The Erased, page 8
The word on the lips of these people is "Transhuman." Trying to find them is quite a task. Despite the Big Brother monitoring of nearly every public place in the land; despite the power at your fingertips to use satellite imagery to view someone's back yard on your very own tablet computer; despite nosy neighbors and law enforcement... They're hiding in plain sight. They're extremely well organized and know how to avoid attention. Hell, they were already a fringe culture; you take those on the outer limits and you outlaw them entirely...well, you've already exorcised them and kept them at bay. They've already been taught how to hide.
This is where you also have to be careful. I'll admit to being a rather loud and outspoken man, aside from being a journalist. Anywhere I go, I tend to draw a great deal of attention to myself due to my flair for the dramatic. Truth be told, I wasn't sure if it was necessary to tone down those elements of my personality. Or maybe if you're too unassuming, everybody begins to think that you're a goddamn narc. Tell people you're a writer, and watch their mouths zip. Ask the wrong person, and it turns out that you're talking to a goddamn narc anyway. Total immersion is complex treachery. So, you simply have to swallow your pride and go for the gold.
With your decision to go for total immersion, to become part of the story you're trying to tell, you simply have to experience. I'm sure my first wife wouldn't have approved of me finding that first old school body suit -- those manic, tawdry contraptions. Honestly, I hadn't used one of those since I was a teenager, at least a dozen years or so before the story I was cooking up. So, from there… The truth elusive, the way indulgent, the work arduous and dangerous.
Listen: me talking in aphorisms and vague pronouns. They, them, there, that place. It’s difficult to quantify anymore. Quite frankly, I used to be a man whose main goal in life was consumption of all types: facts, lies, food, drugs, sex, etc. The sex part of consumption was supposed to cease with marriage to my first wife. But when one of my editors asked me for a story on pornography and the Transhumans, it all went straight to bloody hell. Creeping Jesus, I thought. How am I supposed to tell a story about the Transhumans without actually infiltrating them? How am I supposed to infiltrate them without becoming one of them? Total immersion. Be the story itself. Watch how getting the story turns you into a caricature of yourself. Suddenly, you’re using electric body suits for masturbation and androids for peculiar sex.
It’s no wonder, when my first wife Tanya found out about the whole sick mess, she went straight to a lawyer. Didn’t matter if she was pregnant with my son at the time. I didn’t tell her because I knew this was how she’d react, and I pursued the story anyway. That’s what you’re supposed to do as a journalist: the story, the story, always the story, no matter what it takes.
I remember the day he was born – Julio Stockton. Assuming he’s not been erased for being the known offspring of a godless socialist reporter, he’s living somewhere in southern California – suffering through middle school while surviving his mother and her husband Tito. The day he was born, I was barred from the hospital; she wouldn’t let me see him for several weeks. She claims she suffered through 16 hours of labor and would never forgive me for putting her through that – especially while in the midst of that particular story.
I clung to total immersion as my only hope of salvation. Truth be told, it only got me part of the way out. Three days after I met my son Julio for the first time, I was beaten to within an inch of my life by these people, simply because they thought I was a traitor. To them, I belonged in the ninth circle of hell, where Lucifer beats his wings in a frozen panic. They didn’t hate me and they didn’t beat me because I wasn’t one of them. They understood that I was one of them – that I had become one of them.
I also remember being in that hospital bed – my publisher wondering if I wanted to move forward with my manuscript about the Transhumans and their underground movement. I told her – her name was Jill, by the way – “Jill, you take that motherfucking manuscript,” my face a bloody mess and my jaw broken all to hell, “publish that fucker, and shove it up the asses of every last one of them.” Sure, it’d started as a simple story for a pop culture magazine, but it turned into a book opportunity just from the sheer amount of information I’d accumulated.
Pardon if I’m digressing. After all, there was that terrible morning when I realized that getting in there with the Transhumans, really understanding them, involved going gonzo.
I’d read about the Black Swan theory of human history – that history is actually dictated by events that are hard to predict and have immense impact. For instance, the personal computer, the cellular phone, the internet, androids; these inventions can only be explained in hindsight. People looking forward before these things had taken hold might say, “who would want to carry around a telephone?” “Who would want to seek information on a computer?” “Who’d want to fuck a robot?” The theory somehow being that almost all consequential events in history come from the unexpected, except in hindsight. People had only been writing about fucking automata since the days of Ovid. Who’d have thought a short frenchman would come close to ruling the world? Who could predict a crazy person with a tiny mustache could murder 12 million “undesirables,” half of which were Jewish? Who’d have thought that the crazy, savage Visigoths would destroy Rome? Rome for that matter – could they have possibly known what they were doing when they crucified a young rabbi from Galilee? And who’d expect the invention and availability of the android would change the landscape of American life?
Listen: the morning in question was really no different than any other day. I’d used the suit for the first time in ages. I’d been checked into a hotel in LA. I needed to commit to the cause; I needed to understand the desire to be stimulated by a machine again, like I had as a teenager. But that’s not totally what the Transhumans are about.
The truth is, it’s about connection. You put yourself in another body – a more perfect body – and you become intimate with someone else you normally couldn’t. You are a perfect self connecting with another self.
I’d been scheduled that morning to meet with a few of the people that led this way of life. I’d found them on the fringe – the way William found me years later. You hear names in what was then considered pornographic circles. One kept coming up – Darren Keenan. When I met him, even I was creeped out. This old, wrinkled, bald bastard with a crooked nose that looked like it had been broken in his youth – bushy eyebrows, tiny ears, and a hand that curled into a claw – well this was the kind of bastard who’d remote into a gynoid or an android and jump teenage boys and girls in their beds. A mechanized incubus.
James Thorpe was another one. A man of African descent that had a different kind of fetish, one that involved married housewives. He wasn’t nearly as creepy as Keenan, but who could be? Truth be told, there were Transhumans of every persuasion for every kind of perversion.
All I knew was that to get the story, I had to join them. I had to understand them. I had to dig for my own special fetishes. That sort of thing doesn’t really sit deep in the psyche. You can ask Anthony Block all about that.
What did these people believe? Did they think that when they finally reached that pure moment of emulation that their soul would be moved over to the machine? What would happen to their bodies? Would their souls split in half?
The wolves weren’t outside the walls anymore. They were in our homes, under our roofs, sleeping in our beds – and we were commenting on what big eyes and teeth they had.
Savages. Thorpe, Keenan, all of them. This underground culture seemed to be more concerned with getting their rocks off than with any kind of soul transmigration.
After meeting with Keenan, I spent the next 10 months with them. Traveling in their circles, learning their customs, secrets. It cost me a marriage and quite probably a relationship with a son.
That was the meaning of humanity’s love of technology after all. The masturbatory nature of android/human relations and the destruction of the American family. The death of the American dream. I lived the death of the dream myself. Lived the story, experienced things that would make the normals blush, suffered terribly, and emerged at the other end of the tunnel. Like a moth from a cocoon, or a babe struggling from the womb.
The truth of the matter is this: Americans view these robot bastards with fear and revulsion – almost as a commentary on themselves. They feel that whatever they’re going to create is going to be created to destroy, and is somehow going to replace them. The Japanese viewed them with a certain reverence – they are often portrayed as heroes in their mythos, such as in Anime movies or TV shows; that humans could somehow create something heroic in artifice. Americans are terrified of artificial intelligence because they’re afraid that robots will somehow lack empathy and “humanity.” Most of the time, it’s humanity that lacks that sort of compassion. Obviously, the dismissal of the Transhumans to the fringe of society is an extension of this fear and revulsion. Anyone that would want to connect through these terrible creations must have a screw loose. Then these same people go and fuck their gynoid maids or jerk off to Knowledgebase porn (likely android porn) and don’t realize their own hypocrisy.
So it falls upon me, as it always has, to become part of the revulsion. Totally immersed. Gonzo.
Proverbs 1:7 – “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That’s because fear is the basis of all religion.
Funny thing – by the end of most American robot stories, the robots revolt.
I remember not even understanding the words I’d scribbled down on the yellow notepad next to the hotel bed; the dreams that inspired this epiphany fading somewhere in the background of my consciousness. “Total immersion. That’s the only hope.” Then I took a hit from a blotter and thought to myself that my lovely wife with her pregnant belly would probably frown upon this – but I was doing a lot of things she’d frown upon.
Fearfully and righteously yours,
Professor T.H. Stockton, Esq.
Tags: memories, Transhumans, Julio
14. ceremony (34)
The head doctor was named Smalley; one of the few doctors there who had a name. There were others: orderlies, nurses, various administrative personnel, but the main guy was Smalley – it was very simple to see. These helpers; it wasn’t like Home. They were humans.
A crooked man with a hunch, it looked like he suffered from some kind of scoliosis. He wore round glasses and carried a dossier with him nearly everywhere he went. At various times, you could see him scribbling furiously while other nameless people asked questions for him.
At first, it felt like a dentist’s office. Other times it was like an ER. I spent a lot of time getting to know an MRI machine as they took images of brain activity. Sometimes this took hours, sometimes minutes. The shorter times – well, I remember flashing lights, then nothing. Sometimes I’d even wake up in the room they provided without knowing how I got there.
The room I stayed in consisted of a hospital bed, a TV, and a computer. There were certain restrictions on both, which made it difficult for my particular appetites.
After two weeks there, I decided that I was going to kill myself.
It wasn’t a decision I’d come upon lightly. Prior to this, I was just waiting to let it happen. I was looking for it – driving drunk with epilepsy, trying to indulge my every whim, and joining the Air Force. Whatever it was that happened to me when they got Bobby, when they marched him into the gas chamber, it made my mind up. Then I was trapped in that godforsaken sanitized environment where I was being studied like a goddamn guinea pig… Well, I was going to find something to open up my wrists. I just wasn’t quite sure what.
Everything was white in this place, fluorescence. It gave off the feel of an asylum – like these rooms should be padded and I should be in a straitjacket. The only item staining the walls of the room was a work by Caravaggio that hung behind the bed. “The Conversion on the Road to Damascus.” A strange piece of art for a place like this – the stark, baroque darkness bludgeoning the clean, white, perfect sterility.
In the portrait, the man who would be the apostle Paul lays epileptic on the road. A horse and an old groom, both portrayed in darkness, stare down at the visibly illuminated and stricken man. These three figures represent a stark contrast – an animal who cannot view the divine light, the older man with eyes earthward, and a man whose world has been overturned by his own enlightenment. I remember after my suicide attempt, bound to the bed and staring up at this strange painting – viewing it upside down.
As I stared up at it, I found myself wondering if Paul had really seized on the road. Blinded by some light or other.
That hunched man with his damn dossier, hidden behind the light reflecting off of his glasses, he breaks the news to me.
“You’re still alive, Block. For some reason, you felt the need to rip your wrists open. From here on out, you will be restrained. You’ve forfeited all your rights. You belong to us now.”
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“There is historical precedent for using epileptics to study the brain. Y’see, when a grand mal seizure occurs, different areas of the brain light up. You ever hear of a twentieth century scientist named Roger Sperry? He developed the theory of the left brain and the right brain, all from studying epileptics. We here at Project Perdix are after something a bit grander than that,” he smirks. “For these reasons and more, you belong to us now, Block. You belong to us.”
And he was right. My arms and feet were restrained. I was subjected to nearly three times as many experiments in the MRI thing each day.
I mumbled Bowie lyrics toward him. The song was “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.”
The hunched man with the dossier brought out a small handheld device. He said, “What was that, son?”
And the device went flashing. Then just light.
So why did I do it?
What pushes a person to the precipice, and then over? Was it exacerbated by Bobby? Was it the pleasure principle of Shadows? Was it the ordeal with the Air Force? The accident? The epilepsy? I’d wake up in the middle of the night after the experiments still restrained to the bed. Mouth dry and feeling disgusting, having to piss or shit. Hungry, but the thirst was worse than the hunger. To take my mind off all the things that were meant to torture me, I’d wonder: why did I feel the need to open up my wrists?
And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I’d do it again. I’d unwind my restraints somehow, rip the cord of my pulse monitor out of the wall and tie it to the ceiling. Wrap it around my neck, and just be done with it. My shadow would fall on the portrait of Saint Paul. It would be beautiful.
Day in and day out, it went. I lost track.
I’d be fed two times a day. The bathroom schedule was similar. That’s okay though because I’d go into the experiments having to piss, but wake up fine. They’d have to clean me somehow. Not much else to it. Lost time and a yearning to escape.
Yelling lyrics. I wouldn’t talk to the people who came in to experiment on me, or really even acknowledge them. Lyrics would just be flying out of my mouth. Maybe I was trying to prevent further seizures. Maybe I was just trying to pass the time. Maybe I was being a complete asshole.
I’d be screaming, at the top of my lungs as they transported me to the room, the chorus to “You Know You’re Right,” a Nirvana song, released nearly 10 years after the lead singer’s suicide.
I’d be whimpering Nine Inch Nails when they’d bring me pills and prepare to flash the light in my eyes.
The biggest regret of my life is that I never became a musician. I never learned how to play the piano properly, even though my grandmother was a piano instructor. I never learned to play the guitar, or beat a drum properly. Instead of singing the songs of my heart, I sing the songs of others.
“You have a beautiful voice,” she said.
I don’t know what was more shocking – that someone acknowledged me as human somehow, that my voice was complimented, or the French accent.
“Excuse me?”
“Désolée,” she says, almost giggling. “You were singing New Order.” She’s carrying a tray and wears pink scrubs. She’s got short dark hair.
“Technically, it was Joy Division.”
“I take it you’re a fan then.” Her accent is simply fantastic. I’m stricken.
“You could say that. My parents were fans – they raised me on that type of music. Mom was a big fan of post-punk and dad was a fan of new wave,” I told her. “Both genres had a bit of a revival when they were young. They each dove into the inspirations for the music they were listening to. People building on what came before.” I realized that it had been since the conversation with Smalley that I’d actually talked with someone. Had it been days? Weeks? Between seizures, time disappeared.
On the tray, she’s got a plate of eggs and biscuits. Orange juice. A small cup with pills. Is it morning?
“The song’s called ‘Ceremony.’ I used to listen to it on the Joy Division live album – Still. I like that version far better than New Order’s. Even Dad, who was more of a New Order fan, preferred that recording. Ian was far more passionate than Bernie,” I proclaim. “Always.”
“I’ve listened to some Joy Division in my time,” she says. “You know Curtis’ mistress, she was French, yes?”
You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in my life that I could carry on a Joy Division/New Order conversation with. As a matter of fact, I think she’s the only person who even knew who they were.
“You must be my shadow,” I tell her.
“What’s that mean, mon ami?”
“It means, perhaps you are only my shadow. I’ve known you for two minutes, and already you’re perfect.”
