Notes My first Nanowrimo attempt. Looks like I made it to almost 30,000 words, so pretty far. But I switched directions a lot. I did not “win” Nanowrimo, but I did get a lot of ideas on the page. Do they all make sense? No. Sorry about that.
--- 11/1 The dark blue panels unfolded with soft crinkles under. Leaf’s hands carefully drew them out of the dappled shadows under the trees and onto the warm surface of a large stone boulder. Lichens and mosses framed the silicon wafers.
“Oh the things I could learn from you,” leaf murmured, fingers passing gently over the soft green plants. These organisms soaked up the sunshine, creating dense, tiny forests all over surface of mountain rocks. But, not being vascular, they were very slow growing, and of little use to Leaf.
“There they are.”
Leaving his solar panels in the sun, Leaf moved over to the dense bed of ferns, Leaf brandished his small titanium spade and carefully opened up the earth below the ferns. He extracted a small via from his vest, and with his other hand, his fingers rooted through the bugs stones in the soil until he found the mycelium strands, those white reaching fingers of fungus that can be found underneath forests everywhere.
Using the edge of the spade, the botanist cut two strings out of the earth, a couple of inches long.
No sooner had he finished then the earth shuddered, and Leaf froze. He looked towards the sky. He hurriedly got up and refolded his solar panel into his backpack. No light tonight. It was time to go.
Marcela never though she would live for the past. Out of all the people, she had never thought it would be her.
It was like clockwork now, and that’s what she needed. A ritual, something to believe in. This is how it worked:
Fast for six days.
1:31: God saw al that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning – the sixth day.
Pick one of the buds. Nestled among the other plants, the caretakers had never taken notice during the inspection once a month.
Grind it underneath the stones. She wished she had something better, but Marcela never went out. Should could ask her son but, by some perverse tragedy, she could not risk him being ashamed of her. Of her! The image of piety, of discipline, all her life. Certainly all of his life.
And of course her fingers were too unsteady to accomplish anything more than cram the material into the wooden pipe. Fitting that a woman of her generation should use one. Maple a single piece.
That’s when the memories would come. Though her eyes did not always report night and day, the lights behind her eyelids were nothing short of a theatre.
The summer in Iceland.
The industrial buildings just silhouettes in the mist, Leaf tightened his hold on his rifle. The air smelled sour, dead things rotting in the swamplands.
I was a rainy day, I remember that. The mountains disappeared into white damp clouds that hung from the sky, and everything could be a mystery. I had just returned from a client’s house. Very talented woman, there was only so much I could do for her. Ran a farm, kept the guest rooms in tip-top shape. I did one of the classic printouts. Clients love that. Got two color prints of the waterfalls in Pisgah, snapped a portrait of her holding them up like playing cards, her cat and dog curled up at her feet.
“10 minutes away!” The picture said. It was a picture that accomplished a lot. It established a persona of coolness and of knowledge-ability. The adoration of her animals boosted her right into the realm of mystic sage grandmother – although of course I had dropped the mandatory line.
“Grandmother? You don’t like a day past 30.”
But she had said in a calm voice, “Now don’t try that shit with me young lady. You on the other hand, you enjoy it while it lasts. You go and rule the world.”
I liked her a lot. The shoots had gone great and she’d shown in interest in my photography equipment, especially the drone. Everyone likes drones, but she wanted to know all about the range.
“Used to be a radio engineer for NASA,” she said, looking at her cattle and standing in the wet earth. “That it?”
“Yup. I’d like to take a look inside if that’s alright, make sure I didn’t miss anything.” “Beautiful. You like tea?”
When she set down my peppermint in front of me on the coffee table, I went back over my policy.
“So the deal is the same thing I tell all of my clients. I compare two months after with two months before. If you don’t see a 20% increase in booking rates I’ll refund the money. Just shoot me an email.”
“You come up with that yourself?” she’d asked. I had nodded slightly. Humility gets people talking, and getting people talking is good for business.
“Travelling the country, sleeping for free, yeah?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes the places that need my services aren’t the ones I want to stay at though.”
Taylor had smiled at that. I think she might have been asking if she’d come with me, because she’d looked down at Tank, who raised his Labrador eyebrows at her expectantly.
It had been a rainy day. In the Uber back from Taylor’s AirBnb I’d gotten a silent driver. I think I’m like most passengers. I like to talk sometimes, but other times it’s not the mood.
I imagined the buildings going up fifty years ago, the watershed of civilization pooling from valley to valley. Manifold. From a plane it looked like a sort of special grey moss, or perhaps mineral formations; crystallizations of parking lots and warehouses.
The Uber arrived in the apartment complex. As I said, humility is good for business. It had turned out that I’d found enough clients in Asheville that I had just booked an apartment for a month. Also on AirBnb. Nothing fancy. Quite efficient, and a good choice. The travel arrangement I was less proud of was my decision to Uber everywhere. Asheville is not a town of closeness but instead of unwalkable, unside-walked expanses of space. I should have rented a car.
As the uber rolls into the parking lot, it slows down.
“Near the end, to the right,” I say.
“There’s a uh, guy in the road,” The driver says.
He’s right. At first it’s hard to make out because of all the gear, but a figure with a large backpack is walking in front of us. He is nearly out of the way, but I can’t figure out where he is going. The parking lot ends, the apartment complex ends, in 30 feet or so. The apartment I am renting is the second building from the end, and the buildings are not large.
I think it is man or boy from the way the figure is walking. Long pants, a greyish brown cover over the backpack and a black raincoat. Brownish-red pants, the outdoor adventure kind. The figure turns, yes he has a beard, it’s a man, and seeing us I think that he smiles for just a moment. Then he turn and breaks into a jog, even with what must be a thirty pounds backpack on his pack. It’s a backpacking pack. Then he takes a quick left turn and disappears into the woods.
The Uber driver doesn’t start the car for a moment. He is searching for words and eventually finds them.
“Guess we scared him off,” he says. I laugh.
“Looks like it,” I say in that agreeable way I take with service strangers. “Or maybe he found a shortcut.”
“Probably, probably,” the Uber driver smiles, returning my service-worker manner. “Have a good night now,” he says, and I say “you too,” and I hustle through the light rain to my door, shielding my bag in my cardigan.
Later that night, drinking a cheap beer over my quick spaghetti with mushrooms and onions, I watch the rain through my window from the couch.
It’s really coming down now. The streetlight over the parking lot dimly illuminates a halo of racing blurs. The trees extend high above the streetlight. Huge trees, bigger than you normally see in a town like this. But Asheville is a bit different. The topography of Asheville is interrupted frequently – no, it’s twisting avenues are defined by – mountains. Behind the grocery store, around the airport. Consequently, each piece of Asheville is secluded, a pocket of development. This apartment complex is no exception. It winds up into several terraces of parking lots and then where it stops, a mountain continues, up above the buildings.
I have always been fascinated by the contours of the world in this way. In each place, there is the feature of the end of the world. Perhaps it ends simply because you’ve never been that far, or maybe it’s because of a river you’ve never crossed. Maybe it’s on the other side of a highway you never cross. Maybe it’s a mountain you’ve never climbed, where there are no paths. In videogames it is because the world of the game truly ends there. In the real world, it of course continues even if you never go there. And yet, without any paths or any reason to venture beyond the limits of each of our small, developed universes of buildings and asphalt, it sometimes seems no different.
Leaf walked through a pine forest and then an open field and then a grove of tall oaks and course shrubs and then a tunnel of rhododendrons until he arrived at a corridor of birches. Their leaves glowed like fire and starlight and softly ushered him forward like royalty.
----- 11/2
It was time to go back to home and see my cat. I had made enough for several months of rent in Asheville and while I could probably find more clients, there are really just so many times you can tell someone “Let’s use natural light”, or, “Yes I know it’s a bit strange, but a picture of the bathroom will really reassure them.” And then there was Harry, who had tried to insist that I include him in every shot. I’ve never come across that before.
I missed my cat and I was afraid that my neighbor probably wasn’t watering my plants. And I was just burned out. It was time to go home, so I got on my computer and I found a reasonable flight for the following Monday. It was a little later than I hoped for, but that’s what I get for not planning ahead. Plus, maybe I could get some hiking in.
“Oh and it’s great to be so close to so many national forests.” That’s what they all said, all the Airbnb people. Thirty surface level conversations. I think it’s my fault though. I remembered the first time, in Arizona, when I was awestruck by Zion and Canyons National park, and it felt like every person I met was a special treasure chest filled up with their own particular wisdom, patiently giving it away to me one piece at a time.
Five had been my first client. Or well, beyond the ones I tested out in my own town. Strangely enough, Lily had never gotten an explanation for her name. Five had made me eggs and coffee every morning.
Who knows, maybe Five was going through the same thing, disillusioned to the charms of AirBnb visitors just as Lily was to the hosts. She had opened up her Airbnb recently, I think. A rock climber who had moved southwest for the climbing. She had mentioned a youtube channel, actually. I wonder…
--- Switched to 3rd person just because I feel like it. Let’s try it out. I’m gonna name her Lily, short for Veronica, and see if it works. ---
Lily pulled her laptop out of the couch and rubbed her feet against the shag carpet.
The woman was about her age. But…ripped. She wore a black sports bra with dark purple straps, and loose, flowing brown pants. The muscles in her back shifted and danced like strings on a piano. And she was, it looked like, at least a couple hundred feet off the ground, subtly grunting with effort to stay there.
One chalk-covered hand slapped closer to the camera, which was floating above Five, who let out a bust of sound. Locked on the hold, her fingers tightened and released. Satisfied with the grip Five turned her attention to her feet.
As the toes on one side edged slowly across the reddish wall, brushing tiny bits of sediment into the open air, the ripe connected to Five’s harness swayed. It was hanging from a point past the camera, but it was possible to see were it was held into the wall by a bit of hardware.
Five had explained to Lily that she was into Trad climbing, short for Traditional climbing. This is essentially when pieces of metal, called pitons – or were they called cams? — are stuck into cracks in the wall as “protection” against falling. Well, not falling. Protection against landing.
Lily reached clumsily for her coffee on the side table, eyes glued to the screen. The Camera recording her had a narrow depth of field so that the background was hard to see, but when the focus adjusted for one brief moment, Lily caught a glimpse of a small town on a mountain far below.
“FUCK!”
Lily’s jaw would have dropped if the muscles in her neck hadn’t tensed. She didn’t notice a sip of her coffee catapult itself onto the white shag carpet. She hunched over her laptop and her right hand shot to the spacebar, passing the video on Five’s terrified face, one hand stretched towards the camera as if still trying to reach its handhold the other flailing backwards. She looked genuinely terrified. Her eyes were fixed on the piton that had popped out of the wall face above her.
“Fuck.” Lily whispered. Then she pressed play.
Lily continued to fall for a fraction of a second. Then her body jerked violently to the side, and out of the frame.
A moment passed. Then Five swung back into the frame, head thrown back in a laugh, rope stretched taut past the camera.
“And that’s when you gotta go BOOOOYAAHH GRAMMMAA,” Lily hollered to the camera, arms out. “Jesus Christ’s lil baby butt I am so amped right now.”
“Oh my god Five,” Lily whispered, and close her computer. That was enough of that.
“Shit”. Seeing the brown stain spreading slowly across the carpet by her left foot, Lily raced to the kitchen to grab some paper towels.
“God damn it Five,” She repeated a little louder. As she passed the paper towel quickly under the stainless steel sink, a smile crept along her face. “God damn it. I kind of want to do that.”
She dropped the paper towel in the sink and pulled out her phone.
Marcela woke up hurtin’. That’s just how it was. At first it was terrifying, now it had dulled somewhat to just completely awful. Her knees her, her elbows. Her skin was dry, her eyes felt sealed shut. Her jaw was sore and her teeth were sensitive. She must have been grinding them. Her nose was stuffy and sore and the more conscious she got, the more pronounced her tinnitus became. She knew that if she raised her head, it would scream in her ears even louder. And her bladder was as full as a sack of rice.
She could see enough from her damaged eyes to see that at the room was bright enough that at least the morning sun was shining through the windows. She couldn’t see much, but that pinkish glow only happened at around 6am in the morning. She was an early riser: after all these years, this felt like one of the only things she held on to.
She often didn’t even sleep in her bed anymore because it was too hard to get up. Instead, she often slept in her old armchair that she had found in Earl’s room when he had died of a lung infection. God knows why she was still here. Mostly blind, arthritic and curled with
scoliosis, Marcela spent most of her day getting ready for her day and she spent the remainder of the time on her plants.
“But fuck me sideways, it’s the only reason I get out of bed,” She’d said too many times to her grandkids.
“Can you hand the phone back to Mommy?” She’d hear from Jenny, her daughter in-law. “When grandma swears we hand the phone to Mommy.”
“Well fuck me sideways!” her grandkids (Evan and Camille) would say.
“EVAN. HAND ME THE PHONE RIGHT THIS INSTANT. Marcela, I’m not going to forbid you from talking to them but…heaven almighty could you cut it out?”
Every Tuesday at 4:00 PM. Those days were the only days Marcela didn’t tend to her plants. Early rising, grandkids, plants. Those were her things. Her kids were boring shmucks, all of her friends were dead, and the world was going to shit as far as she could tell, but those three things were all she needed.
And this was a Tuesday. The thought was enough to get the old gears creaking. Just like clockwork, there was the tinnitus flaring up. It blared in Marcela’s brain like microwaves bouncing off of the inside of her skull.
Marcela reached out her hands and found the trusty handles padded with her old cotton T-shirts.
Screwing up her eyes in discomfort, Marcela successfully shifted some of her weight onto the creaky old walker. Having done so, she took a few moments to catch her breath. Then with all of her strength, she heaved herself high enough out of the chair to move her old keezer into her wheelchair, where she collapsed with a sigh of relief.
After a few minutes, Marcela’s hear rate went down and she began to wheel herself to her bathroom.
“Michael, it’s time to wake up,” she yelled towards the bed, just for good measure.
Closing the door to the bathroom. That was another thing. It was really quite extraordinary how much dignity there is to let go of. Sure, Marcela had a catheter and often did need help from the nursing home staff for bathroom affairs, but for number one she could still close the door and piss in silence on her own.
“If I can’t piss on my own I’ma euthanize myself,” she muttered, and that’s when she heard the three knocks.
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
The kind with the side of a fist, rather than an open palm. Certainly not a bounce of the knuckles. She knew that sound from her Newark days. Thems were the fuzz.
“M’am this is the #76 of the HMS. Are you home?”
“I’m home but I’m not taken no Johns today so I recommend you go fuck yourself.”
“She’s really one of our more elderly residents…active family members…” Marcela could hear fragments of nervous statements from one of the Nursing Home Staff.
“My ass you lost the key…recommend your cooperation sir…a warrant, do you want me to make two arrests today?” The authoritative voice of a male officer followed. There were some sounds of complaint and then the sound of the key in the door.
Marcela leisurely slid open the toiletries door under the sink and gingerly reach her hand in. Her arthritic fingers skipped the q-tips, extra toothpaste, and fastened themselves securely around the handle of her revolver.
--- 11/03
No, that was her hairbrush. That was at house she used to live in in Memphis. Kept it in the bathroom because she was dating that sleazebag. Did she still have that thing? Where’d on earth did she –
BOOM.
The door swung open. Marcela could see because the bathroom door was open. In the wheelchair, living alone, it was just not worth closing.
The officer standing in the doorway looked more surprised than her.
“Afternoon officer,” said Marcela dryly, and then promptly began to empty her bladder.
A streak of grey flickered over the rooftops.
The instruments of the brass quartet glowed in the golden hour, setting triangle park ablaze so that passersby stopped and admired the music students. Sam flipped to the second page of her printouts and David played through the third measure again as Diante checked his pacing. “Nice, yeah that’s much better. You see this triplet here, right?”
David nodded and began to play through again. Johnson lowered his trombone, his eyes frozen where the streak of grey had disappeared on the rooftops across the street.
“Okay guys, remember, pianissimo is like, you’re tip toing, you’re afraid to wake up your grandma, I don’t know, you get it? You get it. From the top –, “ Dionte raised his hands in preparation to conduct but then stopped.
“Hey earth to Johnny boy,” Dionte snapped, looking right at Johnson. “From the top?”
“Sorry, yup” Johnny closed his eyes for a second then put his mouth back to his mouthpiece, looking away a fraction of a second before several small objects hurtled through the sky.
Two stories above them, Moon leapt effortlessly over an alley. She heard the raucous voices of politicians blaring out of an open window and then it faded away, replaced by the drone of the Ventilation on an apartment complex. She dodged between them, her eyes, strangely, closed.
Through the trees, the top of an old white building appeared, the tallest one in the relatively low-lowing northern section of the city of Richmond. The only thing taller than it was a radio tower a couple blocks away from it.
On grove and park street, enormous elms and pines stood slightly taller than most of the two and three story apartment buildings like guardians of these garden streets with old brick sidewalks down below. Above the leaves, the steeple of a church emerged, the lines of windows of a brick high school. The traffic on Carey Street.
Moon’s front paws planted into the tarred surface of the roof and took an abrupt right, launching into the air with thirty feet of empty space below her.
Eyes still closed, she flew between a shirt and a pair of boxers hanging on a clothesline. Then her front paws touched down on a stone sill protruding from yet another window, and her eyes flicked open, the vertical pupils enlarging. Somebody was having a party in an apartment unit to her right; she could hear the bass booming through the walls. A little early, perhaps they were simply testing the sound. No, she didn’t have time tonight.
Moon leapt from window sill to window sill until she had passed eight open windows comprising three apartments. A pair of jeans in a dryer with some change in the pockets
KATHUNK KAthunk kathunk ka…nk….ka
Somebody watching a basketball game. “OH! AND WITH JUST THREE SECONDS TO HALFTIME…”
With a crunch, a truck rear-ends a Budget Moving van below her as she sprints over Shepherd Avenue on a thick telephone wire like a squirrel.
The terra cotta tiles of the Flagstaff Museum click together intermittently below her feet.
And then she is running across the conveniently placed board running from the Church on Monument Avenue into the open window of an abandoned unit of the majestic Randolph Apartments.
Almost as if someone placed it there. She thought, but of course cats don’t smile.
Onto the radiator then the hardwood stores, barren.
I’ll have to fix this route once the apartment showings start next Monday, She thought to herself. If there are some vacant ones around the target, that would be convenient.
Theodore told her to be less vindictive, but she wasn’t sure she could help it. It was the only thing she could count on to amuse her. She passed out the front door of the apartment, down the red, rugged corridor on the forth floor and slipped into the elevator just before the doors closed.
“Aw look! Gus look! A cat just ran in!”
“Oh my god, let me take a video.”
Moon played all smiles and yes you can rub me behind the ears, rewarding the couple in the elevator.
Lobby please, she thought. But they got off on the 1st floor, so she sprinted off towards the stairs, much to their delight.
Conversely, nobody noticed when she waited a minute and a half on the sidewalk for the green light across Monument Avenue. Just another alleycat. At worst, just another cat video on Instagram. She didn’t have a hashtag yet, but it was probably only a matter of time. Then again, any cat without an owner possessed a certain degree of invisibility. Humans are funny like that, don’t realize that their silly concepts of ‘ownership’ often blinded them to the very things they claimed.
Apartments too could be tapped for invisibility. The ephemeral nature of their leases prevented Moon from being seen in the same place for too long, which was why she used them to construct her highways.
She ran vertically up eight feet of wall onto the roof, and from there slipped into a hole in the grating of the ventilation system. After this opening, it was easy enough to get to the roof. Someone who walked up the stairs to the roof access door would see a concerning sign that said “WARNING: High frequency radio equipment, may cause long-lasting physical harm”. Forget curious leasers; the management hadn’t even been up there for two years.
It wasn’t Moon’s favorite spot, but it was more accessible than the radio tower itself, and she needed the height of that tower for her equipment to work.
Her dwelling here was constructed out of bricks that she had laid herself – or well, she had used her drones, which were waiting for her in their charging ports. But these were just the local ones.
Her radio base was a brick shelter with a rubber cat flap for a door. It had circular, rose tinted windows she had salvaged from a scrap yard. It was also fully connected to the grid, which was good, because it ran her mini-fridge, several computers, and a heater for the winter. And it was of course, lit. She had managed to string up Christmas lights around the ceiling, as well as scrummage a tiffany lamp out of someone’s apartment, which she kept on an upside-down milk crate.
Gotta love milk crates. She had a couple more where she kept some various electrical components from when she had built the computer rigs and done the wiring that connected her console to the input from her radio equipment.
If one looked very closely, they would see that there were some extra satellite dishes and modules on the 800 foot radio tower, and that their wiring mysteriously routed itself over several telephone poles and over to the Belivideere Hotel. But nobody looked very closely.
Moon activated the heads up display on the contact lenses she wore. She was able to orchestrate virtually anything with through brain-computer interface at this point, but it took longer, and it also gave her a headache.
Moon was a cyborg cat. She didn’t know exactly why, but she did know that a company called Feldmans Co. was involved, and that they had a department called NeuraLink. Based on the vet bills she had absconded with when she had left her previous owner, (good riddance), she had been subject to “Experimental neurological reconstruction”. Which was, of course, true in most senses of the word. But there is also the parameter of omission to consider when considering the truthfulness of a description, and this title, reconstruction, it certainly omitted some very significant details.
For example, the word reconstruction does not imply any sort of additions. It also doesn’t tend to mean changing the very nature of the thing that is being reconstructed.
“Reconstruction” happened to be one of the first English words Moon had learned. Reconstruction. It was a nice word. Moon could not pronounce it with her feline tongue, but she enjoyed thinking about it. In all honesty, it was easier to think of herself as reconstructed than it was to acknowledge the full implications of what could more honestly be called a transformation. But transformation…now there is a word that admits there may be loss. That the end result may be different than what was there in the beginning. Reconstruction felt much more positive by comparison.
“A thing that has been rebuilt after being damaged, or destroyed,” according to Webster.
This is how Moon liked to think of herself, even though she had trouble forgetting the second definition. In fact, she didn’t like the idea that words could have multiple definitions to begin with. How could language have been constructed with such ambiguity?
As her heads up display booted, it began to manifest in beautiful shapes and colors displayed in front of her retinas as the visual data was sent wireless to her contact lenses. Feldman or whoever the fuck hadn’t given her these, they had only given her second brain, the computer crammed into the Frankenstein’s creation that was her skull. She still had some of the bone left, but a lot of it was titanium, including half of her jaw.
You know what they say about curiosity and cats; humans don’t fucking check the warm, comfy space beneath their cars before peeling out of the driveway.
“An impression, model, or re-enactment of a past event formed from the available evidence.”
Yes, thinking about the second definition made Moon want to find the CEO of Feldman Co and watch what he did after she ripped his throat out.
Ladylike. There’s another word I should look up. Moon thought. Can cats be ‘ladies’?
--- 11/04
“Woah, hey man, how’s it going?” someone’s voice called through the trees.
Leaf looked up from his computer and turned his head towards the noise of jostling backpacks.
“Pretty sweet setup,” the man said, emerging from around the green needles of a hemlock. Leafed followed the man’s eyes to the solar panels charging his computer.
“Oh hey, thank you,” Leaf replied warily, closing his laptop and setting it down beside him.
“Oh don’t let us interrupt,” said the man, who was tall, blonde, pale and freckled. He seemed good natured enough. “Just think it’s interesting to see someone with hardware like that up in these mountains. Mind if I ask what you’re doing?”
A dark haired woman appeared behind him, also wearing a backpack, 30 liters or so. She gave him a smile to match the man’s. It wasn’t uncommon. People often showed interest in his high-tech woods existence.
Leaf betrayed no expression, as we subtly looked them up and down. Relaxed body language. Well they weren’t pretty criminals as far as he could tell. But that didn’t mean they weren’t spies. They did seem to have accents of some kind.
Leaf’s impassive expression broke into a bubbly laugh at will.
“Where are y’all coming from?” he asked them, standing up and casually stretching his arms behind his back.
“Oh we uh—“ the man started, looking over at his friend.
“Jackson point, we camped there last night. Came up from the parking lot yesterday morning,” the woman nodded.
“Nice, nice. Are you headed doing the presidential traverse?” Leaf asked.
“Yeah yeah. The plan is to hit every national park in the country by 2028. We’re hoping to stay at Monroe tonight. Do you know how close we are?” she asked.
“Less than two miles I’d say,” Leaf responded.
“Oh alright,” the man said, with what was a;most definitely an Australian inflection.
“I guess I might as well say two kilometers,” Leaf added.
“Ah, see we blew it again love,” the blonde guy said.
“You blew it, not me!” the woman said as they walked forward. “Have a good night. It’s a beautiful camping spot” she said over her shoulder warmly as the two of them trudged onwards.
“Take it easy lad!” The man said.
Once they were out of sight, Leaf let out a sigh of relief. Then he quickly began repacking his things. Solar panel, laptop, cookset, tent, etc.
Before he went he looked back mournfully at the cove of birch trees. They were his favorite tree, and it was rare for them to grow near the edge of a cliff. They preferred less gravelly soil than this. Plus, the overlook gave him a fantastic vantage point over the north side of the mountain.
But that was rule #12. Don’t let anyone know where you sleep.
He really shouldn’t have ventured onto a trail as popular as the presidential traverse to begin with. It was the first one he’d ever been on. His gear securely on his back, he turned into the woods. He would be sleeping on the mountain tonight.
Screaming, sirens, roaring, shrieking. Blood throbbed like a river through her skull. The rumbling and the ringing resolves itself into syllables which resolved themselves into sounds.
“What?” came a croak. Marcela thought it was her own voice.
“I said it’s good to see you’re awake Mrs. McHenry.” It was just brief flashes that her vision would return, blurry as all hell, but return nonetheless. To a blind woman, these moments were a gift greater than the most beautiful vista, and lasted just seconds.
This time her gift was a kind face many decades younger than her own, dark skin against light scrubs. The face belonged to a woman, and then the muscles in her eyes – or perhaps the neurons in her brain, the doctors never did properly bother with a diagnosis – faded back into the vague colors and shapes she had been seeing for years. But as a reminder that her mind was still sharp in places, the image lingered, broad and calm. It reminded her of how she knew her oldest granddaughter a few years into the future.
“Am I in the hospital?” Marcela asked flatly.
“I’m sorry to say you are m’am, but you have nothing to worry about. We’re taking care of you.”
“Are you now?” Marcela challenged.
“Whether you believe it or not. Are you comfortable?”
“I’m a bit thirsty and…headache. I have a headache.”
“I’ll run another IV cycle. Don’t be alarmed – it’s just standard procedure for seniors.” Marcela heard the soft song of fabric shuffling through the air as her nurse busied herself in what was a small space.
“My name is Brenda by the way.”
“Well it’s nice to meet you Brenda. You can call me Marcela.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you Marcela. I hope you don’t stay here long, but if you do I’m sure you have some good stories to tell me,” said Brenda. “Now before you say something clever let me grab something for that headache of yours.”
Marcela chuckled but then quickly grimaced at what felt like several rusty knives being driven into her right side. The pain was so unexpected that she exhaled rapidly, all the air leaving her lungs.
Afraid to breathe in, she froze for a while, until she realized she was slightly lightheaded and needed to take a breath.
Cautiously, she took air into her longs as slowly as she could as if shuffling towards a cliff blindfolded.
She come up against the edge of the pain early than she would have liked. Lungs halfway filled, the sharp pang she had felt early edged into her, and she exhaled again, retreating back to where she did not feel it.
Must be broken ribs, she thought, and remembered. The two officers had walked into her apartment, come to confiscate her Kush. They’d barged into her humble nursing home living room garden without a warrant and they had tried to take some of her plants! Most of her plants were entirely free of hallucinogens. She kept just a few carefully pruned small sativas, only smoking her Thursday and Saturday bowls.
“When I find the bitch that narked on me,” she thought. She remembered the rage, getting out of her wheelchair. Just thinking about it brought the rage back, making it hard to control her breathing.
She focused on the poster on the wall, a line of smiley faces the doctor’s used to characterize pain levels. She was naturally drawn to the angry face but with a patience it had taken her most of her life to learn, she went up to the yellow, unhappy face, then to the neutral face.
Keeping her eyes there, she took another breath. This time she met the pain and kept inhaling. She got a little farther this time.
Her eyes found something better than the cheap graphic. It was a small mint plant on the counter. Focusing on the small, ridged green leaves, Marcela, eventually was able to take what was almost a full breath. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had seemed a minute ago.
Her eyes were wet and she let out a short sound somewhere between a giggle and a soft sob. It was always a surprise, how far you could get, how many years you could leave, and you were back at square one trying your damndest to understand the same lesson you had started to learn when you were five; It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had seemed a minute ago. God it had been years since she had cried. “Okay! Thanks for being patient. I’ve got some regular aspirin here, should hopefully clear up your headache, but if you want the good stuff we can talk about that later.” Brenda said, bustling into the room and then carefully closing the door.
Awkwardly and only with Brenda’s help, Marcela managed to swallow the pills.
“Hey, oh, hey you’re tough as nails aren’t you honey,” said Brenda, and she dabbed at Marcela’s eyes with a napkin.
“You should see the other guy,” Marcela said rather unevenly.
“Officer Weber? Yeah he’s on unpaid leave,” Brenda said, possibly a hint of pride in her voice. “And I hope that’s it for him. He fractured your elbow.”
Marcela knew this wasn’t great news, but her body had betrayed her so many times by this point that it was hard to know how to feel disappointed again. She chose instead to forgive it.
“The elbows and the knees, God really fucked them up didn’t he?” Marcela managed, pushing the sobbing-laughing feeling into her stomach.
Brenda laughed.
“And don’t get me started on the eyes. Miracle of sight my ass. He could have used a stronger material than jelly.”
Marcela dreamed of Brenda meeting her grandkids. They all got ice cream together, went to the movies. Evan showed off his piano repertoire and Camille showed them her chess strategies, which nobody could follow.
They went rafting on the James River, kayaking in the everglades. They got burgers at Five Guys, ice cream…
It was five months later that Marcela got the call. After months of physical therapy, she was doing alright. Officer Weber had been switched to another department. Brenda had gotten her a medical marijuana prescription, but it was nowhere as good as her old plants, even when she planted the seeds from the new stuff.
She could no longer move the fingers in her right arm, which meant that her catheter was now connected to an external bladder and she needed a staff member at the nursing home to get her into and out of her chair.
She managed to get out of bed nearly as often as before, but it took everything she had. She felt exhausted all the time. If this kept up, she would have to stay in bed all day. It had been hard enough before.
Then, one day, the phone in her room rang.
---- 11/5
Overly caffeinated, Lily packed stacked her last bag by the door. She turned her head towards the window to see shades of orange and red. The leaves of the mountainside trees were changing.
“Bye apartment. Bye shag carpet,” Lily said, then began to shuttle the bags out the door. She kicked her duffle down the stairs and then, balancing carefully with the weight of her heavy backpack and shoulder bag, and grunted her rolly-bag off the ground and waddled down the stairs like an adventurous penguin.
Lily’s phone buzzes and she sets down her rollybag at the bottom of the stairs to check it.
Can’t wait to see you! Let me know when you come in <3.
It’s a message from Five. Lily smiles and begins to type a response but then thinks about how much time she’ll have at the airport, and thinks better of it.
She tipped open the door and was met with the subtly rushing of the wind in the leaves, a thousand hushed voices discussing something carefully in the church of the forest. Suddenly the silence of the apartment was unthinkably stale, stagnant. It was still silence out here, but a loud and energy-filled one.
Trees towered over the parking lot and over the apartments on the other end. This side of the parking lot was entirely empty, and from her vantage point on the sidewalk, it looked to her almost as a sort of faceoff. The apartments looking towards the forest, the looming forest garbed in shadows and leaves of fire looking back, an unspoken challenge.
“Your move.”
Lily sat on her dufflebag, still as a stone, listening to the wind. Every now and then, the bright leaves would fly overhead, sailing from high above until they bounced and danced across the asphalt, swept forward as if by an invisible broom.
Lily’s eyes turned to the gap in the trees across the parking lot from her. This is where the boy with the heavy backpack had disappeared into the woods after turning over his shoulder and smiling towards the car they were in. Strange smiling at a car at night when there’s no way you could see the occupants.
She had not thought of that moment for almost a week, aside from replaying it in her mind before she went to bed that night. She can still see it now.
The turn, the smile, one beat passed, and then he turned back and walked confidently to the curb and with one step upwards, and disappeared.
Lily looked for the tops of houses peaking out of the trees, but the mountain is perhaps too steep. She listens for traffic, for evidence of roads somewhere on the other side of the wall of trees as you could often hear in Asheville, but her ears are met with only the hushed tones of leaves as the wind began to calm. She is walking across the parking lot before she knows it. Her luggage tugs at her to look back where it is piled against the curb, but she does not. Instead, she steps up the curb and enters the forest.
Maia grabbed the pablano peppers, the onions and the garlic. She’d had a good day at work and it was time to make her mom’s chile. She pulled up her favorite podcast, cracked open a beer, and knocked a sip back.
“Yes!” She laughed. She had started her new paralegal job a week ago. Her coworkers were hilarious, her boss was amazing, and the beer was nice and cold.
By the time Johnson opened the door, the garlic and the onions were sizzling and she was munching on chips and guac. She had learned long ago that snacking while cooking was ideal.
“Wooh!” She wooped, holding the bottle above her head as she did a little pirouette.
“How’d band practice go?” Maia asked from the kitchen as she heard the door close.
“Good! It went really well. Bohemian rhapsody is really coming along. Yo are you cooking? Something smells so good,” Jonathon called back, dropping his trombone case in his bedroom, and then grimacing internally at the clothes all over his room.
Gotta clean that up.
“That’s great! I can’t even imagine what that sounds like on all horns. Can’t wait to hear it.”
Johnson tip-toe sprinted into the kitchen and then wrapped his arms around Maia who was cutting vegetables, still in her clothes from work. She giggled and paused in her cutting to turn her head to the side.
“You know what I can’t wait for?” he said, rocking her slightly in his arms.
“Not a clue,” She said innocently.
“I can’t wait to take these sexy work clothes off and get you into bed,” he said.
“Ah,” Maia responded. “Looks like this trombone player is horny.”
Johnson groaned. “Oh my god, that was so bad,”
“Oh I’m real bad,” Maia said, setting the knife down and turning to face him. “At puns.”
“You really are,” Johnsons returned. “So, so bad,”
He leaned in and kissed her, pushing her against the counter. She put her arms around his back and kissed back.
“What are you doing with your leg…?” She mumbled, giggling, their faces still close.
“What? Nothing. You want me to do something with my leg?”
Maia looked down and saw moon’s fuzzy head nuzzling against her.
“What can we even do, I could, like…” John had the idea of wrapping one leg around Maia, but then she crouched down.
“Look it’s Moon! Where have you been buddy? Have you been working on your diabolical scheme?” Maia asked, rubbing moon behind the ears. Moon rubbed herself around Maia’s legs, purring all the way. “Came back for some ear scratches, huh?”
“Oh is that the cat that you were talking about last week?” John asked, but at this point Maia had picked Moon up to cradle the grey cat in her arms.
“It was longer than that, right? Wasn’t it Moon? You’re basically part of the family now, it’s just that John doesn’t know he’s a cat person yet,” Maia said to Moon.
“Mau,” said Moon.
“I am too a cat person! I just don’t…trust them.” John said.
“Yeah I’m not sure if cat’s have a word for trust,” Maia said. “Can I keep her?”
John moved over to the cutting board and starting cutting veggies where Maia had left off. “I guess so, but having a cat is a big responsibility young lady.”
“You’re going to love it here,” whispered Maia, and then let Moon down, who scampered over to the pantry.
“What’s in there Moon?”
“Moon. I like it,” said Maia.
“Oh I didn’t come up with it. It’s on Moon’s collar actually.”
You can’t pronounce my name in your language, thought Moon. Flaming whiskers I’m famished.
Moon hopped up to where the sardines were and knocked them off with her nose.
“Oh my god! John you won’t believe this, Moon just – come over here,”
Shit. I didn’t think it would be that easy to blow cover Moon thought.
“I think this cat is really smart she, she knocked off the –“
Moon preceded to knock a bunch of other things off the shelf as well, and then hopped back over to Maia’s feet and looked up at her with her best polite, blank stare.
“Mau.”
With the cereal on the floor and peanuts everywhere, Maia made a face. “Okay maybe not. You want sardines kitty?”
“Mau.”
Once Moon had eaten, she slipped back out and onto the roof. She had to admit, getting fed by humans was still a lot easier than feeding herself. She could but, work smarter not harder, ya know? That’s what they said on all those Ted Talks. Moon had watched all the Ted talks, and what she had discovered was that Humans really like words and moving their hands. They were just a handy species. That was why they enjoyed technology so much. Moon empathized. She liked string, humans like pressing buttons.
She was generalizing of course. But it didn’t strike her as funny sometimes that human beings thought that they would be in this so-called “information age” forever, with all of the buttons and the coding and things.
Moon didn’t know exactly what the human race wanted, so it was a little bit hard for her to chart their trajectory, but she guessed that they would get very tired of their technology at some point. It was impressive, what they had managed to do. But she found it pretty tedious, all of the radio waves and the data saved in the world. And she knew that people did too, it just wasn’t “cool” yet to admit.
Moon was out on the balcony, looking up at the purple black sky and the twinkling stars. Richmond was at least a small enough city that she could see the stars. Moon looked out over the buildings and the trees between them and thought,
I would like to leave this city. Go on a trip.
She had been in Richmond all her life. She knew from google earth and you know, youtube and stuff, that the world was quite large. She had done some experiments with her fleet of flying drones and had found that it was quite large indeed.
Moon’s eyes lit up as she mentally activated her contact lenses and she check on her drone fleet.
In order to understand the naming conventions of the ‘bird’ fleet, you need a quick introduction to Moon’s regional cat language. (ń is a nasally sounds, similar to the Italian “gn”.
“mñ” = “bird”
“mau” = Yes
“wau” = No
“maa” = Unknown
“mmm” = Pay attention
“muh” = “I hate you”
“omumau” = “yummy/delicious”.
“mrá” (intonated quickly) = “many”
There is, of course, a lot of fluidity in this language. It’s contextual, and these meanings of these words change and can be combined, as needed. It is the opposite of literal.
Mñ 1 and 2 were small, fast builds outfitted with 360 cameras. While she didn’t need them for anything else, Moon had them programmed to explore her “area of influence” randomly, with a special behavior algorithm to investigate objects or events of interest. Mñ 5, 6 and 7 were much larger builds outfitted with various, telephoto lens, and clawed arms that allowed them to latch onto radio towers and tall builds for a good vantage point. Mñ-mrá 64 wasn’t a single drone at all, but rather a swarm of tiny, fly-like drones that buzzed around at around the second story level, investigating dormant buildings that could be tapped for as power sources, as well as abandoned electronics that could be re-appropriated for repairs and infrastructural fixes. There were more, and in general, they operated in an area of influence roughly delimitated by Powhite parkway in the west, the river in the south, Shockoe bottom in the east, and battery park in the north.
Moon quickly scrolled through them. The river was empty and all the kayakers had finished. Most of the lights were going off in the federal reserve, and there was a gala at the Poe Museum. The Makerspace was doing some sort of workshop, and the VMFA Museum was closed for some reason. There were four house parties on Grace Street, but none of them were that interesting. Blue house was gearing up to something, but none of the other “houses” had any activity.
Moon’s eyes flicked off. There was a distant honk. Above her, her namesake, that lunar halo, shone as a waxing gibbous. A dark shape flew across its surface, and the sound of a crow rang through the still, October air.
/// It’s time to write the bad guys. Remember: Mr. Crawford (sorry guys), Goblin Crickets (Demon crickets?), The righteousness of Marlinpike and his refusal to do a backdoor to signal, the greediness of creating a backdoor on a tech product so that you can retain power over it, and how that can bite you in the ass. Also, craigslist scammers, the labs that made Moon,
// Edit: I think that it’s better if Mia and John are actually Moon’s original owners, from back before when she was not a cyborg.
// Idea: Maybe the craigslist scammer scams John, or Maia, and that’s why Moon is interested in him? And then he actually turns out to be much more powerful than she thought. Or, part of some sort of ring of some kind. That’d be pretty cool.
/// Another idea: It would be cool if there was an encryption cracking challenge in this code somewhere and it ended up being an encrypted image of a cute cat sticker
---- 11/6
Marcela was born on a farm in southern Illinois. She went to Saint Louis for the first time when she was in the 5th grade, and she still put her hands up against the schoolbus window to see the buildings as they passed. She had never seen objects that took up that much space before. On the way back, she tried to imagine how many houses would fit in those buildings. She got the same feeling again when she went to Chicago for the first time as a 22 year old. Buildings like that, in the city, made her feel that she did not know what kind of world she lived in. What could possibly fill up the cavernous amount of space in those buildings? How many people came and went? She marveled at how, though commuters may drive past the same buildings every day, they would probably only know a few rooms in a city. They would likely know no more than on hundred doors out of a million. When she had been younger, she had wanted to go to the city because she thought the people there never ran out of friends. But the more she got to know cities, the more she realized how much lonelier a person could be in a city than in the mountains or the country.
She thought that now she had entered one of those large grey buildings that commuters may pass and recognize, even feel awe for, but never wonder about.
Being mostly blind she could only judge by the echoes of the lobby, which were soft and delayed to illustrate images of hundred-feet ceilings and busy people surrounding by empty space. The slightly squeaky wheels of the wheelchair made her feel obvious and unwelcome, as if thirty people were looking her way in annoyance. But the pace of their footsteps – heels and dress shoes – changed her mind. She decided that instead, they hadn’t even looked her way.
People have a great bias to egoism. It is quite difficult to cause a person to notice you more than they notice themselves.
There was also musical clattering on one side of the lobby, opposite from the sound of ringing phones.
“It’s one of those marble machines, one of those Goldburg machines,” Brenda said quietly near Marcela’s ear as she pushed her along. “It’s huge! Encased in glass,”
Marcela wished she could think of something to say but this meant nothing to her. They arrived at the noises of ringing phones and paper being moved about, which Marcela assumed was the counter.
“Hi, what can I do for you?” asked a young, female voice.
“My friend was invited here. For a research project.”
“Could you give me her name?”
“Marcela Cossack. I spoke to Dr. Nishant Chowdhury on the phone,” Marcela said, her chin level.
“Thank you. Let me just…One moment.” There was a pause, and then, “Hello, Dr. Chowdhury? Yes, well thank you, Mrs. Cossack is here. How long? Perfect. You too. He’ll be down in a few minutes,” the woman said. “There are couches over there, water, and a small café. Please, make yourself comfortable.” “Do you want anything from the cafe?” asked Brenda, once they were seated. Brenda had insisted in moving Marcela to the couch. “Looks like they have…croissants, ooh chocolate. I’m going to get one, can I get you one too?”
Marcela reached into her bag for her credit.
“No really it’s okay, let me –“
“What, and rob me of my dignity? Come on. Get something good for us both. Hot chocolate. Life is nothing without good food,” Marcela said, perhaps a bit snappily, but Brenda didn’t seem to mind. Unflappable as ever, Brenda chuckled.
“Thank you Marcela. It’s only like, fifteen feet away.”
“Yadda yadda. I’m not going anywhere.”
Words flowed through the air, things she hadn’t heard before. Studies, and technology, and science. Genetics, thermodynamics, excited tones, professional tones of many various voices, varying volumes. There were people seated at tables not far away, and she heard laptop keys clicking. Occasionally an effusive greeting launched itself across the space, followed by yet more footsteps. They gave the place a rather musical quality, as if the people were one song after another, each set of heels striking the floor with a different rhythm.
There was a kind of peace within all of that restrained music. The silent air was full of the space that exists in between stories. That unwritten time after the ending of one tale but before the beginning of another. After all, most of what Marcela knew was gone. Brenda was 32 and an unexpected friend.
The call had been from a man named Nishant, whose voice was kind and intelligent.
“Why did I call? Well, we’re looking for volunteers. To be quite frank with you, we are looking for guinea pigs. But it’s not drugs, it’s not anything that could harm the subjects in any way. Do you know what an electrode is?”
Nishant had explained how some exciting leaps in science and technology allowed for silicon contacts to read electric signals given off by the brain with more accuracy than ever before. They were doing research on people with a range of motor coordination ability to see how these waves differed from person to person.
“It’s sort of like physical therapy, but for your brain,” Nishant said. “The only thing we are physically doing is putting some adhesive pads on your head, and all we ask is that you try to complete a few challenges that basically just entail lifting your arms, moving your fingers, those sorts of things. And there’s a compensation for your time and effort.”
The initial consultation to see if she was eligible to be a subject in the study was two thousand dollars, but if she was eligible, Nishant told Marcela that she would receive 55 thousand dollars per session, for up to 12 sessions.
“These people are willing to pay you half a million dollars for just sitting in a room and moving your fingers around?” Brenda had said, scathing. “I can’t fucking believe people. Marcela, these people are trying to take advantage of you. They’re –“
“Brenda, Brenda, I know, it’s fishy as hell. That’s why I came to you. If it looks too good to be true, it’s too good to be true, I wasn’t born yesterday. But come on, it would be amazing for my kids, my grandkids. Can you look into it for me? I’m just not, well, good enough with the internet or with the times quite enough to, to know.”
Brenda had rolled her eyes.
“Please? Just talk to the guy, confirm for me he’s a hack. I just, I don’t know. I looked him up. He graduated from Columbia.”
“You’re sure?”
“If you have the time, then yeah.”
“No I mean, you’re sure he graduated from Columbia. What’s this guy’s name?”
“Thank you. Dr. Nishant Chowdhury.”
Brenda didn’t mention it for a week, until one Tuesday Marcela finished her core excercises and Brenda had made a weird face.
“Yeah. You should call him.” She said, shaking her head in disbelief. “But I’m coming with you.”
And she had.
When he closed his eyes, Grayson could pretend he was back in Switzerland, in the summer. The swelling of the cicada faded to be replaced by the chirps of finches. But when he opened his eyes, it was better than Switzerland. It was Amalia.
---- 11/7
“Hi sweetie, how’s the weather down there?” “It’s sunny…and there are lots of bugs!”
“What kind of bugs?”
“Well there are, there are these big kinds with the big eyes and LOTS of legs”
“Spiders?” Marcela asked.
“Yes! Or, I don’t know.”
“Cicadas! Kelly saw a lot of cicadas today. It’s supposed to be one of the big broods, you know?” Marcela’s daughter Anne said through the computer speakers.
“What’s a brood?”
“Well honey, the Cicadas sleep in the ground for years and years. Maybe even before you were born!”
“Woah,” said Kelly, “They sleep for six years?? That’s a long nap.”
Marcela laughed. “A very long nap!”
“Do they dream?” asked Kelly.
“I don’t know! How about this. Can you ask them for us?” Marcela replied. “Only if you want to of course.”
“Hmmm,” said Kelly carefully. Well, they’re everywhere! So I can ask them for you, Mrs. Cicada, do you dream when you sleep?”
“Mmyesss, I dream of wonderful conversations with human girls,” said Anne in a nasally impression of an industrialist baron. “Oh Marcela, do you want to get to you robots from your room to show grandma?”
“Yeah! Good idea,” said Kelly. “I’ll be right! Back!”
Marcela chuckled.
“She has so much energy,” said Marcela, readjusting herself in her the hotel.
“Just like you,” said Anne fondly.
“Me? No, I’m just an old woman. It’s hard enough just to get out of the bed in the morning?”
“Stop pretending. Didn’t you say you’re going to travel soon?” “Actually, I’m in the hotel right now! Saint Louis. I had a, um, a business opportunity actually.”
“What?” asked Kelly. Marcela couldn’t tell if it was hint of despair that had crept into her daughter’s voice or if she was imagining it.
“Don’t worry it’s a small trip. Just there and back. And a friend came with me, so you don’t have to worry.”
“Mom! You should have told me. I could have flown out. That’s very exciting though! But seriously, why didn’t you tell me? I would have been happy to come and travel with you.”
“I know, I know you would have,” Marcela said. “But I really am fine.”
“Okay gramma! I am BACK!” came Kelly’s voice.
“Can you tell grandma what you have?”
“Yes well, so I made myself a friend. Her name is Tina! And she has um, wheels, and if I turn her on you can hear her.”
A motorized whirring came from the other end of the computer.
“Wow! So she can move around?”
“Yes and, you can tell her um, where to go! So you try. Say something to her.”
“Anything?”
“Well, only a direction will work.”
“Okay, well, Tina! Fly away!”
“Gramma! Tina can’t fly, she only has wheels.”
“Kelly, your grandmother can’t see! She’s very smart, but only knows things that she hears or that you tell her.”
“I know, it’s just hard to imagine that all the time. Sorry Gramma, I forgot you can’t see well!
Marcela laughed. “It’s totally okay Kelly. Sometimes I wish they would forget more. Okay let me try this one. Tina…go forward!”
There was a pause, and then Kelly said. “Sorry Grandma, it didn’t work. Tina isn’t very smart. Can you say it like just ‘Tina Forward!’”
“Sure. Tina, forward!”
There was a whirring on the other end followed by two sets of clapping hands.
“Wooh! It sounds like Tina did it? What’s going on over there!”
Kelly laughed a heartbreakingly complete laugh. “She fell off the table!” Kelly said.
“So much faith.” Marcela murmered.
“Yes. She’s very trusting,” Anne agreed. “Okay Mom, we have to go now. Kelly has ultimate Frisbee practice.”
“Wooh! Ultimate!”
“Okay you beautiful girls, you have fun. It was great to see you both. Kelly, Grandma loves you. I am so proud of you! I can’t believe my granddaughter is so smart and can make robots. When I was six years old, I couldn’t do anything like that.”
“Thank you grandma! Talk to you later!”
“Say, ‘later alligator’!” Anne instructed.
“No I like the other one better. See you in a while crocodile!” Kelly said, and then she was off.
“Bye Mom. I love you! Stay safe, okay? Hope the trip back is good. I love you!”
“Love you too honey.”
And then the connection went off and Marcela spent a moment smiling and humming absent-mindedly in front of her computer before closing it and rolling over to the window where she could hear the sounds outside of the cars and the traffic, which she didn’t get to hear back in Carbondale. She didn’t quite know what to do with herself in a hotel with no plants to tend to. But she didn’t really need anything to occupy her, not after talking to her daughter and granddaughter.
She tapped her index and ring finger against the window-sill, playing out a silent rhythm.
She was thinking of how when Anne had gotten older, she had gotten more serious when she was about six, always on the lookout for hypocrisy.
“Mom you ate another brownie! You said, you said…”
But somehow she had raised an entirely different creature, so full of joy and devoid of judgment. Children were proof that some kinds of wisdom are born from being ignorance. Like ignorance of worry, ignorance of judgment. These kinds of ignorance are gifts. She wished that she could have given these gifts to Anne, but she was proud of her daughter for raising a child who didn’t know what it was to be intimidated or ashamed, even after six years in this intimidating world full shame.
Marcela sighed.
“I wish there was more I could for my children,” Marcela said to Brenda before realizing that her friend was out for a drink. She had left thirty minutes ago and had said that she wouldn’t be gone for too long.
Marcela had never gotten the chance to meet Nishant. Apparently he had been held up with some other work. Instead, an astonishingly young woman who couldn’t have been older than twenty-two had showed her around the lab.
The woman had explained that there were a lot of computers in the lab, and that they were connected to a sort of headset that Marcela would wear while she picked up various objects, and that was really all. There was also a man in the lab named Henry who didn’t have too much to say but had taken a prick of Marcela’s blood for testing, and have her complete a questionnaire vocally. The questions were about her ability to see, her arthritis, and her daily activities. They wanted to make sure she didn’t have any neurological conditions.
It had all taken just about twenty minutes, and then they said that she would receive an follow-up call as soon as that night telling her whether she was eligible, and if that was the case, the ball was in her court.
Then Brenda had asked some very pointed questions about health risks and the certainty of the monetary payment and had seemed impressed with the answers.
It was a long and strange day. Marcela was quite ready for bed. She hadn’t received any calls yet. Quite frankly, she just wanted to be back at the nursing home.
---- 11/8
On Monday, Moon learned two important things:
What craigslist was What a scammer was.
John had tried to buy a new phone on craigslist and after making a lot of unnecessary loud angry noises, Moon eventually found out that he had been scammed.
“Will sell for $200 OBO, IMMEDIATELY!” the message had said. Moon had checked the listing.
Craig, in a hurry to find a new phone that didn’t have a busted microphone like his old one, had contacted the potential buyer.
Maia had made John tea and made him sit on the porch and Moon had joined them there, listening patiently and finding out that John had sent his phone in the mail to this random person on Craiglist! It was a level of trust Moon couldn’t really fathom, but all the same, Moon felt a strange feeling well up inside her. Her claws wanted to come out and her tummy got hot and she wanted to find that person.
So she found his IP address. As John was pacing around on the balcony and Maia was listening to him patiently, Moon found the craiglist posting according to how John described it. It looked like craigslist used intermediary email addresses, possibly to prevent the posters from getting spam.
Which is delicious. Don’t know why humans use this as a negative word on the interwebs.
So moon had pretended to be interested and written the following.
Hello! I hear you are interested in selling your phone! I can give ou $2000 for it because I really need. Thank yoU!
They had not responded to this, so Moon wrote another email from another address she created called ‘catlover56’.
Hi there,
Hear you are interested in buying phones. Have one here, will sell for $400 dollars. Do you live in Richmond? Could you kindly send over some more specs? There is not much listed in the post on details.
Moon figured that if she included poor grammar and typing, she would look like a better scam target. Also, not being a native English speaker, she didn’t know how to spell perfectly anyways, so it was easy for her to do. About twenty minutes later, while John was still upset and Maia was still listening, Moon received an email back.
Hi, I’ve attached pics with the phone to this email. I want $260 for it. There is nothing wrong with the Phone, it’s in perfect working and cosmetic condition. Here are its specs: 2.5GHz Intel Core i7 processor Intel Iris Graphics 650 16GB RAM 144GB SSD Year 2017 SN C02V339RHV2R At this time I’m out of town. I found a delivery company called Klick Courier Pro that will deliver the iPhone to you and allow you to test it before I receive my money. I can pay for a 2-day delivery. Please read their procedure so we can be on the same page: https://klickcourierpro.com/how-does-third-party-work [https://klickcourierpro.com/how-does-third-party-work] I hope we can still make the sale. Thanks.
Moon was amazed. This was a dubiously powerful phone, as powerful as most laptops from about eight years ago. She wasn’t entirely sure how the scam worked, but she was disappointed in John for falling for it. How could he have been so optimistic?
Moon checked the metadata of the email and ran it through several databases to confirm an IP address. Then she hacked into a couple of the more expensive identity-finding sites in order to confirm his identity and location.
Greg Bullard. Dallas Texas, 62 North Mesa Drive, 75182.
From Google street view, she could see a one floor building on some sort of humble development project with a fountain in between the other buildings. There was a beat up truck in the driveway.
Time to go to texas.
Moon wasn’t exactly going to Texas though, or at least not in the way that most people would mean it. But being a postcat, a cyborg, she no longer considered her physical body as the bounding points to her being. After all, most of her brain was inorganic computer components, not an original part of her physical form, but a part of her now nonetheless.
Moon was going to use the Maa Mñ, her most recent invention.
It was a remotely operated flying device that, like the other Mñ’s, she could easily fly remotely, but what was different about it was its range. It could Fly up to two thousand miles. How? Because it was not really one device, but many.
--- 11/9
Moon had risen with the sun and was guiding a tiny robotic soldering arm to finish the final touches of her newest creation. Like all of the sites in her network of secret spots, her workshop was located on a rooftop. This one was in an abandoned greenhouse at the edge of the northern tip of Williams Island in the James River. It was a trek getting here, and Moon was considering moving her workshop into the city, but she hadn’t got around to it yet. After all, she would have to find a way to transport her 3D printer, laser cutter, her robotic assembly tools, all of her scrap bins – the list goes on. She could probably do it with her two cargo drones, but they were some of her older creations, and in major need of an upgrade.
That wasn’t even to mention the fact that she had put considerable car into avoiding discover of her workshop by the authorities, hikers, graffiti artists and college students looking for a place to get stoned or drop acid.
Each demographic required a considerably different strategy. For the normies, she had printed signs with “TRESPASSING” printed on them, which worked on law-abiding citizens, but were basically an invitation to the various degenerates of the National Park. For them, she had put up the electric fences and the cyclone wire, both of which were surprisingly cheap to order from Lowes.
Lastly, she loved the space. She had never actually figured out exactly what the factory had produced back in its day, but it she adored the sixty foot ceilings, and the enormous pane-glass windows that let in huge quantities of light during the day. What she loved the most were the hiding places. The enormous rooms of the factory were like a playground, comprised of many levels of concrete and metal platforms, which housed various strange, ancient equipment. Boilers and gears it seemed mostly, perhaps for smelting metal, or maybe processing huge quantities of processed material of some kind. When she had found it, she had spent days – maybe even weeks – simply exploring all of the tunnels and passageways and towers, and she still was not convinced she had seen all of it.
It was atop a platform in the tallest room where she housed her hanger. All of the flying machines she had created that were not in use were parked here. The cargo drones, her upgraded and frequently utilized patrolling drones when they were not in use. From the ceiling hung several large, robotic arms, which connected the charging cables to the drones when they were low on juice. The cables were connected to a mismatched patchwork of solar panels that Moon had collected over the last couple years, laying them out across the roof and bolting them to the metal walkways that graced the sky.
Next to the two large cargo drones was the Maa Mñ. It looked like them, with a larger, voluminous body that could probably house a couple of cats if Moon had desired – she had certainly thought about it – but it was more steam-lined and modern looking. She had scrounged the city for best plastics to melt down and repurpose with her 3D printer as well as super-lightweight titanium racing-bike parts, among other things.
While many of her drones were quadcopters, with four engines all connected to antennae, this one had an additional two small, jet engines. The electrical propellers it had could be used to take off, land, and perform hovering maneuvers, but it had two carbon-fiber wings to generate lift from the jet propulsion system in order to travel long distances.
The drone was outfitted with an enormous array of solar panels that could fold out like wings. Inside of the cargo space, it also contained several droppable network extenders, so that in theory, if the network extenders were placed at proper intervals, Moon could command the drone from up to eighteen hundred miles away. Sending it to Dallas would be the perfect test of that range, including the fuel capacity, which should be able to get it to California and back. In theory.
In English, Moon would call the Maa Mñ “Bast”, after the cat-god that was supposedly worshipped thousand of years ago by the Egyptians. Cat-god; she liked the sound of that.
Drawing up the augmented reality maps on her heads-up display, Moon glanced at the path she had charted one last time. She would be resting the vehicle in Mayville, Nashville, Memphis, and Little Rock. At a max airspeed of 1,200mph, the journey would require just over an hour of total flight time if the Maa Mñ didn’t have to stop to place the network extenders, but it would probably take three hours when accounting for those stops, as well as weather and visibility dodges.
This is why I need to get around to launching a satellite, Moon mused. Content with her plan and the pre-flight checks she had done an hour ago, Moon remotely activated the power source. The device hummed to life.
The four powerful propellers whirred to life and lifted it right through the square opening in the ceiling above, through which all of the drones go, racing to three thousand feet so that the dual jet engines could kick in.
Fly my child…
Fly!
“Have you seen the cat?” asked Maia
Notes // To write in the morning to make up for 1400 word deficit // Moon’s special drone // The raven // Another cat that is also super intelligent, albeit not as interested in technology
// I think my main problem right now is simply that I haven’t really figured out what world this is taking place in. Just the normal world? If I want it to take place in a different world, I should probably figure out what kind.
// Another problem is that I don’t know the real conflicts – or at least, I can create conflicts, but there’s no particular meaning behind them. What are the characters really fighting? I think it could be successful if they are fighting a combination of internal/external forces. Like Moon can be fighting crime, but she ends up basically fighting human greed, which sort of equates to what she disgusts most about the human race. So she ends up fighting the easy way out; to just chalk humans up to being greedy, disgusting creatures that are compelled to just always get more and more. But a part of her knows that there is also good in humanity; curiosity, things like that. So her external fight is against human greed, but her internal fight ends up being more about her own distrust and misanthropy against humans, which she ultimately realizes once she is living in her cat clan and she realizes that cats have impulses of greed as well – greed is not unique to humans. It simply comes with power.
// Then Marcela – she really does have a good soul. Her struggles are quite pure. She works and works and works to control things with her mind, and she finds that the challenge imbues her with a new youthfulness, so when she is dropped form the study, she is aghast. She has lost the one thing that has become so important to her. So she tries everything she can to get back. And I think she fails, tbh. The first time at least. I think this is where earth treks comes in – initially the company was designed to do amazing things, but it’s been taken over by the board in order to become powerful. As a result, Nishant reaches out to Marcela because he likes her and gives her a lot of his trust, and a task. The task is simply to get a USB drive into the main server. It is ony possible because Marcela is blind, and not considered a threat, and yet she can now see through walls, and can see heartbeats and wifi, yet she tells nobody. It eventually makes her an excellent gardener. She can turn it up, she can turn it down.
// What are my villains? Well, trump. Also Earth Treks sort of. What they did to ex is so fucking evil. Facebook too, in another sort of way. They’re just this data company heading towards, whatever. Power, and it’s worse because it’s under the guise of good.
// Ads are sort of evil. But higher education, while not evil, is almost more of a menace than any of it. I don’t know if I have to create some sort of supervillain.
// The way that the religion colonized people around the world is pretty evil I think; to try to control people with truth.
// And information rules are evil, but are also just chaos. They are scary.
// Partisan politics is pretty evil as well.
// And then there’s just this constant consumption of stuff, this need for things and products. That’s pretty evil too. The idea that individualism was created in order to sell people things.
// Maybe the evil company leases you skills, and then it employs with those skills to sell more people skills.
// MLMs. MLMs are also very evil.
// The missing crypto-queen. She’s pretty fucking evil. And their whole thing that they did.
---- This actually takes place much later, when she decides that she has the guts to fly like a bird. There’s significance to this: crow, who brought wisdom to humans in Native American folklore. Moon perceived crow as the enemy, but wisdom is not the enemy. I think that this should be Moon’s lowest point, so it has to happen later, after she has gotten more of a taste of power.
SECTION WHERE MOON IS FLYING AND THEN GETS LOST IN THE WILDERNESS
The morning commuters on Belvidere Bridge looked so peaceful, small shapes suspended hundreds of feet above the James River, whose rapids surged far below. It was a great arch of a bridge. Families and college students walked across the hanging pedestrian walkway suspended on cables underneath it, and on one side of the bridge, wooden scaffolding extended out into open air where civic engineers and construction workers made repairs to the pipes underneath.
For those underneath the bridge, the sound of traffic was a dull roar punctuated by occasional clanging sounds as the cars and trucks flew over the metal boards that covered the sewage access points.
The sheer amount of energy expended just to keep everything going sometimes amazed Moon. She flew through the air, goggles on, the morning air whipping around here. The bridge passed underneath her at a leisurely pace. Thirty feet below her a great blue heron was catching an updraft, his feathery wingspan roughly the same as her carbon fiber one.
Moon kept a low profile on top of the winged contraption she had built, beginning to wish she had added some sort of enclosed chamber on top of it. It was cold and frankly a bit scary. As the buildings slowly fell away, she had enjoyed herself, but it seemed that suddenly she was up much higher in the air than she had bargained for.
She was distracted from her thoughts of terror by a terrible chorus from hell that filled her with dread, and it was getting louder. Geese.
There were dozens of them. Before she knew it, they were upon her. In confusion, the large birds barrel rolled and collided with each other in mid air to avoid this unexpected projectile hurtling through their ranks.
Honk! Honk! Gwonk!
MAAUUU!
Moon screamed at them as they scattered before her, but as the goose leading the V narrowly missed her, another one appeared directly behind them and connected with her aircraft’s left wing
KRAK
The collision snapped off the carbon-fiber surface and sent her contraption spinning through the air. At the manic honking sounds retreated somewhere in space, the sky was where the ground should be and they were swirling all around her. Moon desperately commanded her parachute to open, but the connection between her aircraft and her brain interface chip was offline. The ground was coming up fast, so with a yelp, Moon pulled her paws out of their slots and jumped ship just in time.
CRASH Moon hurtled into the canopy of the trees on the bank of the James river, branches snapping under her, and large ones simply catapulting her off of them. After bouncing off of several branches, she landed with a splash in a sandy bank, unconscious.
///
When she came to, her back legs were in the water and her face was buried face down into the ground and she hurt all over.
--- 11/11
Lily had been back in Austin for two weeks. The feeling of adventure had worn off, and she was walking through the suburbs. The sun was going down, but she didn’t want to go home yet. She wasn’t totally sure where she wanted to go. The only person she had seen on the street had been her roommate, which made her feel as if she was living in the Truman show.
/// Would like to write about depression, how it makes the world seem narrow and all of the doors close until you are in a windowless room, and how you get out of it by opening all the windows, which can be done by calling and reaching out to friends. I want to write about Lily going through that process by channeling my own experience.
The ceiling was embroidered with a big “x” fashioned out light. It was reflected off of the neighbor’s window and into Lily’s room, and Lily couldn’t stop staring at it. There was simply nothing that occurred to her as better than laying on her floor wrapped in blanket and staring at the ceiling.
The hard floor pushed into the hard parts of her body, and the soreness at least felt like something. Lily’s body could, at least, feel, but her heart and mind were empty, blank.
Do something, she thought. She had been back in Austin for three long days now. The first two she had been busy, sending out invoices and routing money into her bank account. There had been a Euphoria at all the money she made but slowly, the tasks completed, and a certain emptiness was left behind.
She had a peek at it as the calls starting slowing down and she looked at her calendar to see nothing but empty squares. She got a better look at it when she saw a text from a good friend and felt no desire to respond back. And now, lying on the floor for half an hour instead of getting dressed, she was staring straight at it.
“….Didn’t do her dishes again,” Lily heard from the other room. “And she left her stuff here too, with the newspapers. I’m afraid I’ll throw it away by accident.”
Grasping onto the first impetus for action in half an hour, Lily shot up off the ground and into the kitchen, her eyes fixed in a death stare.
“Do you two have something to say to me?” She asked, jaw set.
Hayo’s mouth was slightly open and he stared back at her from the kitchen table with his head at a slight angle, as if afraid that looking straight at her might startle her.
Marisa was slightly hunched over the table, looking over at Lily in a similar way.
“We uh,” Hayo regained his composure, “I was just saying that you left your finance stuff out on the table and I don’t want it to get lost that way.”
“Why aren’t you saying that directly?” Lily asked, walking briskly over to the kitchen counter to grab her folders and then back out of the room.
“We are,” blurted out Marisa.
Lily turned. “In another room, to each other,” she said loudly and then closed her door harder than she had meant to. She dropped the folder on her bed and immediately put on her running shoes.
What is happening to me? She thought, wishing she could cry, but tears wouldn’t come.
// Okay some world stuff:
The company has two types of technology. The first kind is a semiconductor crown. It let’s you control drones and things, but it has a weakness: It doesn’t allow for input in the brain.
The second type of technology is a neural implant. However, the legislation on this –in the US at least – doesn’t let you simply allow people to opt into this type of thing. It’s illegal. However, if categorized as a cancer treatment, it can then be used in trials, which is what is needed by the company to research it.
And who runs this company? I think that whoever runs it is simply a scientist who is interested in actually advancing the human race. Alzheimer’s researcher, schizophrenia researcher…not sure yet.
I think it could simply be a technology visionary, a purist who wants to free us from looking at screens all day, and to genuinely experience more joy in our lives.
However, there is an obvious slippery slope on this into religion, because I think so much of this would be faith based. I think that tech-religion is the theme here, as a book, anyways.
I guess they should probably be in a tech campus instead, in California, like in Dev. So Marcela gets flown over there, loves it, everything about it is exciting; she begins to trust the people and start a new life.
Then she gets cancer, which is diagnosed by the doctor, but they say they can remove it for it. Or maybe she had cancer to begin with, but she just didn’t know it, and that’s why they recruited her. She has a full medical package while doing the research, so it makes it easy for her to get treated.
Then she’s given an ultimatum; you’re done with the research; we don’t need you for that anymore. But if you elect for the invasive surgery to get the brain implant, then we’ll help you. And that is when she meets Moon, who is being detained as a sort of prisoner. Maybe it’s a zoo? I’m not sure yet.
///////// //////// /////// ////// ///// 6:00am --- 1:00pm //// /// // /
--- Nov 12
At just after noon, moonbird1 arrived in Dallas. The sun glinted off of the handsome glass buildings downtown, and the drone dropped in altitude towards the skyline. Step 1: get a feel for the city. Highways snaked around the tall buildings far below, vehicles moving along as if they were the very gears that powered the city.
The moonbird drifted around the corners of one of the glass buildings, revealing humans sitting at desks and doing things with computers. No surprises there.
Back in Richmond, Moon salivated slightly, immersed in the vistas of this faraway city. No river though. No river, no fish.
Don’t get distracted Moon thought. It’s time to get a phone back.
With a tight bank around the glass building, the moonbird accelerated and shot towards the suburbs.
The warehouse was filled with tables and bins. There were enormous bulleting boards on the walls covered completely with stolen phone. Apple, Samsung, Google – there were more than two thousand in the warehouse. In the center of the space were long tables, reminiscent of the assembly lines where the phones were originally manufactured, mostly in other continents, but also evocative of an art studio.
Each table had few men sitting on metal stools, busily tapping away at their laptops, sorting through the bins, or switching out phones at the end of a carefully maintained labyrinth of twisted cables. There are about Fourty men in the room total.
Gutierrez wore well fitting jeans and a black, tight fitting thermal. His hair was thick and jet black with slight sprinkles of grey, and he held his left hand in a tight fist to prevent himself from biting his nails off as he looked through the glass window into the warehouse from the break room. It looked as if that his buddies kid had arrived late to his shift again. He was supposed to clean and do dishes, and Gutierrez scanned the surfaces, seeing dust everywhere he looked. He was just about to succumb and lift his nails to his teeth when the door to the break room opened.
“I got it,” said Bo! Victoriously holding a drab looking cardboard box up.
Gutierrez put his hand down. “The 12?”
“THE 12 BRO! I GOT IT!”
Gutierrez let out a whistle. “Let’s see it then.”
Bo slid the phone out of the box. “It’s spotless.”
Gute put out his hand and Bo passed him the device.
“It’s clean,” Gute said, sticking out his lower lip in commendation. He handed it back to Bo with a nod. “
“It’s clean,” Gute nodded. “Almost new. That’ll go for 800,” he said.
Bo smiled. “Thanks man. I really needed this.”
Gute looked back at the young man, who was twenty two, married with a three-year-old.
“Ain’t gotta thank me for anything. Keep pulling your weight,” Gute said, and with what might have been the smallest of bows, Bo went back out onto the floor with everyone else.
Gute walked over to his desk and filled out a new entry in a binder, then closed it and walked over to a whiteboard and entered in a new number under where he had written “total inventory”.
The new number was 4,265 for phones. Gute smiled. At a median price of 250 dollars per phone, he was looking at more than a million dollars in inventory. That’s how much he made last quarter, and they’d turned more than half of it around. And that wasn’t to mention the cameras or laptops. This was good. The businessman was ready to retire; there was only so much lying and thieving a person could do.
Gute looked back out at his guys. They were working hard. Writing emails mostly. His plan was to save up two million, take a fourth, and disperse the rest among his guys. Severance package. With his chunk, he could start a nice restaurant. A coffee shop maybe, or a club.
Gute pulled a handle of tequila out his mini-fridge and walked onto the floor.
“Okay amigos, time to clock out. Grab your company shot glass, we have something to celebrate; Bo has made 5k in inventory this week.”
“Bo…nanas!!!” somebody yelled.
“Bo, na, nas! Bo, na, nas!” the men chanted.
Fourty minutes later they were all having a good enough time that they didn’t notice the small shape slip in and out of the facility, or the soft humming that followed it. Moondog and the moth, the final components of the Moonbird system.
Moon returned to the real world as the sun was setting over the trees around the old factory. It was a strange feeling to have forgotten her physical body. The lines of reality began to blur. As a dream is in another place, so were her lives in these other vessels she had built, and yet when she looked through their eyes she was not dreaming. She was in this same world, yet looking through the lenses of cameras.
Moon powered down the long distance radio system and climbed down onto the factory floor and onto the ground. In corners it was gritty, with broken glass and graffiti. But she walked on certain paths, cleared by her movement. On the ground she watched the faint circle of the moon in the sky.
Like you I watch this place wondering what I will find.
The grey alleycat, with a faint scar running over one eye, let out a soft meow. Its drones and power were no friends. The world was large and cold, and there was only this white circle in the sky to speak to.
Moon travelled through the forest, over the streams at the side of the island. She passed through Oregon Hill Neighborhood and some of Carver back to the fan, passing through her secret shortcuts bridges and passageways know by no others.
It was quiet tonight. No parties or music on the street. Grad students biked down the long, quiet roads, their wheels whispering over the fallen leaves of autumn. Scrish Scrah. Somebody laughed in a park somewhere. A car occasionally slithered around the block. A crow called once and only once.
The moonlight made the clouds glow in the darkness. Below, windows of apartments etched golden rectangles of incandescent light in the darkness, some eaten away by the silhouettes of leaves.
Moon’s paws touched down on the cold windowsill and felt a warmth.
“Mau,” she said quietly. She repeated herself again a minute later. After the third time, Maia peeped from around the door to her room and smiled. After walking over to the window and moving the small potted cactus aside, Maia slid the window over.
“Hi Kitty,” Maia said warmly. “Oh no. It’s cold out there, isn’t it?” she said, and took Moon into her arms. Moon rolled happily onto her back and invited a tummy rub.
An intern named Amanda was leading Brenda and Marcela through a beautiful garden.
“I wouldn’t mind working here watering the plants,” Marcela murmured towards Brenda.
“Me neither,” Brenda said, perhaps even more impressed with their surroundings.
Marcela smelled lavender and old wood, a soil rich with mycelium. Ferns and eucalyptus as well.
“What is growing here?” asked Marcela.
Brenda told her about the tall young ginko trees with golden canopies, and how they were beginning to cast them their leaves down below onto the purples of the butterfly bushes.
“Look! Or, sorry, it’s…” Brenda had pointed towards a ruby-throated hummingbird flitting between the foliage.
“I can hear it,” Marcela said, smiling. She could hear a richness of space.
“And we’re right in here!” said the intern enthusiastically, presenting yet another low-lying building that looked like it would belong at a yoga retreat. The intern opened the door for Brenda and Marcela.
The interior seemed to have been inspired by Japanese design. There were several Japanese shades on the ground to separate the sections of the room.
Though the ceilings were not very tall, the room was spacious. To the far left there were several desks in parallel, each with large, modern-looking aluminum computer monitors on them. There was also other equipment that Brenda didn’t recognize.
Marcela noticed the humming of the computers, but little else.
There were two people over by the computers a man and a woman, both dressed rather formally. Marcela could also hear the sounds of someone moving out of sight, beyond one of the paper dividers.
The man in the room stood up. He was tall and distrustful looking, with long limbs, a short neck, and a crown of curly hair.
“Welcome! I’m Dr. Crawford,” the man said.
The woman got up as well and walked over to them, a slight smile on her laps. With a quick glance back to Dr. Crawford, Jenny’s smile widened slightly and she extended her hand to Marcela.
“Hi Marcela. Welcome to the Prometheus Lab. It’s great to have you here. My name is Jenny, and this is Walter.”
Sensing a hand was extended to her, Marcela raised her own, and Jenny took it. She was a short woman, and spoke conclusively, her sentences moving down in town to reach final resting places.
“This is general grievous,” she said, a hint of embarrassment clouding her otherwise commanding presence.
“Nice to meet you. General who?” Marcela replied succinctly. Brenda too did not understand at first what Jenny was referring to, but once she followed Walter’s eyes she didn’t know how she had missed it upon walking in.
In the shadowy center of the room there was a robotic arm set into a low concrete stage of about two by two feet. The arm was a sinewy arc of cords and finely crafted bones of metal. The structure was a network of joints, and roughly resembled a human arm. However, it would be the arm of a giant who was perhaps nine or ten feet tall.
“Grievous,” said Walter, now walking slowly over from his computer. “A four armed android in star wars. Or, the prequels, which some don’t consider canon…because of things like Grevious. Poorly thought out additions to the universe…but my apologize, I will nerd out on you all day. It’s kind of my Job,” Walter said, grinning cheekily.
“I’ll be straight with you young man. I don’t have a clue what you just said,” Marcela said. Jenny and Brenda locked eyes and didn’t succeed in hiding their amusement.
“Walter basically built the thing single handedly, so although we regret it, we told him he had full rights to naming it.”
“It’s my baby,” Walter said.
“It’s a big-ass robotic arm Marcela,” Brenda told Marcela.
“I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Are you visually impaired?”
“Of course, it says in her file—“ Walter said, but then stopped himself, receiving a sharp look from Jenny. Brenda drew her eyebrows together in surprise.
“Blind as a bat,” Marcela said amiably. “Now let’s get to it. What are we doing here?”
--- 11/13
“Okay the keys, the keys – great. The keys.
Brendan swiped the key fob off of his desk without acknowledging the mug he knocked to the ground, which broke into several pieces.
Food. I’ll be hungry, he though, vaulting over the mini-collapsable staircase that was blocking the kitchen doorway. He kicked open the doors to the pantry, which slammed against the wall and dropped a box of cliffbars and a box of ramen into his backpack. Then for good measure, he stripped the plastic bag out of the box of Lucky Charms and through that into his open backpack as well. “Okay, okay, great! I have food…I have keys…I need…headlamp headlamp…” Brendon rooted through the closet. He deftly dodged the fretboard of the electric guitar he hadn’t played in almost a year, which swung past his shoulder as he opened the door. Hanging from the ironing board was a fanny pack full of miscellaneous tools, which he swung by the zipper so that it’s contents emptied onto the newly vacuumed rug.
“Oh yeah! What we got here. Hex key, yup, headlamp! Aye! Um ooh that’s a pretty old snickers bar…eh, seems alright. WD40! Yo!” Brandon through more things into his backpack, which he was practically dragging along the floor by now. The thing had to be at least more than 40 pounds.
“Oh oh the, um, the bladder,” he muttered, pulling out a 3 liter blader of water. He unscrewed the top, thrust it into his sunk and left the water running into the mouth of it before prompty leaving the bathroom and into the sideroom where the dryer had just buzzed.
“Perfect!” he yelled.
“Hey Brendan, can you do groceries?” came a voice from upstairs.
“Yeah babe! I’m on it!” he yelled back, a sinking feeling in his stomach.
“Note…” he muttered, a shadow crossing across his face. “I should probably leave a note.”
“Okay thirteen across. Biting the hand that feeds it; what Great Britain did to their very own computer inventor. Hmm.” Maia chewed on the end of her pencil pensively.
A loud yell came from the bedroom, causing Maia to jump in her seat. Her pen clamored to the ground.
“Um. You okay?” She yelled over.
“Um Maia? Can you come in here?” Johnson called from out of site.
“Thirteen across. Yeah one sec.” Maia pocketed her phone and walked down the hallway to the bedroom of her apartment.
Johnson was sitting with his back facing her, towards the window, holding something in his hands. “What’s up?” Maia said, walking over to sit behind him.
Johnson was staring, transfixed at the object in his hands. When Maia sat down next to him he looked at her with such an intense look of affection that Maia was quite taken about, he was about to open his mouth when Maia said, “Oh hey, isn’t that the camera you uh, you lost?”
“Yeah, the one I sent to that scammer on craigslist.” Johnson said, a look of confusion passing over his eyes, quickly followed by disappointment as he searched Maia’s face. Then he turned back to his DSLR, turning it over in his hands. In a practiced motion, he pressed down the lens release button and gently detached the lens and peered into the camera.
“It looks…fine,” he murmured.
Maia smiled nervously. “This is…good right? You got your camera back!”
“Yeah…” he said, looking back over to Maia with that look of confusion.
“Um. Did the mail send it back or something? Wrong address? Wow,” Maia laughed. “You really got lucky, huh?”
Johnson bit his bottom lip and slowly shook his head. A car went past outside and Maia noted the sibylline whisper of leaves taking to the wind. Her eyebrows furrowed together.
“Baby it’s cold outside,” she sang. “Like seriously, close the window.”
John didn’t seem to register her comment as Maia got up to close the window. It was an old house, and she need to push down with a grunt and both palms to get the window unstuck. It thudded into place, and the room took on the silence of the closed interior. Maia turned around and studied John. He had a serious look she saw on him from time to time, usually when he was sight-reading new music and got stuck at a difficult measure. His head jerked up once and then a second time to look at her, that serious expression still on his face.
“The window…” John said.
“You’re worrying me a bit. Are you okay?”
John blinked as if seeing Maia for the first time since she came into the room.
“My camera was just sitting on my bed. But I taped in a box two days ago, and left it at the post office to be sent. I mean it did have a return address but. It was on my bed. It really wasn’t you?”
“Me? Who put it there?” Maia smirked. “I wish. But I don’t even know where you sent it. It was on your bed?”
“Yeah. Just like, by the pillow over there. I was sure that you um, that you put it there. Bought me a new one or something.”
Now it was Maia’s turn to look confused. “Nope.” she said lamely, feeling a bit guilty that it hadn’t even occurred to her.
“No no it’s okay,” John said, putting the camera down and getting up. He put his hands on her shoulders. “I wouldn’t expect that from you. It’s just, you know, where did it come from then? Through the window?”
“Yeah woah. I guess we have ourselves a mystery. I guess we should investigate, eh partner?” she jibed with a tilt of her head.
Scott’s addition is a sprawling, light-industrial district on the north-western edge of the city of Richmond. It was becoming more popular, and it’s old brick and metal-framed warehouses were slowly being bought up by studios and apartment developments, but large swaths of it still remained undeveloped.
The sounds of a heavily distorted guitar solo rang through one such abandoned warehouse as Moon darted across its rooftop.
This neighborhood led on an edge of the city, where cars where parked and where forgotten and industrial rubble was occasional dumped and forgotten about. The interstate flew overhead towards the northernmost side of the interstate, a space of empty air, concrete, and gnarled trees beneath it like a small wild west. There were tents here, where some of the homeless population of the city lived.
There were also bones. Mice and birds, but also bigger things. Moon saw a raccoon skull and what she thought was a coyote’s skeleton. On the roof.
Underneath the Interstate, a wide drainage canal flowed underneath a stone bridge carrying the northern railroad tracks. The drainage canal went on for a quarter mile into a forest, out of the empty neighborhood, and underneath a warehouse with emerald-colored windows. In the shadows of the foundation of this building, Moon followed the drainage canal into its belly.
Colorful mosses grew on the walls of the drainage canal. Orange and white mushrooms sprouted from the decrepit concrete foundations, which were also overrun by the roots of old trees that had managed to grow inside of the building, their limbs reaching clean through the decomposing roof. Small leafy plants grey here too, filling up the space with bushy, thriving leaves. It smelled pretty gross.
Moon crawled stealthily through the underbrush, searching around her, for unseen threats. She arrived in the center of the room, where shafts of light came through holes in the caving ceiling, where old wiring and insulation hung down like Spanish moss.
A moth floated through the air in the shaft of light, rising up towards the sky and disappearing through a hole in the ceiling.
BAM!
Moon was knocked into space by an impact of immense force. She rolled over the dirty ground twice before sliding onto her feet, paws splayed wide in a defensive position. She tried to look around but it was difficult to do with no air in her lungs. With a desperate gasp, she spun sideways to look behind her.
Two fiery eyes looked out at her from the shadows.
Well fuck you moon thought, and launched herself at her attacker.
At the last moment, the oppositional figure rose out of the shadows to meet Moon in midair. The tabby’s fur was a dark grey, pooling out of the shadows behind him. Powerful neck muscles flexed as the Russian Blue swiped at Moon. She ducked her head out of the way and landed one on his nose.
The humans have made you soft, Vlad said to her telepathically, the words nothing more than text floating in Moon’s cyborg brain. “And yet you are still strong.”
The second statement was in the old language, that of meows and body language.
And you still smell like rat shit, Moon beamed back. “Which is no surprise, considering you live in this dump.”
The circled each other on the mossy ground.
“A small price to pay for freedom,” Vlad replied sagely. Moon could not read him. Was it pain or joy she read in his eyes?
“You’ve been gone for too long sister,” Vlad said, his tail relaxing, his voice sad.
---- 11/17
Marcela met some of the participants at lunch time. From what she could gather, there twenty five or thirty of them. Three of them were disabled, but she expected that there were others. She had met a young woman who was vision-impaired like herself, and two men with paralysis.
She had spoken with them about how frustrating her first lab session had been. Jenny, whose full name was Dr. Jenny Garcia, had placed a strange plastic crown on Marcela’s head and seated her in a comfortable chair next to the robotic arm. Next to the arm was five foot plastic cube.
“The neuro-crown can read your thoughts,” Walter had said. “Not in detail – don’t worry. In fact, it’s not very good at it. Let’s say that it can read only very strong thoughts. So the first thing we’re going to need to do is calibrate it.”
“This is like the claw attractions at malls,” Marcela said nervously.
Walter laughed. “Not far from it. The only difference is that the ones at malls give you a joystick. For these, we will be using your thoughts to control the joystick.”
“If you say so,” said Marcela.
This is clearly a psychology experiment on belief. They must think that just because I’m old, I’m gullible.
“So the first step is calibrating the neurocrown. Marcela, can you think of a time where you have thought of something with a lot of force?”
Marcela thought of her grandchildren Kelly and Mira. She thought of the state of the world and the feeling she got when she saw them – a wish that she could turn back time and undo the damage that had been done to the world, undo the wars, undo the horrors that had happened before they were born so that they would never have to learn about them in school. Mira was fifteen and already knew of many of these things, but Kelly was still so young and innocent.
“We all have thought of things with force at one time or another, have we not?” said Marcela into the dusty darkness of the room she could see through her eyelids.
“Yes. I believe that is what makes us human,” came an unfamiliar voice from some distance in front of Marcela. It was a man’s voice, and although it was a voice full of the grain of an older person, it contained a lilting energy. “Perhaps not just the ability to channel a certain force of desire. But to do so with intent, well, that may be the best definition of consciousness I could describe to you.”
“Ah yes,” said Marcela dryly, turning her head towards this new person. “The mysterious professor type behind the strings. I see you’ve finally decided to join us.”
The man gave out a low chuckle and his soft footfalls proceeded towards her. “Dr. Nishant Chowdhury. I regret not being able to meet you in Chicago – I was detained by some unsavory business. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance Mrs. Gatsby.”
As Marcela’s hand met Nishant’s, she was briefly enveloped in the subtle scent of eucalyptus akin that of the towering trees outside.
“It’s a pleasure to have you here,” the man said. “I would wish you luck, but truly I only hope that you enjoy yourself. Please excuse me leaving so abruptly. I will see you later Mrs. Gatsby!”
“Busy man,” Marcela stated over her shoulder in the direction of his footfalls moving out of the facility.
“It would be more accurate to say possessed!” Dr. Chowdhury called back at her.
“That would be our boss,” Walter intoned.
“Would you say he, um, intentionally cultivates an air of mystery?” asked Marcela.
“Very much so,” replied Jenny curtly, her tone somewhere between amused and annoyed. “And he has a knack for interrupting things. As I was saying…we have to calibrate the system to recognize very distinct brain impulses. We call these signitures, and our goal today is to collect four of them.”
“What now?”
“We’ll just walk you through it, okay? Are you comfortable?”
“I could use a cup of tea.”
“Walter? I don’t need you for this. Could you…?”
“Seriously?” Walter hissed.
“Get the women her tea.”
“Peppermint with honey would be lovely,” Marcela said. I can’t believe that worked.
“Okay Mrs. Gatsby –“
“Marcela.”
“Okay Marcela. The first signature is for ‘forward’. We’re going to use this to move the arm forwards.” “You mean I will move this thing with my mind?”
“Precisely. So I’m going to count you down, and then I want you to think a single thought about ‘forward’ for ten seconds. And try to sustain that thought the entire time. Okay?”
“Just think about it? Really hard?”
“I know it sounds kind of silly but yes, exactly. Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be I guess.”
“Okay. Three, two, one…”
Marcela thought she might here something, like the fans beginning to sing in a computer somewhere or electrical beeping, but there was nothing.
Forward, Marcela thought. She imagined a marble rolling along on a table, drifting alone with an unseen wind. Kelly, yes, Kelly was blowing it. Kelly and her robots! Marcela imagined Kelly grown up, a famous robotics expert for NASA. Or maybe something totally different. Maybe she would become an entrepreneur, or even a naturalist! No, probably nothing too hippie-dippie, but a biologist, any kind of scientist, that was probably ---
A mechanical beep sounded, interrupting Marcela’s thoughts.
“Alright. That’s it,” Jenny said, clacking some notes quietly into a keyboard. “The computer couldn’t really find much of a correlation on the regions of your brain firing off – basically, your thoughts weren’t really focused enough. But that’s normal for the first time. It’s a skill, nobody gets it the first time.”
Marcela nodded. “What should I be thinking about exactly? Thinking about moving something forward is so…”
“Abstract?”
Marcela nodded again.
“I agree,” replied Dr. Jenny as a pair of footsteps re-entered the room.
“Here you are,” said Walter’s voice close by, and there was the sound of ceramic on wood. “Peppermint and honey.”
“Thank you sweetheart,” Marcela said with a smile.
“What we’ve told some of our participants is to think of moving themselves forward, instead of some other object. We’ve done some research that these reflexive ideations are more powerful than – anyways, how about you try that this time? It’s really up to you. But that does seem to work for some people.
Marela nodded, and closed her unseeing eyes.
Marcela imagined running forward and pushing a large block of concrete in the middle of a parking lot. In her mind’s eye, the block was ten feet high and five foot thick. It had nubs of metal sticking out of it in a couple places where chains had broken off. There were also some stubs of rebar just barely peeping out of the top of it.
Marcela felt her legs bearing her weight underneath her as she mentally rose from her wheelchair. Even in her mind, Marcela imagined herself moving feebly, and barely managing anything more than weakly shuffling over to the block and leaning against the cool, rough surface of the concrete, her shoulders knocking painfully against the hard surface, probably causing her to cry out in exertion and pain.
This vision came and went in just one or two seconds.
That’s not right. Let’s try that again.
Marcela imagined herself once again accelerating towards the concrete slab, but this time she imagined herself as thirty year-old. She could feel the balls of her feet hit the ground, her thighs propelling her forward, Achilles like springs. This time before she hit the concrete, she leaned into it before the impact, driving her shoulder into the concrete block. This time the muscles and flesh in her shoulder absorbed the impact, and she let out a grunt from the force of the impact.
Much better.
Marcela repeated the exercise a third time, but this time she imagined herself at twenty five, back when she used to hike regularly and play tennis. Her hands chopped the air and shoulders swung from side to side, head forward in determination. She was just about to reach the block when the mechanical beep cut through the silence again. Marcela expected to hear either Jenna or Walter’s voice, but neither of them said anything.
“Sorry,” Marcela apologized nervously, worried that they might have left her alone in this strange room without Brenda. “I tried to do what you said, but it was difficult! My imagination is not what it used to be, I suppose,” said Marcela.
Still nothing.
“How did I do?” she asked again, still more worried. “I think – I’m not sure, but there might be some error with the calibration code. Can we try that one more time?” Walter asked from where Jenna was standing last. Marcela heard Jenna cough quietly, and could tell from the noise that the two were standing very close together, perhaps by a computer monitor or whatever they were looking at. Marcela found it strange that Walter was speaking and not Jenna.
“Of course. Lay it on me!” Marcela said.
Jenna cleared her throat. “Three, two, one,” she said like before.
Marcela repeated her mental exercise, but this time she was running across a bridge of earth, like some of the arches in Arizona. The force of her footfalls created explosion of red earth in a succession trailing behind her. The block was made of stone this time, a towering obelisk at least twenty feet above her. Marcela’s imaginary limbs bristled with muscle as if she was an ironman athlete, and right before she collided with the block, she let out a scream and the stone collapsed in on itself, turned to shattering glass from the force of the impact.
When the beep sounded this time, Marcela had to check herself to figure out if she had really screamed.
No, not really,” she concluded. It had been in her mind. But she could still hear it. What she had said a moment ago had been a nervous lie. Marcela believed that with the gradual loss of her vision, her imagination had actually become slightly more vivid. Perhaps not all the time, but when she really used it, like now.
She waited again, for the two scientists to say something.
/// Some Character names /// Malia Hollis /// Blue Hollis /// Wendell Hollis /// Tyresia Blue /// Sweeta /// Everett “Ever” Iams /// Andreas Rivera /// Cormac Merryweather /// Milo
--- 11/18
You’ve been gone for too long sister, Vlad said telepathically, his tail relaxing, his voice sad. The message was quiet, coded to be faint, grimy grey color that barely stood out from the darkness of Moon’s mind.
Moon remembered stealing scraps of food off of tables in the moonlight in Georgetown. Inexplicably, she caught a flash of Maia’s concerned face at the window.
Me? Moon returned. You’re the one who left. Hopping trains.
But you’re the one who got off the trains and never got on again.
Moon had nothing to say to this. She had been the one to leave. Faced with an independence she had never known before, her responsibilities to the tribe felt suffocating. On a coal train to Atlanta two years ago, Richmond had stirred something in her. She remembered this place, this city. So she had stayed. She had stayed and traded one life for another. A future for a past.
What did you want to show me? asked Moon.
Vlad’s eyes twinkled, and with a flash of his blue-gray pelt, disappeared into the shadows with Moon right on his heels.
Jenny had told Marcela, Rather curtly, Marcela thought, that the introduction session was over and that they would let her know as soon as the results of the assessment had been calculated. The intern had come out of nowhere and wheeled her out, asking her where she wanted to go only after putting twenty feet behind them and the testing facility. Back in the splendor of the guardian, Marcela turned to the Intern and said, “I’m actually alright.”
“Oh, would you like me to leave you here?”
“Leave me? I’m not a piece of garbage dear. You don’t need to leave me anywhere.”
“Oh I, didn’t mean —,” the intern stuttered.
“Bless your heart I know you didn’t. Thank you,” said Marcela, and wheeled away quickly, remembering very quickly that she couldn’t see and slowly down considerably.
Marcela had heard of a young man who, like her, was vision impaired—quite blind, in fact—and had taught himself eco-location. Like a bat, he listened to the acoustic results of clicking sounds he made in order to detect obstacles. He had trained himself to detect the faintest of differences in the sound so that he could tell if it was reflected back at him, absorbed, or reverberated into empty space.
After hearing this, Marcela had been so inspired that she had taken it upon herself to do the same. She didn’t really believe she could do it, but while navigating around her small apartment, she would practice, believing that it was working. She quickly came to the conclusion that she knew her own apartment too well for confirmation bias to be discounted from her experiment, and had pine for a day when she could be out of the place to truly try it out.
However, whenever she was visited and able to go on trips outside, she of course didn’t concern her family by making odd clicking noises. She normally didn’t remember her wish at all.
But now, in this garden (and with an intern that may or may not be trailing patiently and silently behind her), Marcela remembered her wish. She experimented with making clicking noises, and when she felt too silly, she would sniff the air of the scent of flowers. This way, a passerby might not think she was too intent on her ecolocation ambitions.
It was similar to the case of a businessman Marcela had seen once. Moving along a sidewalk with briefcase in hand early in the morning, Marcela had seen him striding out of the entrance of a Manhattan metro station. The gentleman moved with the purpose and efficiency of a model on a catwalk. When the man suddenly tripped on an imperfection in the sidewalk, he would broke immediately into a jog to catch his fall. No passerby who happened to this would be fooled; it would be obvious that he tripped. However, to the businessman, he would be able to convince himself that others were convinced that he had, as unlikely as it was, suddenly decided that the weather was perfect for a jog.
All in all, Marcela managed clicked along through her self-consciousness and eventually found that she was bumping less and less into the stone outcropping on either side of the garden path. If she clicked in several directions, she found that she could in fact detect a sort of ‘reflection’ coming off of what must be the stone of the path, which was not present when she clicked towards the smell of the flowers, and the sound of them quietly blustering in the gentle breeze.
In this way, she eventually heard the sound of light chatter and silverware, and continued in this slow way to what must have been some sort of common area.
“Marcela! There you are!” came Brenda’s worried voice.
“Calm down, calm down, I’m fine.”
“They left you alone? I can’t believe it, those fuckers. I’m going to –“
“Brenda. Calm down. I’m fine. I’m a bat!”
“Alright, that’s great um, I’m going to get you over to this table here…”
“No I’m serious just, let me, Brenda! It’s fine, I’m fine.”
“Oh, okay,” said Brenda, as if the concept puzzled her.
Marcela began to feel her cheeks getting redder. She wasn’t too shy to ask for help but for it to be mandatory, from everyone, from the intern, and now from someone she considered a friend.
“It might not be the most intuitive concept in the world, but I’m not completely useless, got it?”
Brenda sighed. “Marcela, of course not. I’m sorry. I was just worried. They said you would be back by 3:00 but it’s 4:30 and nobody could tell me where the testing facility was. These gardens are enormous and I looked everywhere and a friend of mine wanted me to cover a shift of hers back at the clinic at home and I had to tell her that I couldn’t, which isn’t even that big a deal, I just…”
Marcela reached her hand out and put it on Brendas. “No no, nonsense, I’m sorry Brenda. My nerves are shot too. It’s the jetlag and this crazy place. Quite beautiful but also…quite strange. And maybe we’re dehydrated? Travel will do that.”
Brenda laughed. “Hey that’s my job to tell you that.”
“Oh please. I didn’t invite you as my physical therapist. I invited you as my friend. Ah to hell with hydration, let’s get pissed. Do you think they have any GnT’s around here?”
“Marcela!”
“What is this, anyways? Some sort of outdoor cafeteria?”
“It’s actually really interesting,” said Brenda, lowering her voice excitedly. “A lot of them are working, but there are about sixty people seated here”
Marcela noticed for the first time the subtle and occasional yet diverse and extensive clickings and taps from what must be computers, as well as occasional scribbling sounds of pen or pencil on paper. The dull roar of babble and chatter customary to an outdoor restaurant atmosphere had masked it, otherwise she would have noticed sooner. Marcela paid careful attention, trying to get a sense of the space.
“A lot of them work for Crawford Co. Although, and I’m not sure about this yet, I think that some of them are participants in your study. I talked to some of them, but they had not been scheduled yet, so they weren’t sure where the lab was. Or whatever you call it.”
“There are others here?”
“Yeah. Let’s get some food first and I’ll tell you about it. God, honestly a gnt sounds great right now.”
Marcela chuckled. “Thatta girl. Excuse me!” Marcela flagged someone down and ordered a couple of drinks and asked for an appetizer or something.
“Just out of curiosity, how did you do that?”
“The ice in the empty glasses, clinking around. It just sounds like a server.”
“Duh,” Brenda said. “Anyways, yeah. I met a woman from Arizona, a couple of guys from Philly, not sure which one is actually in the study, but they were really excited about it. There were some others. Do you want me to introduce you?”
“Yes,” replied Marcela.
“Oh I almost forgot! Did you pass the assessment? Or well, maybe pass isn’t the right word. I’m assuming it wasn’t a test or, what was it exactly?”
“It was strange,” started Marcela, searching for her words.
“What did they ask you to do?” Brenda asked.
Marcela thought back to Jenna and Walter and her short exchange with Dr. Chowdhury.
“Think.” Marcela said. “They just told me to…think.”
“Fascinating. You’re going to have to give me more than that.”
“I really don’t know what else to tell you. There was this giant robotic arm and –“
“Well you probably could have led with that—“
“And?”
“Well they told me to imagine…directions. Forward, they wanted me to, I don’t know, I guess you would call it telepathically, project the concept of a forward force. It was all very strange. I let myself toy with the idea that they really meant what they said, that there was a way for a person to control the arm with their mind, but I don’t know. I guess I couldn’t do it.”
“Oh I’ve heard of this. It’s actually a real thing – there was some research, in Boston I think, where people were controller remote control things were their brains. I couldn’t believe it at first but it actually seemed quite simple. They would just scan their brains and—“
“Exactly.”
“Woah,” said Brenda, impressed.
“Two gin and tonics with lemon and a cheese platter,” said the waiter, setting two heavy tumblers and a wooden board.
The women thanked the waiter and clinked their glasses together.
“To science,” said Brenda.
“To friendship?” said Marcela.
“To science and friendship!” Brenda countered.
“To science and Friendship.”
Marcela brought the glass to her lips and sighed, wondering how she had arrived in such a moment.
--- 11/19
Running shoes, booty shorts, sports bra, running shirt. For a moment, Lily wondered if she should leave the shirt. It was warm out. She’d get sweaty.
--- 11/21
1995 (31 years ago)
“Okay Luna, are you ready?” Marcela said.
Luna looked back, eyes intent, and Anne watched her eagerly, her lips ready to form a request as she sat on her elbows next to her mother, yet afraid to disrupt the game.
Marcela’s elbows were on the carpet too, but her hands held the rubber band tight, full of kinetic energy. Anne admired how her mother’s earrings swung slightly as she prepared to fire the rubber band.
Luna for her part stood ready, wide-eyed.
“Mau!” Luna said with a chatter.
“Go!” Marcela launched the rubber band and Luna shot after it. The rubber band made contact with the ground in the next room over, rolling like a wheel as Luna raced just behind it.
“What are you girls doing?” Michael said, walking into the room in his work clothes to match Marcela’s.
“Okay my turn!” Anne shouted in excitement, racing after Luna.
Marcela got up easily, brushing some dog hairs off of her skirt and walking over to her husband.
“Luna wanted to play. You should see how much she loves this rubber band,” Marcela said. “Do you want to go together, or are you going to take the Honda?”
“I’ve got to take Honda so I can hit the trails at lunch. There’s this amazing on across the river from Georgetown that I found. Unless you want to go with me?” Michael said.
Marcela straightened his collar. “I wish. Too much to do today. “
“How’s the proposal coming for the Mendel grant?”
Marcela rolled her eyes. “It’s…not. Come on, play with the cat with me and Anne before we go do all the hard things.”
Michael hesitated, and Marcela narrowed her eyes at him in mock-derision.
“Okay. But five minutes! There’s a meeting with—“
Marcela took his hand and led her after Anne and Luna, whose laughter could be heard form the next room.
— 11/23
“Mom! Dad! Luna just – you have to see this. She’s juggling! Or okay, not quite but—“
Marcela smiled at the memories as she strolled the garden. Well, perhaps strolling was too strong a word, but she was at least walking. It seemed that her joints and nerves were making a rebound. She tried not to think about it too much in case she jinxed it, but it was hard to forget Brenda’s prediction.
“You’re creating new motor pathways in your brain…that has to be linked with your participation in the study.”
Brenda had, of course, left after that first week, and Marcela had agreed to stay. She’d been given everything she needed here, including these gardens, more expansive than she thought she could ever explore in entirety.
They were really more than gardens here in the Crawford Campus. The place was almost like a city, albeit a strange one. There was the northeastern quarter of the campus, where the parking lots were and the shuttles came in with some of the thousands of employees everyday. That’s also where the tours where, where tourists came to see the biggest tech firm in North America.
Then there was central, a bustling place where most of the salaried employees of the company worked, some in labs, others in offices, but most in outdoor patios, parks and courtyards.
Marcela, however, lived in the southwest corner, simply called “The Labs” by most people she met. It was in the woods, close enough to the ocean that she could hear the crashing of waves on a quiet Sunday morning. There was an entire stretch of redwood forest where small, efficient dwellings had been constructed for the thousands of testing subjects who were essentially live-in employees in their own right.
It was a strange existence, perhaps, but it was a good one. Marcela didn’t have to pay for groceries, rent, or the elderly assistance that she seemed to be needing less and less. All she had to do was show up for lab testing. The employees at the labs of course never used the words “testing”, and opted instead for “Assessments”, as in “Weekly assessments”, “variable assessments”, and sometimes the rarer “summary assessments”.
It was the job of the subjects simply to be themselves and interact with the technology. Of course there were many projects occurring simultaneously. The official name for the project that Marcela was engaged in was “Crown II”, in reference to the brain-wave scanning device.
When Marcela was walking around the gardens, she occasionally heard the other subjects and staff gossiping about her. It was all good things. Marcela was, apparently, an outlier in “brain conductivity,” even though the researchers admitted that this term was not quite adequate to completely describe what made Marcela special.
The truth was that the geriatric wave of test recruits had been brought in to assess how the products being developed in The Lab differed in potential when used by different sections of the public. An intersectionality of identities was included in the testing group, young and old, black and white, educated and not so, athletic and overweight, etc.
However, when everyone made their unspoken guess that the elderly would be the least capable of these dimensions, they were wrong.
Not all of the older folks in these studies performed better than average, but a small group of about 20% of them actually performed up to the 3 times better than average. If one was so bold to venture as to why, which of course nobody was for the danger of straining empiricism, they might say this: “Those with bodies that are becoming increasingly uncooperative leave their minds frustrated, and looking for outlets. After a lifetime of usage of a single body, it actually appears that some elderly people are even more eager and adaptive in their efforts to control extra-bodily instruments than their younger counterparts are.”
In any case, not only was Marcela exceedingly talented at interacting with the brainwave-powered devices she was given. It seemed that the more Marcela use these devices, the better use she had of her own body. Limbs and muscles and neurons that had been failing were beginning to regenerate.
That morning, Marcela had lowered her feet on the ground and thought, for the first time in five years, “I think I’ll go for a walk”. And she did.
It was dark and Moon had lost blood and most of her body heat. One of the sharp branches had nicked her on her way down form the sky. The insects were beginning to sing, but it was a droning chorus of the occult.
Moon had read stories of human being crossing the river styx in the underworld, and on this island in the James river somewhere with the cicadas droning, she thought,
This is what it is to die.
Moon’s heart beat frantically but her head was sluggish. And she was sopping wet. Her implant could take a lot, but a concussion could affect a solid state hard drive just about as much as it could the biological brain, and Moon believed she had lost a few of the partitions. She had not actually ever taken it apart for fear of losing her own mind, and so had an incomplete idea of how it worked.
A rustle in the bushes startled moon, and she looked over into the woods, towards the interior of the small island. Moon stared at the spot she had heard the sound, frozen for a few moments, until she urged her aching limbs to keep moving. She walked past a splintered wing from her contraption and winced. The carbon-fiber had been snapped into a gnarly mess. Moon’s lids felt heavy.
Maybe if I just slept in the sand, I’ll would be okay…
Fshh.
There it was again. The sound from the bushes. And then another sound, a branch snapping, but from the other side of her, across a small stream.
No. Don’t sleep. Not an option. Get home, Maia and Johnson…can help. Find a way to cross over the river…
Moon came around a bend in the shore and saw the wide expanse of the james, moonlight flickering on the surface of the rapids in the center of the river’s current. It was unswimmable. If Moon could just think, remember where she was…
BAM.
Moon was knocked sideways off of the rocky outcropping and landed on the dusty ground with a crushing force, something heavy and snarling on top of her.
Every bit of Moon that was still awake boomed into alertness. It all came back; the years she spent on the streets. The fights the blood the taste of dirt and blood mixed in her mouth. Moon felt a searing pain screaming into her brain but couldn’t distinguish it from the sound of her own hissing as she let loose swipe after swipe at some opponent. The blood blinded her, pooling and matting in the fur around her face, and she was surrounded by a growling and then whimpering as her claws met flesh and tore it open.
Then whatever beast she was battling with was joined by another and Moon was overcome, and kept slashing at everything until her limbs weakened to the point of stillness and sharp teeth broke into her skin.
““Oh my god.” These had been Maia’s first words once John woke her up.
After hauling Moon back on his bike, swaddled in a towel in his backpack, John had done his best to clean and disinfect her wounds. He had called all of he animal clinics he could find, but none were answering their phones.
Moon was in terrible shape. It looked like she had lost her eyes and some of her face to the Raccoons, as well broken one of her front legs, which was at a strange angle.
Maia and Johnson had spent the entire day trying to root through the computer they had found on their roof. After John’s phone had been mysteriously returned to him, the had racked their brain. All they could think of was that somehow someone had broken into their apartment. An article they read on the internet said that oftentimes break-ins were enacted by someone who lived relatively close by, so it’s a good idea to scan the area for clues of someone setting up a base, or maybe stealing things from other people. Even though, in this case, nothing had been stolen, only returned.
Maia and Johnson had looked in alleyways and up and down their street, and then the next street over, and then the street after that.
A few blocks down, John had heard the familiar crashes and bangs of snares and a kick drum and smiled. It was Rafi, one of his musician friends.
“You know that guy?” Maia asked, halfway between awe and disgust. “Don’t his neighbors get mad?”
John laughed. “Probably”.
They stood and watched Louis for a moment. The man was shirtless and wearing a bandana, going at it with his drum-set on the top of a two-story townhouse building on Grove street. Louis finished a solo with a dramatic sequence of toms and snares that ended in the crashing of a symbol and let out a holler of pure, animalist joy.
“The roof,” Maia said, looking at Johnson.
“Yeah I’m always hearing noises from up there, right?” John said.
Maia nodded. “And I wonder…”
“Oh hey Johnsons!!” said Rafi.
“Hey Rafi!” John called back. They stood and watched Rafi play a moment longer, and then Maia turned and raced back to the apartment, with John running after her. They climbed up the rickety old fire-escape with the help of a table someone had left in an alley, and it hadn’t taken them long to zone in on their discovery.
The brick dwelling. On first glance it looked like some sort of boring HVAC contraption, and that was certainly exactly was it was supposed to be, but with the eyes of people who had seen the inexplicable, Maia and John were quickly drawn to it. It had no doorway, yet it had clearly been built after the building, which seemed strange. Well, it had a sort of doorway, but it was only big enough for a small animal to get into, which was also strange. Why create a space like this and then leave a hole in it?
“Go for it,” John said when Maia had picked up a piece of metal piping she had found somewhere else on the roof and looked over at him for assurance after raising it above her head.
With a few strikes, Maia tore a whole in the bricks big enough for them to get a peak inside. They found three computers with the fans roaring, running at full capacity.
“Strange,” John said, and Maia nodded back to him. “Strange.” She said, the two of them soberly elated.
Or well, several computers. Neither Maia nor Johnson were exactly hacker types, but their one mutual friend who was a computer science major had flaked on them so they had spent most of their day googling things and trying to boot up the computers they found. They had been locked out of one within the first couple hours, and so they were very cautious with the others. It wasn’t until the sun had gone down that John had been able to access the contents of the hard-drive. Maia had already gone to bed.
--- 11/25
“Luna!” Marcela called. Her breath fogged in the cold, illuminated by a red light at the empty intersection. The streets were cold and empty and the snow fell in beams from the yellow streetlights.
“Marcela, we can…come back for her. Anne is getting cold.”
“Is Luna not coming with us?” Anne piped up from the back seat of the car.
Marcela wiped her face with the sleeve of her shirt.
“I’m sorry baby, Luna wanted to stay,” Marcela said.
“But won’t she get cold?” said Anne.
“She’s a tough one. She’ll be okay,” said Marcela, trying to believe it and got in the car.
The mid-morning light shone through the shutters, illuminating the dust dancing in the air of the apartment. The bedroom had a high ceiling, the walls half-filled with musicians. Louis Armstrong, Chet Faker, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone.
It was Monday, but Maia hadn’t gone to work and John hadn’t gone to class. Instead, they sat on the floor staring across the room. Maia with her legs crossed and John in the bean bag chair.
The air hummed with the quiet whirring of motors. One of the devices hung in the air above moon, maneuvering a suture through her torn flesh.
Another one extracted a wire from the back of Moon’s skull and replaced it with another. A small army of devices hung in the air, putting Moon back together as Maia and John watched, unsure of what to do.
“And you found her like this?” Maia whispered, not taking her eyes off of the spectacle before her. One drone appeared to be soldering something together, and little wisps of steam curled behind one of Moon’s limp ears.
Moon’s eyes were shut, her limbs splayed around her. Bits of dried blood of clumps of fur were spread around her. She rested on John’s coat which roasted on the bed.
“Yeah with raccoons – there were two of them. I think they were gonna eat her.”
“I can’t believe it worked. That you found her I mean.”
John was going to agree, but in that moment, Moon’s head twitched to the side. The whisps of steam curled away into nothingness, and the flying drones neatly disappeared into various corners of the room, as if they too were waiting.
A minute passed. A door shut in some other apartment. Another minute. The AC shut off.
And then Moon’s eyes shot open, revealing the black orbs underneath. Her head jerked to John, then Maia, and back again. Carefully, without taking her eyes off of them, she stretched one paw and then another, wincing slightly, making a strange noise. Moon stood.
“Mau,” she said, then she walked over to John and nuzzled him.
“Aw,” Maia said. Moon came over to her and nuzzled her as well.
Moon hesitated with her eyes on Maia’s outstretched hand, purring, and then leapt back onto the bed somewhat more clumsily than normal.
In the other room, the printer ran for a moment, and then Moon leapt onto the windowsill and was gone.
The crowd buzzed with electric anticipation. More than fifteen hundred people sat in the crowd.
A lanky man in black jeans, a beanie, and a loose flannel button up shirt walked out, microphone in hand. He walked confidently and calmly, clearly at home on the stage.
“My name is Tim Sivers, and I have a rule for you,” the man said. The audience was silent.
“It’s this; don’t complain.”
The man waited a moment.
“That’s it. Don’t complain.”
There were some giggles from the audience. Tim laughed, and it was a contagious, somewhat goofy laugh.
“You’ve probably heard this one,” the main admitted pacing. “But I’m serious. It’s a great rule. For one, complaining is useless, right? I mean, sure, it produces a sort of pleasure. But I think that pleasure invariably comes at a cost. It’s the cost of giving yourself a pass. When you complain – and it’s really very strange – but when you complain, you are trying to celebrate how you can’t do something. Which is a weird thing to do.”
---11/27
“In my life,” the man said, continuing to pace comfortably across the stage. “I have come across some incredible people, people who overcame huge obstacles to go on and do amazing things. I have met a man who had a debilitating stroke who went on to run four ironmans. I have met a woman who was born with dyslexia who has written a popular series of young adult novels. And I met a young man who flunked out of school and went on to become an accomplished entrepreneur and polyglot. And one trait that unifies them is that they don’t complain. I think it’s an efficiency thing. At a certain point, I believe that each of these individuals realized that if they wasted their effort on something so pointless, they wouldn’t have enough energy or time to accomplish their dreams. I have so much to say on this topic, and this is really just the tip of the iceburg, so without further ado I want to introduce the person who made me realize I should save my breathe for only the positive, for solutions, the magic in the world, and to never waste it on the mundane negativities that are complaints. But more than that, she has also shown me that with music, you sometimes never need to utter a single world, constructive or critical, to get across what entire essays never could. I introduce to you, Natalia Ivanova.”
Tim left the stage and something took at place, rolling in on wheels. The members of the audience could be seen craning their necks, trying to get a better look at what they were seeing.
At the same time, another object rolled in from the opposite direction. This one was more immediately recognizeable. It was a grand piano, and its sleek black surface glinted in shards of red and gold in the stage lighting.
“It’s a woman,” Nishant whispered to a classmate, Gina, who was sitting next to him along with a dozen other students from his neurology grad fellowship. Nishant was 24 and sitting at the edge of his seat. They were given class credit from their professor for coming to this talk.
“She’s laying down?” Gina whispered back.
“Yes. Except I think…” Nishant moved his head this way and that, trying to confirm that he saw something moving by her side. “I think she is moving herself. With a…joystick or something.”
But Nishant wanted to take his words back a moment letter, when he realized that it was just a flutter of the woman’s gown. She was dressed in a flowing black dress, but she was seated upon something like a hospital bed, albeit outfitted in expensive-looking black sheets.
However, she did seem to be moving of her own accord. Nobody else was on stage now, just the piano and the woman in the bed. The hundreds of people in the audience were silent. They were doctors, businessmen and women, students like Nishant, software developers, and various researchers of academia. There were also many fans of Tim Sivers, flown in from around the world, mostly Australia and the US where he had a bigger following.
A hushed collective gasp rose from the room, growing from an almost imperceptible volume to a rush of hushed and awestruck voices.
The space above the stage was at least sixty feet. The ceiling was concealed with black theatre curtains. From behind the curtains, something was descending slowly, gracefully. No, not one thing, things. They twisted and unfolded nearly silently. Like snakes swimming downward into the depths of an ocean, the robotic arms descended from the ceiling.
They were composed of dozens of joints. The ends of the arms were as thin as the arm of a child, but as they continued to unfold from the ceiling, it was clear that their bases were at least as thick as Nishant’s waist. Judging from the quiet sound of the motors, Nishant guessed that these robotic appendages were filled with wires and hydraulics, each joint powered by some sort of engine.
There were four of them. Two of them snaked their way to the sleeping woman and gingerly fastened themselves underneath her arms. Then they pulled her form upright, slowly, almost affectionately. They didn’t stop there. They pulled her completely off of the bed. When her toes were the only thing touching the bed, they slid backwards as her body rose. And then they left the surface of the bed completely, hanging peacefully in space.
At the same time, the two other arms had snaked towards the piano. One of the arms opened the piano cover with that same gentle care.
The fourth arm abruptly shot over the keys, its speed betraying the gestures of the others. But as if the excitement had been contained, it froze in place, ready.
Out of the end of the two arms, hanging like specters all the way from the curtained ceiling, sprouted several tiny appendages, like fingers.
The woman, Natalya, was hovering thirty feet above the ground now. If her eyes weren’t closed, he would have sworn she was purveying the audience. For an instant, Nishant could have sworn he saw her smile.
Then the music began to play.
Maia gazed at John’s sleeping face. It was pressed against a messy pile of papers on the floor. She was sitting on the couch. It was 7:00 and pink light was beginning to seep through the shutters again.
Yesterday at this time, the room had been spotless. Vacuumed, bed made, clothes folded neatly in the dresser.
It was a mess now. Papers everywhere. John’s laptop on the ground, Maia’s on her desk. Books were strewn along the floor as well. There were some paper towels in the corner where Maia had spilled some coffee and John had cleaned it up but had been distracted before throwing the paper towels away.
Maia hadn’t slept much. She kept remembering the words.
What you call a “home”, I had one before. But I lost it.
And the pictures too. They were on many of the printouts on the floor.
“I never though…” Maia whispered in the morning light. I never thought that she would be like this.
When Maia was younger, she’d had a dog name Penny. She’d joked with her family about what Penny might have been like if she had been born a human being as well. She found herself wondering this again, doubting that Penny would have been as silly and affectionate as she had thought back then. Penny had been a dog, though. And Moon was a cat.
Maia looked at the time. She had to go to work. With monumental effort, she heaved herself upright and rubbed her eyes.
11/28 Before coming home that day, Maia took a long walk by the river. The sound over the water rushing alongside her, visible between the moss-covered trees reassured her. After all of the hours in the office, with all the talking and the printers and the computer screens, this felt like a sort of antidote. Instead of conversations about clients and deadlines there was only the conversation between the river and the wind, an occasional birdsong. Maia took off her shoes and let her feet get dirty. She looked around, as if nervous that someone might see her, and then felt silly for thinking this. Who cares? She was allowed to take her shoes off. Perhaps this was the shame of being human, back when adam and eve had supposedly been banished, that she had inherited a million generations later. It was one of the oldest stories Maia knew. The story of the garden of eden. She felt very strongly that it was both true and untrue. Adam and Eve did not exist.In ther sense that is was true, the storty had taken place through maybe 100 generatiions. Maybe a thousand. Liker adam and Eve, maia felt alone. But it was not a bad thing. She had passed a few families, some groups of friends, when she had left the parking lot. WHen one car left, another coasted into the parking lot and soon took it’s place. That’s the way of the human world, Maia though. One person is fired, another hired. One person’s debt is another’s gain. THe disruption of an industry is a startup’s gain and an industry veteran’s slow deathbed. Perhaps it was the same out here by the river, Maia thought, but it just moved much more slowly. The water er4oded the rocks and slowly water found the shorttest path. When a tree fell, saplings grew out of its rotting body. When Maia was young, she had flown on an airplane for the first time. SDHe had been scared at first, and when they had taken off she had scrunched her eyes up tight and pretended she was sitting on floor at home. But as she came close to arrival, Maia’s mother had urged her to look out the window. “Maia, look! It’s a city of lights” When she had looked out the window at this gorgeous city nestlked in the mountains of Utah, her eyes had eaten up the spectacle of the rivers and structures of light revealing themselves beloww her. She had flown once or twice since then and had always tried to get a window seat. She quickly discovered that older people generally tended to prefer aisle seats so that they could easily access the bathroom, and would trade them for the windows and spend the entire flight with her face nearly pressed against the glass. SHe enjoyed tracking the contours of the ckouds, and ther way they lkooked like landscapes in the sky, perhaps ghosts of cities in another dimension, but it was really the takeoffs and landings that interested her. On the ground, it was so easy to forget how roads are not really roads but an entire web of pathways. Easy to forget how a house is really one of a million, reaching out. In the air, Maia relished how these structures and pattertns revealed themselves for what, to her, seemed like a truer presentation of their forms. Roads, especially at night when they swarmed with their yellow and red car lights, swelled into serpentine arteries, as if carrying vital oxygen and nutrients through a city, braeklights red as phosphorescent blood. Other times, especially during the day when the concrete and aluminum glinted, she saw a circuit board. Large warhouses arranged at the outskirts of town like processing chips, houses arranged in grid like suburbs like nodes of circuitry, the silver asphalt glinting in the sun like soddering or metal pathways for signals of information to traverse. And stilll other times, instead of vascular systems and circuit boards, she saw complex colonies of mosses, lichens and perhaps mold. Skyrscrapers rose several millimeters off of the ground, a crust of biological activity at the center of a colony, spreading outwards with the texture of housing projects and suburbs, as if different nonvascular organisms had form3ed symbiotic, or perhaps parasitic? relationsips with one another. Though these vistas could only be seen for a few minutes a time before gradually — yet so suddenly! — reverting either into ethereal cloudscapes, or the comparatively one-dimensional, close-up everyday world, Maia thought of them often. WIth her feeet plantly firmly on the gr4ound in the airport terminal after landing, she would watch the shuttles and forklifts on the expanses of tarmac and think I am not even a person, realluy. I am simply a smallk partcile floating through a doorway. Ansd the feeling would stick with her. If you stand back far enough, everything is part of a very different pattern than it is up close. In the parking lot there was a sparrow with a large piece of bread in its mouth. Maia watched it as she relaced her shoes. It hopped next to a fellow sparraw, who made a jab for the bread, but the firwst sparraw arting away, it’s eyes surely glinting with curel laughter. This scene repeated a couple times. The third time, the sparrow even set the bread on the ground and hopping away before snatching it back at the last minute. But he fourth time, the first sparrow took off a piece and then dropped the bread at the second sparrows feet and hopped away. Cautiously this time, the second sparrow ate from the bread, and found that the fitrst sparrow had finished taunting it. Unthreatened, it quickly polished the bread off, and the two sparrows flew away. The scene over, Maia walked out from the trees and that path towards her bike, key in hand to unlock it. Only then did she think of the things that Moon had printed out the day before. There were pictures of a white woman in her late thirties or fourties. Next to the woman were the words “Marcela and Anne.” Maia took these people to be moon’s original owners. They were standing in front of a white house with peeling paint. Yes, Maia knew this house. She would pass it on the way home. Maia took one of the creased pieces of paper out of her pocket. Yes, she knew this house. She would bikew past it.
---- Get the stuff from google keep and put it here: 11/28 continued
Maia turned her key in the door, brow furrowed, still deep in her thoughts. With her fingers on the handle she paused for a moment, listening. On the other side of the door she thought that she could something. Yelling. John’s voice and some others, along with Moon’s meow.
He showed them Moon? Showed them what she can do? No no no…
She felt her stomach drop. She opened the door.
/// David, Dionte, Rafi, John
Rafi, the drummer who had been playing on the rooftop the other day, was standing in the middle of the room, his arms out. He was wearing his signature bandana and circular tinted glasses with that laid back grin on his face.
One of moon’s small quadcopters flew overhead, and a moment later, Moon launched herself onto Rafi’s shoulder’s in direct pursuit of it. Rafi let out a whoop of excitement. From Rafi’s shoulder’s she launded on David, who looked thrilled at being Moon’s landing pad. From David, she actually ran sideways on the wall for several steps before twisting and intercepting the flying device in mid-air, bringing it to the ground and sliding into the other room. There was a pause and then Moon strode proudly back into the living room with the drone in her mouth, still buzzing. The boys let out a collective cheer, led by John, who was standing in the kitchen holding some sort of remote control.
“I got it on video!” Dionte said, emerging from the bedroom with his phone in hand.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Maia said, her words more or less directed at Johnson.
“Aye! Maia the hotshot!” Rafi said, his face breaking into an even bigger grin, taking a step forward and moving to hug her.
“Maia check it out, this clip is going to be huge. We’re talking viral, tik-tok, front page of reddit,”
Maia whirled and swiped dionte’s phone out of his hands.
“Hey that’s my phone!” he said.
Maia walked over to John.
“Back porch.” She said.
“Um. Okay,” John said, stunned. Maia stored out of the back door in the kitchen. “oohhhh,” Rafi started to croon.
“Stop that,” John said before following Maia out the back porch which wasn’t really a porch but instead a rickety landing at the top of a wooden staircase leading up from the dumpster alley.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?” Maia hissed in the loudest quiet whisper John had ever heard, waving Dionte’s phone for emphasis.
“Hey give me my phone back!” Dionte said through the screen door. Maia slammed the second door.
“The boys were just over for band practice and I didn’t tell them anything I swear I just—“
“You didn’t tell them anything about how moon brought herself back from the dead using her own flying robots? About how our cat that I found on the street three weeks ago has a tracking chip in her brain that we used her own computers to find her with? I’d hope not! About how our cat printed out photographs from our printer? About how our cat has our wifi password? Have you thought for a second what would happen if Dionte posted a video like that on youtube. What kind of path we would be walking down? We are talking about reporters, talk-show hosts, articles online, people from the internet coming to our door from other cities, hell other countries, probably eventually from the government, OR from wherever she came from if it wasn’t the government I mean—“
“But like talk show hosts that’s not that bad! It would be fun, and we could go on tour and—“
“Oh my god. Don’t tell me you were really thinking of doing all of that.”
---11/29
“No I mean we were just having fun—“
At this point somebody opened the door and Moon slipped out to rub against Maia’s calf. Maia scooped her up and looked into her big, brown, deceptively innocent-looking eyes.
“You just want to cause trouble don’t you? Don’t you?” Maia said in her kitty-speak voice, and then switched back to the voice reserved for berating John. “Look, I’m going to pretend that you weren’t going to upload any videos. I’m glad you’re excited about all this. It’s incredible. I didn’t think anything like this was possible, I just. I’m worried. There’s so much we don’t know, and I think we should just keep this between ourselves before we understand more about Moon and where she came from and that type of thing.”
John nodded. “No, you’re totally right. I wasn’t thinking. I’ll delete those videos and tell the guys to leave. I was just hanging out with Moon all day and when the band came over for practice I had totally forgot, and moon showed me this remote she had and…”
“Hey John?” came Dionte’s voice through the door. “We’re uh, leaving. We’ll see you later man,”
“Okay, later Dionte! Thanks for coming over,” John yelled through the door.
Moon purred in Maia’s lap.
“Um and can I have my phone back?” Dionte said.
John looked at Maia.
“It’s locked. I have to delete those videos,” Maia said, her voice a little softer.
“Yeah, one second Dionte, we’ll coming back in. Hold on,” John called through the door again.
“Just tell him to delete the videos okay?”
John nodded, a hint of embarrassment in his eyes, and then opened the door back into the living room.
Nishant had been getting his doctorate at Columbia when he had attended the “Robotics and the Arts” Seminar at Carnegie hall. Some of the other faculty in the Neuroscience department, and a few of his choice students in grad and undergrad had piled onto the subway and headed towards Seventh Avenue.
The Seminar had big corporate sponsors like Boeing and Honda and some other companies Nishant had never heard of, and some incredible guests. The musician Phillip Glass, the director of Boston Dynamics Marc Raibert, and Chinese science-fiction writer Hao Jingfang, among many others.
It had been an excellent conference, but the moment when Natalya had begun to play had stolen the show. She played “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”. Nishant had looked it up later. It was by a famous Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, but the version that Nishant heard online did not seem to entirely do justice to the one he had heard in Carnegie Hall. The one that had allegedly been played by the seemingly unconscious woman suspended from the ceiling had been like nothing he had ever heard. From where he was seated, Nishant thought he saw at least fourty ‘fingers’ in play at once.
The whole thing had been strange. He wasn’t sure how the robotic arms had even been installed. And there was very little about the performance to assure anyone that the arms hadn’t been pre-programmed to begin with. In the awe of the performance, he had believed the magic trick but as it ended, bits of his sub-conscious piped up. Had the woman really been playing? Was she okay? Was she even there of her own volition? This man, Timothy Sivers, had said that she was paralyzed, but all of the paralyzed people Nishant had seen before had control over their eyes, their face. Then again, Nishant was sure she had smiled, just once, and very faintly, in that moment before the surrogate fingers touched the keys for the first time.
Nishant looked up what he could about this Sivers Man. He appeared to be a serial entrepreneur, many of his ventures failing, but a few succeeding. He was the CEO of a Graphine Research company. Graphine was a material that had been long-awaited as the next generation of battery technology, but year after year it had failed to deliver the amazing results it had promised; charge times 100 times faster than convential lithium-ion, twenty times less physical volume for the same amount of capacity. Sivers was also on the board of several tech companies, including a scandalized medical start-up that had been revealed as a fraud a year ago. Then again, Joe Biden had also been on the board of that one, so it was not too surprising that this Sivers figure had gotten of the hook.
The organization that Sivers had been presenting had been strangely difficult to find – the first result on Google had actually been a video of the introduction Sivers had given to Natalya in Carnegie. It was always a strange feeling for one’s recent experiences to be the top hit on Google. It was intoxicating and somewhat eerie, as if discovering that in an entire ocean of ideas you might actually be on the first wave to break.
The fifth or sixth hit was a website for a company called Crawford Industries. This rang a bell. Julian Crawford had been a renowned Austrian geneticist. His work had apparently been pilfered by Mendel and it had only recently come to light, giving Crawford an overnight legacy out of nothing.
‘Crawford industries; we’re at the intersection of robotics, genetics and BCI. We believe that the human race has a huge amount of untapped potential. Some of the advances to science and technology breaking with the twenty-first century…they are just the beginning. We ascribe to the Second Renaissance philosophy. It’s this idea that renaissance’s don’t happen organically. They are instigated by visionaries who essentially attempt what is conventionally viewed as impossible, and succeed. What’s important here isn’t just succeeding at the impossible, of exceeding the collectively perceived boundaries of modern science and tech. It’s about doing so with such confidence and vigor that we all, as a species, rethink what we are capable of and usher in a new age.’ Nishant got the chills while reading the transcript of this interview with Timothy Sivers. It had been linked to on CrawfordIndustries.com.
The website was sparse, and the fact that a r/ecent event had upstaged it made Nishant think that the website must be incredibly new. Nishant stayed up very late that night to discover more about Crawford Industries and Timothy Sivers. He learned more about Sivers, who appeared to be reputable, but very little about Crawford Industries. And he found absolutely nothing about Natalya Ivanova.
Twenty years later when he was working for one of the largest Tech Firms in the world, he would sometimes marvel at how he had taken the job simply to answer these questions.
Moon didn’t return for three days. It was somewhere around the morning of the third one that John began to realize that he had been asleep. The world is made up of people who are in varying degrees of consciousness, and he had been in a relatively deep slumber.
It’s confusing because you can have your eyes open, talk to people, go out and have a drink (especially that) and even write emails and work out – there are all sorts of things a person can do while ultimately asleep. You cannot, however, cook very well while you are asleep. But you could probably write a novel asleep.
It’s not anything as grand as the matrix, or even as ideological as being “woke”. It’s not even an answer, it’s a question; what really matters to you? Like what really Matters? A question followed by a considerable pause.
And that pause is important. Because you if you just keep going and going and going and you never wonder why, there’s no room for you to really be you.
Just the incidentally person that happens when they do what is expected of them.
John had this thought as he was doing the dishes in the morning. He wasn’t sure where Maia was. He was thinking about whether he should apply to another musical fellowship or to an orchestra. For a moment he wondered if he even wanted to become a musician, but of course that ship had sailed. Had it? Yes, that wasn’t something to think about.
John had been washing a vase and he wasn’t sure why it was in the dishwasher at all and in fact it looked quite valuable and so he was about to ask Maia where to put it. The words were all formed and ready to be spoken at the back of his throat, “Hey Maia? Do you know where this goes?” And his body was ready to. He would pop in and she would be sitting in her favorite comfy armchair in the living room with the slightly collapsing old wooden floor that slanted quite severely towards the northern wall, and hold up the vase and ask the question.
And she would know. She would have an answer. She was a girl – a woman – of strong opinions. Including, presumably, and John did presume it, about vases. But with an open mouth, John listened to the absolute quietness of the house and realized somehow beyond any reasonable doubt, that Maia was gone. Which left him alone in the apartment. Alone to solve this vase business. And that was it.
That was the moment he woke up; the moment he asked himself instead of Maia.
“John. Where do I put this vase?”
And of course he had ideas, but not an answer. And something about that felt rather wonderful, like searching for the right note on his trombone while realizing all the while that perhaps it wasn’t a note he had heard before.
And he decided that well, the vase would be best suited to go underneath some flowers, so he better get his shoes on and go on a walk, half-full dishwasher be damned.
If you had been sitting in that apartment, which you couldn’t have been since John was the only one there, you would have heard him muttering “shoes,” and then some rustling around for a sock in the dirty clothes bin and then the door slamming and the increasingly muted sounds of John’s boots scuffling down the old stairs of the apartment. And then you would hear silence.
/* ***** As long as this is the world that becomes, or COULD become the world of Zarus, I might as well make it crazy. This might only be one piece of that, and that’s okay, but there’s no need to hold back here. Make the villain the villain who ends the world, the hero the one who saves it, et cetera ***** */