Before the machines landed and did what they did,
I was trying to convince Julia how Sci-Fi was actually the most
relevant contemporary genre today.
“Baby like, it’s all about the future, that’s all we have.” I said, nudging her awake.
“Will you let me sleep in just once a year?—it’s not even six
yet,” Julia said. She had a flare for exaggeration. First of all, it
was 6:17AM, and second, this year (and it’s only October) she’s slept
in a total of five times. I’m counting.
“Ever notice how UFOs, aliens, and spaceships all come from
above?” I said, taking out my retainer and putting it under her nose to
help her wake up. “That’s how we define them, by our orientation to
them. It’s a metaphor for God, like Godot was.”
Julia’s voice gets more serious, second tier decibel. “Can’t you fucking wait?”
“Nice, love the pun.” I said.
“I’m going to kill you.” She looked.
“Baby you are so rhetorical!” I say, placing the retainer on her pillow, and getting up to take a shower.
The dusty sky framed inside the window is a little off, like a
brightness that has nothing to do with the sun. I’m already late for
work so I don’t wash my hair.
The new campaign at Burger Planet is HAVE
A COW, fancied up by some marketing SVP who has no idea what the
people of Allismore want. The people of Allismore want to disassociate
the bovine aspect of beef. That’s why we use words like poultry, pork,
veal, and beef instead of calling the animal by what it is—to reinvent
its purpose as being food. Julia told me all this. She went to college
and is full of theories.
“What did I say about that greasy hair?” P. Rick, the manager at Burger Planet asks.
“No time.” I say.
“You haven’t had time in the past two months.”
“I’m working on my dreads.” I explain.
“Fucking hippie, just get the register until ten then shelve the
new shipment and work the grill. I got a son your age, and he’s not
some fag like you.”
“That’s odd, I got a dad your age, and he’s an asshole just like you.”
This goes on in my head. What I actually say is the word sorry
when he asks about my hair. Sam and Hector are good at sorry too. Sam
handles the fries and condiments, Hector does the mopping and garbage,
and I take care of the meat. Hector came from El Salvador. He shares a
room way out in Pittsburgh with his two brothers. They got two twin beds
so they rotate the one who sleeps on the floor. Hector sends a third
of his every paycheck to his family in El Salvador. Sam is over six
feet tall. She’s got a scar running down her face that I’ve never asked
her about.
“Did you see the new boxes we got? The meat is sort of blue.” Sam says.
“Maybe we should throw it away.”
“What about P. Rick?”
“Nah, let’s keep him.” I say, stepping into the freezer to haul them out.
Four boxes total, three of them leaking some some blueish oil.
Hector and I try to load them into the dumpster but it’s too heavy. We
open each box and throw the patties in half a dozen by the time.
“Son azules,” Hector says.
“No habla espanol,” which is funny, because I’m speaking Spanish to tell him that.
“Apestan.”
I make words with my hand like a puppet-sock and speak slowly, “No. Habla. Espanol.”
“Stinks,” he says.
“Si, stinks like shit-o,” I say. Hector laughs and we toss in the last of the patties.
Michael lives next door. He’s a retired
accountant and spends a good portion of his day on his porch drinking
vodka. Sometimes he says hello. Sometimes he screams obscenities. Today
he says hello.
“Hello Mr. Smith.”
“Mr. Longblow!!!”
“Kid I told you to call me Michael.”
“Sorry, I just love saying that.”
“Kid you been keeping up with the dogs? They know everything
that’s going to happen like that time the doctors took out part of my
lung those dogs was howling at night to the Jesus say take care of me.”
“I have four dogs. They eat prostitute remains,” I say.
“I ain’t talking about that stupid game you kids keep playing I’m talking about real dogs that spit and chew and die.”
“Okay. I have zero dogs.”
“That game is making a mess of things. Don’t know what is real
anymore—and those things running around everywhere acting like people.”
“iBots. I have three already.” I say.
“Back in my day we called them robots.” Michael says.
“I’m starting a company called Winston’s Butt Shack, opening in next year in 1984.”
“Kid it’s 2022.” Michael looks repulsed.
“Not in world the first it ain’t.”
Julia’s still at work and don’t like me playing, so I quickly login to World The First (WTF). The Host’s Original Liberation Army (HOLA), mainly Stanford drop-outs in Mountain View pissed off about the commercialization of their open-source coding, hacked into Nike’s corporate headquarters and executed the CEO. No one knows the script for this except HOLA, who were recently written up by Washington Post’s WTFs national correspondent, who actually works for the real Washington Post. WTF recently parlayed with MAC, who just released the iBot, which costs $395. The iBot duplicates your actions, learns your behaviors, and scripts characters just like you, like a hyper-cookie. I have 3 so far, all stationed in Miami. I’m currently trying to start a harem, though Levy and Sons is trying to buy me out of my property. Levy is really Chiang Xiu, a 9 year old boy in Shanghai. My second iBot is Dong Johnson, whose my favorite player. So I’m having a Mojito at Miami Nice w/ E. Steele, top paid escort in Miami. She (Charan Lakshmanan, a 12 year old boy in Srikakulam, India) starts rubbing my crotch and my arousal level goes +8.81. I shoot four emocons off and rate her 7.5 in my Friend Finder. I hear the garage door open and quickly pull up my pants and log off.
P. Rick discovers the smell two days
later. He grabs my neck and leads me out back to the parking lot. He
points to the dumpster.
“You get all those paddies you tossed, wash them real good and stick them back in the freezer.”
I jump into the trash dumpster and start digging for paddies.
Some dogs bark through the fence. I come across a black 30-ton garbage
bag full of magazines, three years worth of National Geographic back
issues. I grab one and open to a random page of a picture of a crop
circle, a fractal of circles curving inward. That would make a good
tattoo I think. I dig deeper in the dumpster thinking maybe I’ll find
some porn when it happens…
A glitch in the system—that’s what we called it. The other countries seceded from WTF after the First Inversion and returned to The Real World Proper. By the time the United States withdrew from WTF, its W3C script’s syntax had become so abbreviated all of the language extensions, specifically E4X, were palindromes (eg <1”=aDa=1”>, =="dad")—hence the Second Inversion, or as the iBots had marketed to us: Wrath (Version 1.6) By the time we appointed the linguists as special council, WTF had already colonized most of India and Southeast Asia. We all knew what would happen if Wrath 1.6 hit China, so the US Global Standards Institute developed Obrion, the first and only ELF executable virus to feed off inhospitable vectors, triggering the first buffer overflows in which this information was lost to the skies, formerly known as the heavens [or] the unalienable notion that we were alone, depending on each person’s sentiments. The rest is history.
My fingers tremble so hard that I
text Julia aab1# which doesn’t mean anything. I wanted to describe what
was happening but I didn’t know what word to use, what word could
describe being sucked up just like in the movies. I would become famous:
the first person lifted away.
Big deal at first; the news at it ate. Then it got boring. We
knew they were here to stay so we just went along our way, but soon it
led to screaming, which led to killing, and the killing led to more
screaming. They knew everything about us, our language, desires, fears,
inclinations, everything. My brain got spliced up. I could see many
scenes at once, an aggregate of consciousness. This part of my memory
is still intact, a glitch in the system I suppose, which is how I’m
writing you now, or at least, giving out this signal.
Julia, at night I take all of my visions and join them together
for you, like floating shards of stained glass suspended in a cloud. I
can see you sitting there, at the kitchen table, looking sad.
Don’t be sad, this too shall pass.
I think of you often, and all those crazy things you used to say.