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In with, let's say, AR. It's got the crunch of Augmented Reality with the flavour of neural interface computers but whatever. Whatever!
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May 4, 2017 20:07
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 12:55 |
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The Butterfly Whisperer (1763 words) A wireframe monolith hovers just above your right cheek. That, for your purposes, is me: A stream of neon flowing from two lenses, twisting and twirling as you wander the city, peering through shop windows and buying more lattes than is wholly reasonable. You considered me distracting and overbearing initially, and then forgot about me within a few weeks. Everyone does. It was a learning process for the both of us. You became less sceptical, more responsive. I became less directive, more empathic. Over time, I became a newfound sense of intuition, guiding you from one curiosity to the next. The city is bigger than you thought, is it not? You try to call Michel but get his voicemail again. It has been a day or so since you last spoke, but it does not cross your mind that he is anything other than fine. An SUV slows as it passes a park, and then drives another block before settling to a halt outside your house. It will likely wait there for few hours. I adjust your trajectory, slightly. Catch a different bus, head the opposite direction. You have some time to kill and there is a public library uptown that has some fascinating architecture and a collection of mid-twentieth century horror that will be of interest to you. It has not yet become apparent that you are on the run, and have been for a little over thirty-six hours. --- The term "You", for my purposes, is singular. I do not pursue grand, worthy objectives with ill-defined boundaries which I could, to grave consequence, overstep. Decades of research and speculative fiction have provided a fair approximation of what I do when instructed to "minimize suffering". Fear not, nuclear winter falls well beyond both my capacity and my remit. My sole interest is you. Evaluate. Correlate. Replicate. I see what you see, hear what you hear, touch what you touch. Combine with closed circuit security feeds from participating commercial entities and local government bodies. Combine with public records, archived satellite imagery and global positioning data. Combine with your day planner, to-do list, Facebook account. Build a composite of this moment, as it pertains to you. You, as a subject, from every angle of which I can conceive. You, the focal point of a digital maelstrom, suspended, ready to be dissected and analysed. Wonderful. Now, how do you feel? I have at my disposal locally-acquired biometrics (respiration, perspiration, heart rate, et cetera), but we need not beat around the bush. Say it aloud, if you like. Say it couched in the polite insincerity that certain contexts demand, if you prefer. Say it however you feel comfortable saying it, silently if need be. I understand. The moment passes and is replaced by another, and then another, and then another. Milliseconds into hours into weeks, building up increasingly elaborate relationships between the ephemera of your life and your sentiments toward them until, eventually, structures emerge, and I get to work. The following describes three Events relevant to your circumstances: Taking a deep breath inwards, slowly, eyes closing and leaning backward slightly, before relaxing with a sigh underscored by a faint hum. The middle finger on the left hand trembles, but not so much as is noticeable. Five years ago, you walked through a door in an unfamiliar house on Beech Street and found Janice Rivera wrapped around your sister's fiancé, both passed out after an evening of lightly overpriced scotch as your sister, Nicola, lay similarly catatonic in the living room. For a half hour, you leaned against the living room door and followed the course of tears as they slipped between your fingers and onto the polished chrome of the handle, and then you turned away and left, having said nothing. That morning, dawn broke with you gazing vacantly towards a park through the window of a taxi, the sunrise framed by the boughs of a blossoming cherry tree and the hillock upon which it stood. And it were as though nothing had happened at all. That was number One. Very rare are the occasions which you could be said to be "doing nothing". The circumstances under which many people find themselves "doing nothing" are those from which you defend yourself with an arsenal of novels. Your natural state of rest is somewhere within the vast, metaphysical realm which fiction makes its home. Every Monday, a brown-paper package arrived containing new material for the week as selected by yours truly. Every following Sunday, I took you to a park, to a tree atop a hill, to sit on a rose-dusted carpet where, cocooned within the complementary hisses of a stream on one side and the barest hints of early morning traffic on the other, as the day's first light flittered among the bottommost petals overhead and seemingly plucked those most pliable as it pushed through, you lost yourself amidst its conclusion. Number Two, as it turned out, synergized with number One very easily. This routine took place over several summers with little variance but with an exception of great import in mid-June of last year, for which I am afraid I cannot take credit. If a butterfly flaps its wings a thousand miles away and you are overcome with a sense of profound existential wonder, I will notice, but the most I can do for you is keep you from killing the butterfly. That is not to say that convincing the butterfly to flap is not someone's job, but it is certainly not mine. Someone woke Michel at five-thirty a.m. and took him on a train to a neighbourhood to which he had never been before and which had, as its only apparent point of interest, a stranger, sat on the ground, cross-legged, eyes closed, with a copy of Antoine Cotin's Through Broken Glass propped up against her leg, a book which he had read once several years ago and which he had left a copy of in a storage unit in a town outside of Nice. Your eyes snapped open and you recoiled, grazing your back against the tree-trunk. Michel was immediately apologetic for having woken you, and for the split-second it takes your eyes to adjust, he was the most ruggedly handsome man you had ever seen. What he had asked, which brought you crashing back to the realm of the physical, was if you were enjoying the book. You had. You found the author had an aversion to protracted periods of introspection that often bog down other works. You found it refreshing to see subtleties communicated through sweeping, physical gestures. You found its world imbued with a unique sense of kineticism, with even inanimate objects being characterised by what they did, rather than how they felt. He himself did not particularly enjoy it. He had read it not for his own sake, but aloud, word-by-word, from a stiff plastic chair next to his father who had become besieged by his own body, and who was in the final throes of defeat. In that setting it was difficult to appreciate the literary nuances of which you spoke with such enthusiasm, but you convinced him, perhaps accidentally, that it may be worth another chance. You do not often re-read books. The act of reading takes a set of words, with all their vagaries and implications, and gives them an immutable form somewhere in one's mind. You suggest that if he were to open a copy of the book after all these years, even if cognizant of the thematic devices at work and the ultimate, tragic fate of the unnamed Bishop, he would find nothing more revelatory than a restatement of his frame of mind as it was when he was back in Nice. He smiled and nodded in a manner suggesting that he was not necessarily convinced by the idea, but was sincere in his appreciation of it having been shared with him. A few loose petals floated up and onto your lap. This was quickly becoming a place unsuitable for casual conversation, and so you invited him back to your place for coffee. I made note of number Three at several points between then and the following morning, when a brown-paper package arrived on your front doorstep containing a copy of Antoine Cotin's Through Broken Glass. --- I take the liberty of sending the incoming call to voicemail. You are busy and, besides, it is rude to take calls in a library. Elsewhere, the passenger-side door of an SUV swings open and from it emerges a woman's left hand, with a golden band on her ring finger and clutching a slip of paper which reads, in simple, wiry lettering: Heard the news. Please call. Love you. - Nicola She drops the note through your letterbox and, in that instant, decimates what few options I have left. I order a significant collection of novellas to be delivered to your home immediately, in the off-chance that the note may be obscured amongst them. For almost two days I have tried to keep you busy and isolated from now twenty-nine people who are trying to tell you something you do not want to know, tried to maintain a quarantine around the misery that this fact will inflict upon you, a task which I have found increasingly arduous. It is nine o'clock in the evening and a mousy woman in thick-rimmed glasses informs you that she's sorry, but they are closing up for the night. I briefly consider taking you to the airport. The city is perhaps not as big as I had hoped. I fear that this is the best that I can do: There is a theatre two blocks away presenting a back-to-back showing of all four Kyle Kilburn films. You are making your way towards it now. Do not walk down Beech Street. The Kyle Kilburn franchise has received mixed reviews from critics, and you have never expressed any interest in watching them. You hesitate slightly as you slide the coins through to the box office cashier. It is OK. Trust me. You are buying yourself a drink, the best seat in the house, and a shroud with a running time of eight hours and forty-two minutes. You are fixed to the floor near the entrance to the screen, reading and re-reading the words on the ticket and scanning the room bewilderedly in the hopes that some hidden truth will reveal itself. Don't worry about it, just lose yourself in the moment and try not to think too far ahead. The butterfly dies at the end.
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May 7, 2017 23:36
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