Upturn Ahead

excerpt from Upturn Ahead, Chapter One ©

 

Drake Pelham pressed her back against the recessed entrance door of a shabby apartment building facing a crowded electro-magnetized thoroughfare.

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She waited for a Better Business Bureau monitor to pass overhead. The magnopatrol, sliding quietly five stories above, did not detect her. She had pulled the scannable Identity Chip from the nave of her neck an hour earlier. Only an inflamed incision port remained. With luck, the IC port would not become infected.

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Above, innumerable advertisements of various sizes, projected into the heavens, glittered through toxic neo-smog as they floated aimlessly in airy night.

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Windows of buildings beamed animated posters selling products that could not be imaged as well as mundane things that were routinely ignored. There was nothing that was not for sale and advertising was the undisputed art form of the 23rd century. Poetry, drama, and fiction had reached their zenith of creativity when artists accepted the aesthetic principle that the essence of art was deception. It was in advertising that deception and reality were married.

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Peeking out from the doorway, Pelham surveyed the wide length of Google Boulevard as it stretched to the horizons in each direction.

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A score of scaly, ten-inch homunculi with enormous, round eyes and pointed, slimy tentacles for legs dragged a blind fish past Pelham’s hiding place. Like countless creatures in Liberty City and countless others around the planet, on infested land, in sloughy seas, and flapping clumsily above, homunculi were inexplicable evolutionary cast-offs that no longer aroused curiosity. Perhaps they were devolved from pygmy marmosets or other dwarf monkeys that thrived in toxic humidity, perhaps from animated mandrake roots, perhaps from sea monkeys. It was pointless to speculate. In two centuries, nature had taken an accelerated and devious route and accounting for its infinite variety of mutants was beyond human grasp. It was enough to give them scientific, Latin names. Explanation was neither necessary nor possible.

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Pelham shook her head, trying to erase what she saw or thought she saw. Were the homunculi real, evolutionary cast-offs, monstrous mutants in the natural world—or were they figments of rogue digital code that had fragmented from system logic, pieces broken from the whole by internal contradiction within the system?     

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The odor of the rotting fish filled Pelham’s recess and she held her nose until the salivating parade passed and the squeaky cries of joy of the homunculi were beyond hearing range. She knew that their dish-shaped, grand eyes had seen her pushed back in the dark. She also knew that they fed on carcasses and were too timid to attack the living. They were not predators, unless the victim was in a final conversation with death, and cowardice was, for them, survival. And, surely, they preferred the taste of dead meat to living flesh.   

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In one direction, she saw crowds of assembly workers ending their night shifts at Musk Genius Enterprises and empty from side streets on to the busy boulevard, mingling with digitally-challenged, human automatons who, without direction, roamed the streets, moving in jerks and spasms until they died of malnutrition.

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With a slap to the temple, workers switched on the Big Data Entertainment Center of their ICs as they left work. With fingertips, they skillfully manipulated pressure points along the carotid artery in their necks, selecting games to play, and were soon transformed into semi-conscious, digital zombies responding to glitzy stimuli. Reactions to corporate games in virtual reality formed their personal identities—personalities that, for a price, were programmed to make losers feel like winners, no matter how great the loss, and winners indomitably clever and skillful. Their bodies generated electricity that powered their ICs.

 

Electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram monitoring and research measured how much energy was needed to run and display games, entertainment, and advertisements on implanted ICs and, though the drain of wattage needed to run these programs made users weak, the effects were not, for the most part, severe enough to hamper daily activities. Corporate managers and Luminiferous Aether scientists were aware of how much self-produced electricity was needed to keep the body active and healthy. They maintained a delicate balance in their customers’ electrolytes, advising when calcium, chloride, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium or sodium levels fell low. It was important that the user’s body produce enough electricity to keep products running.

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Pelham studied those she saw. She knew that their digital fantasies had been personalized to include a stream of overt, subliminal, and liminal advertisements, some cleverly embedded in game terrain, some purposefully disruptive of the digital experience.

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Some created from the vast hoard of personal data collected from birth and stored in the Luminiferous Aether triggered an unconscious urge to buy. By the 23rd century, Random Access Memory had been consumed by Clouds and Clouds sucked into the Luminiferous Aether, where definitive big data was a small province of “always bigger data.”

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She watched workers escape their damp lives, entertaining themselves with digitally-violent and mindlessly-clever educational games, music accompanied by animated, abstract-expressionist patterns, and pornography.

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She watched them punch and kick the air, giggle and moan, shout exclamations of faux victory or depressed defeat, or swoon and moan while rubbing their genitals.

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Symptoms of commonplace, fatal viruses were clear to her. The rampant variety of digital diseases in augmented reality was unmistakable. Infestations of binary bugs plagued the dirty city, manifested in standardized disorders and physiological behaviors.

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Across the street, a senile man in his middle 30s repeatedly took one step forward, then the same step back, a victim of Jourdain’s Card Paradox. His winning streak had come to an end when he drew the liar card from the digital deck displayed on his field of vision. Three days of winning wagers had given him a false sense of inevitable triumph. He read the card.

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The sentence on the other side of this card is true.

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He tapped a precise spot above his left eye and flipped the card to its back.

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The sentence on the other side of this card is false.

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He tapped again.

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The card flipped over and over and the man stepped forward and back until he collapsed and his body was hauled off by Liberty City sanitation workers.

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Pelham shrugged.

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Far in the opposite direction, she saw an empty magnobus, a handful of magnohorses, and ambiguous, midnight, municipal shadows. Low-pressure sodium streetlamps overcast the thoroughfare with pumpkin-colored light. Deception, she knew, maintained a world of delusion in Liberty City, the impoverished megapolis adjacent to Freedom Town, a rich, walled and domed enclave that had started two centuries before as a gated community.

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From the other side of gates that had become walls, Drake saw Freedom Town for what it was. Standardized, mandatory aesthetics, conformity hailed in the name of individualism. She believed her grandfather. ‘Freedom’ was a pseudonym for ‘slavery,’ ‘liberty’ the calling word of tyrants.

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A doomed young man slowly passed Pelham’s concealed doorway. He was in the last stages of Terminal Zeno. His IC displayed an augmented game character, Zeno, superimposed on Google Boulevard. Unfortunately, Zeno was the end of the line. As the young man approached the character, he stopped halfway, started again, then again stopped when he reached half of half of the remaining distance. Finally, half by half and half again by half, he was reduced to ever-shorter halves, then each step half the distance of the one before it until he was making exact, fractional foot movements that brought him closer and closer to Zeno. Half of half would never get him to his goal. Close, but not where he wanted to be. He would die, frustrated and desperate, in hyperbolic irreality, leaving life by halves, but before he died, he would experience a fatal ecstasy—the discovery that halves of infinite miles and infinite inches were the same length—and his own death would not bother him.

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Pelham focused on movement along Google Boulevard. Occasional light glowed in a few windows in the glass-and-steel canyon of the thoroughfare, blurry and unable to travel far into the opaque, cruddy-night pollution.

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A neurotic teenager walking rapidly stopped and began to slowly twirl in place, hearing an unexpected and dizzying sentence from the semiotic game she played, Huh?, echo in her digital ear.

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Green ideas sleep furiously.

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Pelham had seen it before. The neurotic girl would twirl in place in languid rotation, uttering “Huh?” after every turn until her muscles gave out and she collapsed and rolled to one side, bumping into a wall or becoming stuck in a curbside gutter.

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Overhead streetlamps, many dysfunctional, flickered nervously, hissing and emitting barely-audible, annoying sizzle.

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Behind the twirling woman, a post-menopausal woman concentrated on the meaning of a text from Austin’s Nonsense and Insensibility that had been whispered in her IC ear.

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Twas bryllyg, and the slythy toves did gyre and gymble in the wabe: all mimsy were the borogoves; and the mome raths outgrabe.

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The woman continued on her way, reciting the meaningless words as though they had meaning, her pronunciation crisp and accurate, as though good diction gave meaning to what was unintelligible. She was unable to speak any other words and unable not to speak the nonsense words that implied meaning, but never gave it, until her sanity failed. The makers of Nonsense and Insensibility had successfully created a game that targeted frustrated young women, shy wives, and lonely spinsters.

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Everywhere, Pelham saw workers escaping from jobs that numbed their self-worth, makers of things that were to be sold, things from which they were detached. She saw them escaping the alienated labor that distanced product from producer. Escaping their degrading reality, escaping themselves.

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Each day, Pelham knew, these beaten manikins would recreate themselves as objects in mirrors or with selfies, always looking for their identities elsewhere, outside of themselves, never looking inside. She wondered what humanity had been like before there were mirrors and digital-manipulated self-photos, when people were unable to see themselves. How did they know who they were? The first temptation, she imagined, was not an apple, but the quiet surface of a pool of water. The Golden Age came to an end with Narcissus, not Adam.

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Across the boulevard, a pale-blue animal with the head of a bird with a long, crooked peak and a slim body with elongated legs and claws for feet, no more than two feet tall, strutted proudly, head jerking from side to side to take in the surroundings with monocular vision, each eye operating independently. The creature, whose gender was indicated by a red stripe that ran horizontally across the chest, cooed a pleasant melody calling for a mate.

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Pelham visually inspected the door wells on the opposite side of Google Boulevard, wary of hopeless addicts, muggers, and triple-vision winos enchanted by cheap, chemical liquid, attentive to motion-sensor electroEyes. Unconsciously, she rubbed the incision on the back of her neck with dirty fingertips, realized what she was doing and, under her breath, cursed in the goliardic poetry of early 23rd-century street slang.

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She stooped to tighten the cords of the scuffed, steel-toed boots she considered her most valuable possession—along with the jackknife her grandfather gave her before he died. He had bequeathed her three things at death. His jackknife, a pocket watch, and a secret.

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Overhead, flung into the night sky by a lazer projector, Pelham read the time.

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∞2231.7.16.23.17pm∞

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Time moved in a straight line, a linear progression into the unknowable future from a forgotten past. Time, for Pelham, was an arrow that moved in one direction only and had no logic unless it were digital. Logical time, like the static time of Terminal Zeno, was divisible. It was unlike her time. Time, she knew, was cyclical, not linear. History repeated itself.

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She pulled a watch out of a side pocket to check the time. She saw the slender hands move in a circle, confident that time was circular, not linear. She translated the ticks along its circumference. It read, 11:09 and 12 seconds.

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The digital clock in the sky read: ∞2231.7.16.23.19pm∞

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The analog pocketwatch was ten minutes slow according to the sky clock, but Pelham knew that time was flexible, a realm of relativity, a more-or-less reality. That, she knew, is what made time beautiful: its imprecision, not its exactitude. Time was precious and beautiful and needed human care. She wound her pocketwatch dutifully every morning. Time depended on her. Without her care, there would be no real time.       

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She had come across the boots while scavenging in a deserted warehouse. The old-fashioned, shiny, steel toes contrasted with their black, synthetic-leather ankle boots. They made her feel unique in a world of drab routine and insufferable, habitual behavior.

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Her grandfather, the only person she loved and who, she knew, loved her, had given her his jackknife and pocket watch before he died in the Lutzia mosquito pandemic that decimated Liberty City at the time of his death a dozen years before—when she began her life as a rebellious child. She had watched him wither away as predatory larvae nested and fed in his blood before their metamorphosis into small, winged adults emerging through flesh wounds.

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The nine years of her life that led up to that moment, the instance of her grandfather’s death, provided no experience of such things.

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“You know how to use it,” he said. “Use it well. Fuck Freedom. Fuck Liberty. Use your knife.”

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Then he whispered his secret secret in her ear, expiring by exhaling or blowing in her ear.

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She turned her attention outward again to Google Boulevard. She knew the danger of being lost in thought.

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Shop signs at street level gave dull illumination to paper and plastic litter in curbside gutters. Derelict furniture and abandoned magnohorses were left to house rodents. Many of the shops were boarded, windows broken, and walls decorated with graffiti. Dog and human turds spotted the sidewalks, organic landmines, and warned the inattentive with the stench of waste.

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A typical night in Liberty City. The air was saturated with moisture, sticky, smirched with fine-grained, toxic particles and scented with industrial gases. Skyscraper windows were smudged and splotched with coats of soot and grime.

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In an instant, her heart pounding, a paper bag in one hand, Pelham sprang from the recess into the street and ran directly at a dark doorway on the other side of Google Boulevard.

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She leapt over a heap of synthetic garbage and trash bags and disappeared into the doorway, bumping into a wino seated in the recessed dark on a doorstep, hunched over his knees, an empty bottle of chemical wine held loosely in one hand. He reeked of himself.

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Before the vagrant could rouse, Pelham dashed to the corner, where she turned and ran towards the end of a brightly-lit cul-de-sac. Along both curbs, sports and luxury magnocars and magnohorses were parked diagonally, their polished surfaces reflecting the gaudy lights of a single nightclub.

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Panting, she arrived at the Other Side Club, where affluent free spirits, the children of libertarian overlords in Freedom Town, came at night to fill their free, empty lives.

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She edged between two parked magnohorses, purposely knocking one on its side. She placed the paper bag on the doorstep, lit it on fire, rang the buzzer of the locked entrance, and ran back the way she had come. Thoughtfully, she remembered to push over other magnohorses and draw a nail along the smooth surfaces of the magnocars as she ran. The rasping of the nail on the carbon-composite veneers grated into the night. For Pelham, it was a fulfilling, screeching aria.

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At the entrance of the Other Side Club, an inebriated and fashionably-dressed customer, followed by a club bouncer, emerged. The tipsy dandy saw the burning bag and, stepping down, stomped it with a stylish, pointed, calfskin dancing shoe.

Pelham dissolved into the gray murk of a rainless electrical storm that bust over Liberty City.

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 The inebriated young dancer stomped the bag repeatedly before the guard pulled him back. Earlier that day, Pelham had packaged shit in the bag. Now, it smeared the dancer’s expensive dancing shoes. He slipped and fell, sitting forcefully in the excrement, horrified to see his white evening wear stained with brown feces. Viscous, fresh feces splattering the guard. The dancer reached back with one arm to steady himself, placing his palm on the slippery surface, and fell back.

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The odor of the scene joined and penetrated the atmospheric stew that was the routine, abysmal life and breath of Liberty City.

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A cluster of tipsy young women and men staggered out of the door and, seeing the young man, pointed and laughed.

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The guard cursed.

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The dancer vomited.

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In the night sky above, a pliable-gas airway train, carrying night workers, sped through a pliable-gas tube. Propelled by a current of air intensified like a channeled jetstream or laser beam, the walls of the tube and cars were durable, pliable-gas shells. Invisible in the day, the light they projected at night illuminated the tubes in which they moved. Crisscrossed and bright, the airway trains highlighted a maze of tubes as they swooshed forward.