photo (c) Voiker 4 questionable-things production
He was standing by the window
Half naked
Window closed
Looking at nothing in particular
He could already start to feel it
The rain
Outside was sunny; still he was starting to feel ideas falling onto his brain, like arrows reaching for his open skull
This was his problem: ideas. He did not expect them, they were flooding inside like successive dams opening their belly to release water down the valley, as he would be standing there, smiling. He thought he would even open his mouth. Year two thousand was approaching, getting very close now. He was wondering how other people could see it. He was wondering when they started to see it. It was just a matter of time. Thatâs why he didnât like it. Time had always been boring, because time was always on time. Making everything dependent, condemned to be its own slave, having to be always the figurehead of what the everything expected from it: regularity. He didnât like its fluidity. For him, the year two-thousand was a submarine that suddently came up to the surface of a sheet of paper, on his desk, and was moving straight from left to right, always the same direction, always the same speed, always the same line...and it was to disappear just as it had come, fading away between the lines at the same speed, the speed of time. He thought he should board the submarine. He thought he would be rewarded eternal life. What for ? Voiker was looking at the metal fish, and he would not close his eyes.
His Life was a continuous effort to stay awake eyes open-wide to refuse what the wysiwyg kept showing him. What you See is What You Get. How many times do people experience a printing out that has nothing to do with whatâs on the screen. Although everything is connected the way it should be. People go shopping and buy oranges. How can they tell if the one they want to buy will taste the way they expect them to taste, unless they peel them and take a bite at each of them ? Reality is real and false. Itâs both what comes in fornt and what is behind after you stripped it away, layer by layer. He liked both. To get some real from the false, expected, without caring to avoid the electric discharge that comes after from dissapointment to surprise. To get the real from the real, after taking time to undress it like he would do for the woman he loved. He kept rubbing for a long time with an eraser before he could see the submarine coming out from his notes.
A car drove down the road; he closed his eyes for a few seconds to cut intentionally the movie. The small-sized red car was still visible when he opened his eyes again, but there was now a blank in his mind between the two positions of the vehicle. His brain was thriving to bridge the distance between the two sequences. Nothing special could have happened. What could ever have happened during the few seconds he closed his eyes ? He thought about it and lit up a cigarette. He though about books. Closing his eyes while the car was passing was like turning a page in a book, and find out that the first word at the top of the page was making sense wit the last one at the bottom of the previous page. Sometimes he wished this would not be the case. Like opening his eyes and finding out that the car is still there, at the same place, but heading in the opposite direction. Next time he would read a book, he would probably try hard to read only odd pages. Just to see if the world still makes sense if he closed his eyes longer on the world around him.
Could he get more from what he could see ? Ph. K. Dick had an answer, as his memory took a small rest on the last book he read. âthe soft-drink stand fell into bits. Molecules. He saw the molecules, colorless, without qualities, that made it up. Then he saw through, into the space beyond it, he saw the hill behind, the trees and sky...in its place was a slip of paper. He reached out his hand and took hold of the slip of paper. On it was printing, block letters. SOFT DRINK STANDâ.
He closed his eyes for a second time, amd shouted âgreenâ as he opened his eyes to see the car slowing down to make a left turn at the traffic light. He crossed the living room, ashes falling down from his cigarette danced through the sunbeam. He took a shower.
He came back to the living room and saw the ashes on the floor, spread in a galaxy-like pattern. How could this one look so calm and still, like dead lives floating over dread waters, while his house was moving at 450,000 miles an hour ? He wondered how many people were fully conscious that they were all trapped in one of the five arms of a clockwise rotating galaxy, lost among at least 300 billion of stars. And how do other people felt to know that their closest neighbor, Andromeda, was two million light-years away, three times bigger than the Milky Way, drifting towards them at eightly miles per second, to collide with their galaxy in a few billion years. The ashes on the floor meant as much as he did in the cosmos. What is coming next would be digested through some large-scale space and time merger. He went down on his knees and took some of the ashes to his mouth to get a first taste of galactic digestion. He tried to think about what he would look like if the merger was to happen now. What could come out from mixing a red car with a submarine and a human body...
He was thirsty. He went to the fridge but did not open it. On his door was a magnetized calculator. He computed a few digits and made some rapid calculation. If the life of the galaxy was scaled down to 24 hours, life on earth appeared around 8 oâclock in the evening, and so-called human race at 8:15. Now was something like 8:21 on the same unique day. Less than four hours to go...
He came back to his computer that had been purring like a cat for the past twelve hours. The screen-saver was getting tired to randomly alternate pornographic pictures scanned from some cheap adult magazines he bought in Hong-Kong with Reuters online updated stock exchange latest news from worldwide marketplaces. His mobile rang as he was entering his code for web connection. He knew who it was. He didnât take the phone. He didnât know why. Lazyness, He pulled out the draft of the email he was preparing for new-year greetings from the entrails of the hard disk, like a heart from a sleeping body, read again what he wrote so far, lit another cigarette and let his fingers jump among the keys like foolish children playing over stepping stones.
His mobile rang again.
His mobile rang again. He knew who it was. He took the phone this time. He wanted to talk with her. He knew that if he closed his eyes, he would see the car in rainbow colors, he would feel on his chest a feeling much warmer than the one the sun gave him when he stood by the window, and his head would start to spin like the ashes when they crossed the sun beam. She was always making him feel real. And 'Feelings' were probably the key to his own mechanics. He made each and every day according to his feelings, making him a self-decision making and self-adjusting organism. His own awareness of the above was leading him to what he called 'unexpected wisdom'. He loved the way Jeff Buckley had described what 'sensitivity' meant for him: 'it's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom'. 'Real' and 'Feel', two words he intended to put first in his survival kit for next year.
Email was not a tool; it was for him the only reliable way to communicate, straight and direct. Key to the evolution towards compact networked civilization. Edge of cyberculture. His choice to live in Tokyo had been motivated by the attraction of several concepts, and email was now the linking element through the cocktail he made out of them: foreign environment, unknown scales of values, technology, speed and crowd.
He thought how big the influence of Tokyo was since long ago, noticeable in either Tarkovsky's 'Solaris', Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner', William Gibson's Night City in 'Neuromancer': It was like 'a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button'.
His unshaved skin in the mirror gave him the answer to why he really came to Tokyo. His very first objective in going far away was to get read of a value that is one of the reason of human misery: 'roots'. He could remember seven years ago when he wrote he was throwing himself voluntarily into a large aquarium to test Archimede principle applied to foreign culture: either he would come back to the surface, that is come back to his homeland, or dissolve in the water. He dissolved. He became a hybrid product, made of what the world is made of around him, influenced by the chaos of all what he saw and felt, at different degrees of reality. Was he what Pat Cadigan described so well ? 'What I see in the mirror doesn't make any more sense. I am an aquarium filled with assorted fishes I don't even know the names of...'
He sat back and finished his email. It was December 19, 2299. And Exuan called him again.
STATIONARY-ORBIT-(II/II)
August 9, 2305Functional report
Outer Space Support Team - OSST - Strategic Transmissions Team Leader - Karl Johnssen - Grade 5
Unit location: Rimindi Orbit. 2515 km from ground surface.
Support timeframe: August 5 through 9, Year 2305.
Final report - Concluding reports 0S3456 and OS3457.
No follow-up required. Remaining spaceship destroyed according to ONU procedure IST2 on August 9, 2305, 10:15 local time (Cosmos Time 6:09 Day 135 Year 207)
Sequence summary: Boarded Odyssey 7 research spaceship without any prior vocal or visual contact. Ship badly damaged, due to Orbiter capsule violent crash against back-rear of docking area. Levels 1, 3 and 4 access impossible, due to oxygen likage from spaceship and structures damage after implosions that followed crash. Spaceship declared non-operational and to be put into IST2 procedure. 3 crew missing: Maintenance Engineering Staff 2 (KJ Lee and S.jr. Simthen), Research Leader Exuan. Ship pilot Voiker found mentally ill from crash side-effects on psychological behavior, likely to be permanent. Orbiter likely to have been piloted by his co-life and researcher Exuan. Crash reason unclear.
Orbiter fragments pushed at velocity 3 into close orbital path to Odyssey 7, regular visual contact between both spaceship and orbiter remainings approximately every 10 days. Body of Research Leader among rotating debrits. IST2 procedure was set to occur at close encounter of spaceship and Orbiter debrits - to clean the whole mess during one single Cleanprog. Voiker transfered to OSST ship under close medical assistance - stigmata of both starvation and irreversible psycho-trauma. Handling case under strict quarantine while proceeding with robotized relief assistance.
End of Transmission
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