deep inside the ashen office towers. The smoke-blue morning mirroring the evening which preceded it. (Sun Rise #1.) My passport, damp in my tight grip. I put it down. Smack my perpetually dry mouth once; twice. Lie back in the car’s rear seats. It is so easy to slip away. I am careful, and there is so much going on, so much activity to mask my leave-taking, and so many shadows to merge into. But they should’ve known. Should have watched me more closely. A risk? Sure. But what choice do I have. It was always going to be bad no matter what. Etc. So I mustn’t squander the opportunity. This final shot, Rn. Final shot at…at what? Redemption? Lmao. A last chance to get my freedom back. I am spending the last of my capital on this clandestine, emergency run.
They’d take my passport, Miss F. had said, ergo, one more thing left to replicate.
The last thing, I hope. And this is, surely, a crime—another crime of counterfeit, but worse, perhaps. It is one I must commit, and I do hope my friend the Same Same man will be discreet—his discretion in regards to these plagiarisms being, as far as I can tell, his main selling point. Here’s hoping. What other choice do I have but to hope? Without these papers, I am no better than a prisoner.
I slink down farther until my head is level with the bottom of the car window and remain in this crouch as the vehicle drives on. Careful now. Can’t get booted yet. What’s the point of leaving after all if I have nothing to show for my time here?
But nobody saw me. Nobody saw me. But I see something: and it is a ball of crumpled paper at my feet, under the front seat in the well.
No escaping it these days.
The overpopulation of my inner world is now causing borders to be breached—cartographic lines are being crossed—my refugee thoughts now overwhelming the world’s outer space; some of these thoughts dying in transit, as migrants often do, while others are making it, making it out, repatriating successfully, and being granted a kind of visa status in the material world.
Which is to say that even ideas need passports.
30
My reformulated device and I escape out unto the perimeter fence again today. My bench. My Observation Point. Might as well be a plaque with my name on it. I’m alone at last. The desert is out there, as usual. Sky still here. Rocks—yes. Horizon: check. Heat: roger that. Sand? Yup. What season is it? Idk, the Institute is seasonless; the desert burns off seasons like fevers. Nevertheless, the air has changed. It’s gotten even murkier. You can feel it, big-time. Even in here. And see it out there. The famous desert winds are whipping up, heralds to the approaching front. Little khamsins and haboobs. Harmattans and siroccos. You can see the effects of the hubbub outside of the metastructure. The desert is encroaching, and odd things are washing up from the sands. Driftwood, animal carcasses, garbage. There’s an ugly ring of the junk accumulating around the perimeter. Not enough sand rakes to stem the tide. We are protected, as far as I know. If the worst does indeed come to pass, if the storm front does hit us head-on, we always have our dome for protection. We can hunker down here and ride it out. So we are safe, even if we are uncomfortable. And boy are we uncomfortable. The heat and the humidity continue to worsen. The more sensitive of the fellows are feeling poorly. The infirmary is being kept busy. A variety of symptoms. Small complaints mostly. A lot of itchy eyes. Irritability. Tinnitus (and has there ever been an affliction that more effectively blurs the line between the awareness of suffering and the suffering itself)? Also, headaches. Lots of headaches.
In an effort to better the mood under the dome, the Institute has organized even more communal events in the Presence Center—they’ve brought more of those spirit-raising therapy dogs in to lift our spirits again. We sit in a large circle and watch them gambol on the lawn—happy, spastic beasts. And, at considerable expense, the powers that be have installed a new VR setup. State-of-the-art, full-immersion pods. We jack into its seamless 3-D renders. Fogging, diffraction, caustics, bump-mapping; surround sound. Its smearily beautiful palette. All the fellows have been spending more and more time in there, enjoying the entertainments. I hang back at first, but now, entranced by the uncanny verisimilitude and haptic responsiveness, I grab the experience with both hands, such that I have now become its most frequent client: its self-appointed keeper, and the foremost proselytizer on its behalf. The strange apparatus is not a toy, but a marvel really. A triumph of art, if you ask me. I’m staying up way past my bedtime to enjoy the infinite other worlds which this miraculous instrument, this ingenious sarcophagus, renders up to me. I could spend my life in one of these. Never come out.
So let it storm, Irl. I can just ignore it all: lie down in there, close and latch the lid, and be anywhere else. For as long as I need. (Or at least until the motion sickness sets in.)
This is not to say that I am avoiding my work. Ideas
are now popping up with regularity. I am thinking with a purpose. And the work is, fittingly, rendering.
Slowly, line by line, progressively rasterizing toward completeness and identity.
So, a happy report to make. At least from this perspective.
That’s it. Ttfn.
Wait. Come to think of it actually, there is one other thing to mention; specifically, that I’ve had another strange and notable dream:
Picture this. Okay. I’m sitting on the grass in the deadening heat of the Cavity Yard when all at once I hear that famous, introductory Discourse™ orchestral hit, which kind of strikes me as strange, that there would be a Discourse™ under way, given that it is, by the sun, the middle of the afternoon. Looking around to investigate, I see something approach from a dark space behind the Presence Center. It is about eight or nine feet tall, and is very narrow, and: well, here’s the thing, whatever this apparition is, it is blinking slowly, literally strobing in and out of existence. Here, now gone. Here, gone. So on. Doesn’t make a sound. Comes toward me. Quite deliberately. Keeps advancing. I stand inert as the terrifying apparition blinks forward. I turn around to see if anyone is seeing what I am seeing, but I am alone, and so I turn back toward the thing once more, and I see now that it is, in fact, a single line, like a vertical rod, a couple of inches thick at most, but still very tall. An ominous, tall, black, thin line.
As it advances through the yard, here, here is the truly unnerving part: things disappear as the line passes through them, as if they had simply been deleted. How, I can’t comprehend, but look: look at the grass disappear (gone!), and now a plinth, and another one, vanished, and now the first row of palms disappears, and now the second, third, fourth. They simply wink out of existence.
I’m really frightened Rn, but as quickly as the line judders forward, suddenly, it now moves backward, away from me, with the same little jerks, which is a relief, as I can’t seem to move my legs or feet, prisoner to the proceedings. And as the enormous thing jumps backward, the vanished trees reappear in place, they simply come back (though now they are blue).
Now the cursor moves forward again. It suddenly leaps forward—or rather it swiftly disappears, and then reappears…right in front of me! It seems as though (and I know how crazy this sounds), as though, as though: it is staring at me. Sizing me up; taking my measure.
I fork my fingers through my hair, close and rub my eyes, look again. Still here (shit!) but even closer now, that tall fucking blinking vertical line (which I will dub, and henceforth call: “Blinky”). We are standing nose to nose.
“Hello, Blinky,” I say, not knowing what else I’m expected to do exactly, and tentatively extending a hand to touch it, just to check on the status of its corporality—and let’s be honest here my sanity as well hahaha—and as I reach out, Blinky responds by jerking forward again and obliterating me entirely again (as well as the room and everything in it) brb
A gap.
And here I am, now standing in the gardens above the Residential Enclave, because Blinky has just put me down here. I can see that several of the other fellows have been blinkified into existence here as well. There are two fellows sitting on a plinth, and another standing by a topiary. One of them (the Econometrician) clearly wasn’t working very well exactly where he was—on the plinth that is—because, abruptly, Blinky moves in on him, bridges the distance in an instant, crosses right over him, and the fellow is bathed in a yellow aura, which is solid for a moment, and then he (the Econometrician) and the yellow nimbus both disappear, cut out, only for the fellow to be pasted back into the world again, this time on the rim of the fountain.
“Okay, Blinky, what are you playing at?” I ask, but Blinky only remains there in place, discontinuous, but not moving, as if thinking, or awaiting instructions.
But now he’s off again, blinking his way across the landscape, in and out of frame, over the Institute’s landscaped hillocks and vales, rewriting and reconfiguring everything, turning concrete into lawns, lawns into desert, trees into palms, flattening mountains and crushing buildings and constructing others, moving people about, making some things bigger and others smaller, and just about basically changing the color of everything, like a child drafting a landscape with the wrong crayons.
Fellows are running everywhere to avoid it like it’s a giant film monster and yes, there is a lot of screaming and mass confusion and the whole ground shakes. It’s just mayhem up in here.
And I just stand watching it all, unable to act, no agency at all, passively observing this Kaiju-cursor go about its business writing and rewriting the whole fucking world.
Now finally the Director appears (“our hero!”). He emerges from the Business Center at a trot, meaning loping like an elephant, the medallion around his neck flopping wildly, and he waves his hands, and the monstrous line stops in place, and then everything, the line and the buildings and the people the whole nine yards just up and vanishes. Then the Director turns to me, and without opening his mouth at all, somehow screams:
YOUR PAPERS.
YOUR PAPERS.
YOUR PAPERS.
YOUR PAPERS.
31
(HUMANIORA)
The Institute’s Security Center is a high-tech affair. A cramped space, constructed of single-sheet monitors, comprising three of the four walls. There’s a single table in the room, which seems to be an interactive viewing console; a command station with a single black rubber joystick, sticking straight up out of it, presiding priapically. Upon the monitors are views of the Institute; uniforms, alone and in groups, studying, building, cavorting, consorting, bathing, exercising, and generally going about their habitual movements. I see, on a screen down toward the floor to my right, someone is speaking with the Sociologist. In another, I see the Architect, 鼎福 , in his full-surround gear. In another, two uniformed fellows are playing checkers. Another screen shows a fellow in a bed in an empty room. On another, jumpsuits with rakes and snowblowers, trying to handle the
garbage paper. Bins filled by the truckload.
Workers are everywhere. They cannot keep up. That white mass sticking to the turbines grows as the paper grows, and hardens over time, making the blades more or less useless.
An entire party of Institute workers is required to clean and repair the massive fan in Turbine Enclosure Number Two. They have spent the better part of the day there, scouring the enormous screw which presides over the middle of the hangar like the propeller of an old, seagoing juggernaut.
It takes forever to remove the obstructing material. They scour first, with industrial rasps, then with shoulder-slung sandblasters. Ten jumpsuits, with cherry pickers, ropes, and carabiners, climbing atop the blades themselves to better their access. But they aren’t making much progress—there is just too much of the stuff to scrape off. The white residue, caked to the metal, is becoming so thick and hard that by the end of their shift, they’re resorting to a high-pressure hose application of a proprietary acid, which slowly, but successfully melts the barnacled substance into an ichor, which then can be wiped off and slung into bio-locked industrial barrels. The latter part of the session is spent screwing and bolting the lids of the barrels back on, and mopping up what remains on the concrete floors. The barrels are then loaded onto forklifts and shipped out. To where, we don’t know.
Though it might be the lake: a skirt of scum with an oily sheen is gently lapping at the rim of it; the water has turned a soapy gray from the slowly dissolving pulp.
And the smell…
It is noticeably warmer inside the dome—inside the Institute’s buildings. The atmosphere is warming to the extent that the fellows’ banter now merges with faint, high-treble cracks hissing their way along the length of the Landau-Schmidt glacier, like lit fuses—high notes supported by the occasional basso profundo of its more seismic detonations. Hissss. Boooom. The Institute clearly has not considered the possibili
ty of the mountain’s structural fragility, and its catchment sink isn’t nearly deep enough to contain the melt-off. So now, on the screens, you can see that the main concourse of the Mountain House has small puddles, where condensation has collected. The added inconvenience being that there are now thin fogs, creeping around corners, hovering in the atria, and enshrouding the overhead lights, like a malevolent gauze. The paper has begun to dampen, and stick to the ground, becoming in places a sort of maché, a disgusting, clingy white plaster which one must avoid stepping on, or else have to scrape, at the end of the day, from one’s soles.
Things are getting shabbier.
Have we underestimated the storm? Become overconfident in the metastructure’s capacities? Either way we have grown complacent. And so, some of the more enterprising fellows are commandeering the paper to make flags and bunting, and there are a few folded paper corsages affixed to uniforms, which could be seen as a bit of can-do spirit here, a “continuing to make the best of things,” etc. Look at them there Rn—recorded on all of these screens—doing their level best.
* * *
—
Across from me is the Director’s great head, behind which are still more live feeds—one showing a very high overhead shot of the campus, featuring various crosses and grids superimposed upon it, like a planetary landing video. One screen is a live stream of the Mysterious Woman in her studio. It must be now—you can tell from the late-afternoon light. She is wearing her uniform, though it is pulled down a bit upon her shoulders. Her hair is unwashed. She is concentrating hard on her device‚ whispering away. I watch as she peruses the device’s contents, casually almost; her face, underlit in blue, as if she were standing in a cool grotto, or swimming in a lighted pool at night. She runs a single hand through her messy hair. She walks across the room. Steps on a scale. Frowns. Goes over to a bed and sits on it. Begins reading again.
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