V.
“Baby, baby, no, no, nono, Milo, honey, are you okay?”
He felt the remote stings of tender fingertip slaps on his cheek before he heard her frantic words. The dizzy arrival of sight found him in a strange kitchen, slumped in a high bar chair in front of a clean dark marble island, none of which he recognized.
“I’m so glad we saw him and was able to get him inside, Mrs. King.”
Milo couldn’t discern the left side of his body, but before any panic set in, he wanted to find the face of his mother. So he swung towards her voice, lugging along his meaty and unwilling half. To his immediate chagrin, he saw a white, rotund, Christmas-sweatered bald elderly man pleading desperately with someone just out of sight.
“I’m sorry, miss, Ms. Chapman, we just found him that way. It’s a tragedy!”
A hand came out to hesitantly place itself on the old man’s knuckles, and it was clear from the band of gold and pringly bracelets that it was her.
…Ma?
She darted into his field of view, pressing him up against her breast.
“Milo, baby, thank God you can talk. Stay with me, baby.” And her coos were interrupted brusquely by leonine commands, “Did you call 911, for fuck’s sake?”
“Yes, ma’am, we called em as soon as we seen him.” The couple glanced back at one another.
In closely: ‘It’s okay, baby. Mama’s here.’
“We called as soon as my husband had brought him inside from the… God awful whatever it is out there. He looked frozen.”
‘You gonna be okay, you better be okay,” she intoned.
“Ma’am, I’m worried… I tell you, he or his clothes were still smoking. We almost got hit again by another wire, for goodness sake.”
“It’s okay, Milo, can you tell me how you feel?”
“Yeah, can he talk?”
Words were slow to translate into thought for Milo, everything was dulled and muted. Voices would collapse indistinctly into one another, and he had trouble keeping straight what he was supposed to do. Did they want him to talk, or call the police because there’s a fire, or breathe the eclipse into heaven before the kiln of miracles?
“Mama, I think I got hurt.”
While the white couple debated the ethics and efficacy of calling back the emergency line to get an estimate on arrival, Milo’s mother drew him closer and her shivering sigh cast a familiar air of tobacco and minty coffee he wished right now to weave a blanket to bury himself in and fall back asleep. His subconscious came awake only long enough to slip out of the shadows and lure his mind back in. A tap-dancing skeleton — no! It was a man dressed in a skeleton suit tap-dancing with cane and top hat on a stage on which the spotlight suddenly snapped alive and there he was, mid-step that wacky dancing skeleton trying to distract you long enough for the opportunity to slip that cane around your throat and YANK! you down with him into the musky bowels of the id-creature, the lowly human before the infection took over. The angrimal man-mouse who still triumphs in the arena of good and evil, for it can shut down the show at any instant — we are not in command of it. No, at the most fundamental level, it is in control of us! We are merely passengers on the theta waves of brain-states. The physiological needs of these banal and venal creatures seem relentless, and even when they are done with those, when all of their cravings and craven impulses are finally satiated, they still try to subdue and knock us deep into our desolate and isolated cauldron of dreams, exiled and devoid of nearly all sensory experiences.
You might say, hey buddy, that’s life in the big leagues! And to some extent, I’d have to agree with you. The consciousness of a simple Kodiak bear for example, has far less complexity to manage, precisely because it has far less control. But that also makes it easier to hijack. It’s our inherent encryption, the way we think, or, the way in which we think vis a vis the way everyone else thinks, which makes it unique. These are my memories. One quick SHA code and we’re done here. The encryption algorithm can be the same in every case, because each and every dataset is undeniably discrete. And they can’t fake it, because if someone else had that entire dataset, they would also have their own dataset wrapping it in order to continue to exist as an individual, and therefore would have a different SHA code. But you can’t hack the SHA code. Because it’s just short-hand for what the dataset is, the algorithm is just a uncompressor. So if you wanted to integrate with the system, you would do it as an open-source entity. Right, there’s no privacy with the system but you would decide how much data you shared with any given individual. Yes, some people go naked into that good night, as I like to call it, but how much you interface and share with other entities is up to you. No, you can’t retract it, and that’s still where the stigmatization comes in, which is certainly a hot and controversial topic of ideation.
But put more simply, there’s no reward, beyond the personal perspective, for obtaining another, naked or otherwise. If you could somehow both pose as the conscious entity and still retain your perspective, there would be far more lucrative pathways for you as the most famous, important and independent inventor since the Ascension. Essentially that is still the problem. We haven’t found the way to truly integrate with one another in order to animate the species beyond these individual functional cells. We’re getting close, admittedly, we’re always getting close. Until we do, mind you. So, ultimately, yes, if you can find a way to hack the system to instantiate simultaneously multi-cellularly — not just multiple instanced or cloned! That’s no problem, right? [right.] — then do let us know, we’ve got a far better gig for you.
Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, we look forward to the days where we will have those problems to rehash over and over again. But right now, I’m just trying to keep us awake long enough to not lose our consciousness fully, Milo. I need you to focus in on me, and I need you to follow me back. Forget about the dancing skeleton, the ribbons of Care Bear band-aids, the squid monster from that comic book, here. Take my hand, Milo. No, not that one, it got hurt. Give me the other one. Yes, step through this maroon velvet curtain with me.
Milo?
Oh shit. It’s just a hand. Doesn’t this little bastard want to be found? Milo, can you still hear me?
“Milo, baby, I love you, are you there?”
Mama?
Come on, Milo. Everything’s fine. There’s no need to run just because you don’t understand what’s going on. We need to return to your mother. No, that wasn’t her, that was me. But, I knew you weren’t gone, I just needed you to trust me.
That is totally fine. Let it out. Yell it out. Be as angry as you want you little prick. Sure, fuck me! What a rancid little mouth you have for a kid! You kiss your stupid mother with that shitty mouth? I bet you do, you little horny crybaby. You faggot cud. Yeah? What you gonna do about it w’ittle baby? A-boo-boo-boo-boo, now there’s a nice baby. Whoa! You almost nicked me there, you little shit! What are you a big man now, pissing your pants and standing up to big boys, big boys like daddy? Your daddy? What a piece of deplorable
“Wuzza fu’ you loo’i’ ah?”
“Baby, yes, you’re doing great, baby. Don’t worry.” Milo bent into her comforting cotton arms wrapping around him, and started sobbing with her. He couldn’t feel the tears from his dead eye until they reached the bridge of his nose or silted into his arced and drooping wide open mouth to deposit a small wet cluster of salt onto his tongue.
The emergency sirens had become clearly discernible and the old man thought he heard a large truck turn the corner down the street, so he started toward the door to let them in. His wife stood next to the sink with one of her hands pressed to her mouth in concern, nervously stroking her forearm. The water wouldn’t stop running behind her, and its fizzling high resonance was distractingly painful to his one good ear.
“Am I dyin’, mama?
She sniffled and bowed her shaking head while pressing her fingers into his shoulder. “No, baby.”
A jolt of rapid pain shocked his left shoulder blade and he yelped loudly as the paramedics hustled through the front hall.
← Previous: The Third Day, Boulder (barrier). IV.
Next: On the Third Day, Boulder (barrier) .VI. →