A future-fable spun for a fiction writing class last semester.
I’ve been having strange dreams each night, like clockwork.
When I awaken my eyes burn with images of an azure and emerald forest, a city organic, mystic, and alive in immortality.
It’s unsettling, and I spend the remainder of the morning trying to deactivate the dream virus, combing through my program boards for some knowing mischief's glitch.
My workday begins at Hour L, right when the Earth rises past Scorpio and light begins to pool in shades of marmalade along the Love Canal. Hologram signs and flashing advertisements have already flickered on in most of the other retreats, but we can afford to operate shorter hours. A line of eager human women has already formed outside of out tent. Fourty, at least, all working equally to conceal their anticipation.
Professor enters promptly to do system checks. He inspects the mirrors for fluidity and sanitizes the bedsheets while I rub EntheoOil over my arms and torso. The fragrant liquid vaporizes almost instantly on contact, leaving a layer of glittery sheen infused with aphrodisiacs. Five minutes to opening, Professor reminds me. I examine myself in the mirror above the bed. Human, almost.
I look almost human.
We operate our business in traditional fashion, assembling our magenta yurt in a different city every season. It’s beginning to grow cumbersome as zoning restrictions tighten, yet we trudge on, setting up sometimes in schoolyards or parks. Often, I question why we haven’t invested in one of the neon-lit shopfronts or thought to rent a loft from which to operate.
I know better than to voice my confusion.
Our livelihood is dependent on our anonymity, the Professor would say. To be visible is to be branded. Apart from the holographic image of a molecule rotating above our canopy, one would have trouble distinguishing our shop from the others crowded about the churchyard. Inside, the space is nearly empty but for the mirrors and a sprawling round bed. A semi-circular shelf runs eye-level along the yurt’s wall, displaying a gleaming array of organic and synthesized entheogens, bottled and neatly organized by use and potency. I suspect the shelving itself, carved from authentic tree wood, is worth more than the apothecary which it displays.
Perhaps more than I.
The motives of my creator remain a mystery to me still, and though it’s clear he cares for my well being I sense a deep unrest that knots his furrowed brow a fraction deeper every evening and slows, bit by bit, the vigor of his morning movements.
Clustered candles of varying size and color are scattered about over any available surface, infusing the small space with a glow incandescent. I brush my fingertips lightly over fragile stalactites of wax bridging the space between the shelve’s edge and carpet. I am reminded of something distant, the gleaming teeth I saw once in a dream.
“Better get yourself ready for the first two,” He said, pulling back the curtain to peek out into the crowd. “Government ‘gals. You’ll need these.” He tossed a riding crop and a couple sets of handcuffs onto the bed with a sharp laugh.
“Aren’t there other districts---” I protested.
“Really, where’s your sense of adventure, Engager? Here, take this.” He handed me a small black capsule inscribed with a cursive D. I obeyed without thought of question; anything Professor gives me helps, usually. “It’s a program I wrote to alter your mood coding temporarily. It’ll make you more dominant, hopefully. God knows you need it.”
Yes, God. I swallow the tiny capsule and feel the recoding process initiate, slowly at first and blessedly subtle. Suddenly I’ve become aware of my duplicate reflections surrounding and repeating infinitely across the marquee’s many mirrors. I stand outside myself, watching myself watching myself. I smile, I smile, I smile.
Finally we were getting somewhere.
I am knee-deep in her now, hunched over my project in prayer, gloved hands buried beneath her silicone skin, soft as cream and luminous. It’s rare I’m able to work with such exquisite materials, and my hands shake as I delicately coil thin, silk-like wires around her engineered interior. I want to bless each fragile white hair and praise how it glistens with oceans of electricity and vibrating universes of nanotechnology. It’s existence alone stands as a marvel inexplicable. Soon, soon, yes, we’re very close now. Each wire brings her closer, each circuit another step to completion.
I try not to think of you too much, Ruby, or else this vessel with morph into your image.
You can see it already in the face, see. Arched and moon shaped, like your mother’s. He asked me to engineer the perfect female vessel, but god knows what he’ll use it for. I’m doing my best to keep you out of this, out of her, but it’s not entirely conscious. The android will be a doe-eyed blonde, willowy and modeled after European pedigree.
I promise to keep your Kansas with me aways, to keep alive in my memory the robust and passionate beauty of prairie women, whose eyes dance ignited with molten currents of mythic, burning intellect.
How I wish you could have known your mother when as I did, long ago, and see how alight she was in the untamed fury of her eighteenth summer, feathers in her hair. Peyote was the name she used then, and when I asked she said her parents were artists, a deliberate lie I noticed but let slide; the mystery of her motives intrigued me.
Your mother and her sisters stirred fresh winds in the otherwise stagnant drone of farm life, and over a summer their antics evolved and became the feed for local legend. As a tribe, the seven of them pounded fury into the earth, and collectively devoted an entire summer to shattering the still lives of prairie folk with a storm of hoofbeats and howling.
Still
I am haunted with images of your mother’s shadowy form amongst a flight of valkyries, her tan legs clenching the drum of an athletic pinto, swift as fire. Again and again I watch her lean her mouth close to the white fold of the horse’s ear, whispering to the beast secrets she would never tell me; hidden glimpses of another world, past lovers, distant dreams.
&Each time her mouth moves differently against the creature’s ear, hiding something new and undiscovered. It would be years before I’d realize your mother’s words were but one half of a mutual exchange of support and comfort between two wild spirits, racing against the evanescing horizon and facing inevitable extinction the only way they could,
with speed.
There are no prairies now, no open spaces. While I search still for glints of rebellion, our clients prove to only grow more tired with the years, the mouths of their young stuffed tight into sedated silence. I coat another honey-colored layer of sheen over the paleness of her silicone lips, tasting on my own the ammonia bite of drying plastic. Could this android in waking flick a sensitive tongue to taste as I do the chemical sting of her beauty, then perhaps we would see the swans of Hephaestus rage against their predestined objectification, to join with sisters of flesh to stage again a violent revolt to tear from their bodies swollen leaches and reclaim the feminine divine from corporate control.
Fire, Fire, Fire!
Shrieking, the women drown out sirens and the amplified barks of police officers the city trembles with their furious volume. Three million people flood the business district, dragging from shattered storefronts mannequin hostages which they ignite in effigy. From their towers, the shaman of capital watch in horror as the Chamber for Collective Commerce building erupts into an inferno fueled by galaxies of paperwork. Into this, the people cast false idols of fashion and womanhood until the pyramidical structure becomes the burning apex of their vision.
I wrap my mouth and nose in layers of airy gauze before coming here again, though in the three years since your riot the settled smoke has long since dispersed and no physical evidence exists to show it even occurred. Instead, boutiques have been supplemented with chemical spas and private practices, all promising to carry a paying customer to physical perfection. Some stare as I make my way slowly through the Market plaza, trying to recall what I remind them of.
Memory is short.
Three days this district burned and I hadn’t heard a word from you as to your safety or location. I was confident, though, unlike some of the families with whom I searched alongside. They were tragic cases, casualties. You were different.
I’m convinced to this day
when I think back to my last image of you
flashing a grin ablaze with vital youth,
Hidden in the war paint streaking your face
in vibrant carmine
that your mother glinted back at me
hazel eyes once again impassioned and alive
I searched in the ash until I had examined every inch of the district with scientific precision. No flake of debris went unturned, no questions went unasked. I know the buildings well, even with their new displays of advertisements.
“The modern woman commands hearts through her body alone.”
On the back of the card was the number and address for a Dr. Richard Owsley, specialist in surgical cosmetics, boasting over 200 designer augmentations and genetic reconfiguration available upon special request.
I think of the women who come to our tent, their flavorless features and identities erased into anonymity.
Unfolding their bodies exclusively for eyes artificial, insecurities and hesitancy abandoned alongside the Real. Our business does not strive to imitate the tired and repetitive act of human copulation, but rather orchestrate an exploration in psycho-physical nirvana.
Can you understand my words, Doctor, oh Doctor?
You who cross the female form with webs of silken white scars.
But they come and they come and we serve them. Alined at the entrance like animals, waiting to be fed.
We feed. Oh, yes that’s no question. One after the other, our satisfied customers exit through the pavilion, flushed pink and sedated. After twenty-five minutes they should be able to resume whatever mundane tasks they’ve filled their schedules with.
Right, yes, there. God, the walls They’re breathing.
I’m not getting any younger, no.
Each goddamn day I wake to find the morning
more painful to swallow with breakfast
my eyes take longer to adjust to the searing dawn
yet we must rise, we must move with the twin suns
each day I begin my routine
Like lightning I am crossed with the paths
of early, unsettling decay.
I return to my crowded lab after checking again on the android Engager, whom I saw sitting cross-legged in a nest of satin and down bedding , carefully tearing from a magazine glossy photos of technicolor nebula, alining the edges against one and other until the round bed was covered in an inky mosaic of polychromasia. He gazed, unblinking into the chasm.
The Eyes of Horus stand poised at the edge of the gazing pool, each alined with an apex of cosmic geometry, etched with runes into the polished obsidian tile from which they read in silence the charts of manifest divine. The frigid air of the winter solstice turns the sky lucid in its clarity making crystalline the separation between microcosm and macrocosm; as above, so below.
I hope you never need to lock away a memory, to wash away responsibility and consequences until what really happened becomes lost in a maze of possible, probable variations. In your life you’ll no doubt stumble into the paths of those who have interest in keeping your memories fresh, appearing at your door some day unexpected, maliciously aware their very presence opens floodgates of neglected truth and forgotten pain.
People from the past, especially the unpleasant ones, have a habit of turning up when you’re most venerable. Only a televangelist could have had timed a visit so perfectly. I had been replaying in my mind our last conversation, where the severity of your imprisonment dawned upon me. I stayed awake, afraid to sleep for fear of dreams. It was early the next morning when your godfather, Aelphys West, found me and shook me back to a half-life I’d tried so hard to escape.
Even without the program, you were probably too young to remember. It was with him I had moved to Witchitaw, on a miracle grant to study the supernatural resonances of tornados. It was an academic catastrophe. Stunned and powerless, we watched days and weeks groan on in mocking quiet, with not even a thunderstorm to stir a reading on our machines. It was in this boredom Aelphys and I drafted the initial manuscript of the Order, a text which outlined the basis for a half cult-half philosophy wrought with consequences neither of us could imagine.
It was a grey morning, quiet. Sleepless.
At once distant and familiar, I was greeted with a crooked thistle smile and jittery fingers, tapping. I remember the way his name looked in ink, black curls embedded into the crisp computer paper. Aelphys, spelled with a Y, like a disease.
A name and student impossible to forget, though I had tried.
I tried to explain, tried to tell him that a man of my age can’t afford to work on commission, not that kind, not that deadline. Back at the lab we were young and could swing through 30 to 40 hour shifts under fume hoods--
Now I must keep myself in smaller spheres, alternating strenuous activities. My lab sessions are short yet productive, guided only on the whim of my personal needs as opposed to academic and technological urgency.
My, it’s been ages. Love what you’ve done with the yurt. Shall we cut to the chase?
Always impatient, always demanding. Doesn’t make for a good chemist, I had warned him.
I have a business proposal for you.
He entered, bending his head slightly and slipped through the doorway, a ghostly trail of layered capes and scarves floated behind in the wake. Everything about his appearance was entirely too theatrical; the billowy saffron of his robes, which glow on camera radiantly, cast an unnatural shock about the room. All light seemed to absorb into the cold pale of his cheekbones, jutting icy and frosted with flickers of crushed glass.
I returned his lukewarm grin with a trained dispassion, clipped and unmoving against better judgement.
Keep your money, I don’t work for hire.
The words were empty like script dialogue-- you don’t turn away someone like your godfather. There’s too much history. Once his shadow stains your door the inevitable is best faced with equanimity. He’s the hand, he’s a wolf. If your paths somehow cross in the future be it known you are chased.
I asked what he needed an android for, had the great televangelist grown bored his harem?
“The Awakening is upon us, Aldous. You translated it yourself from the Therion, remember? The divine pranayama is one born of lightning. Electricity. The prophecy speaks of an electric messiah, don’t you see? Your daughter, she saw in her vision a golden dawn of AC/DC gods, a pantheon---”
A vein of hot static cut the air between us, I rose, stomach reeling.
“Those were dreams, not visions. We were fools to interpret the drawings as anything beyond scribbled fantasy. She was a child, not an Oracle.”
I soaked each word in crackling vile, each a dagger of betrayal to the Order, to mankind’s lustful dreams of evolution. We kept sacred and hidden the art of alchemy, protecting it selfishly in sterile laboratories and cultish ritual. We had found enlightenment, the eightfold path of technology, and used it to control not ourselves, but others. Your godfather was the first to cast away altruism, plucking it from the roots to be tossed in a growing landfill of principles, people, and governments who had stood in the way of his image.
The Shaman’s mouth curled into dangerous-looking smile, baring teeth white as bone and dangerous.
Fixing his eyes on mine he leaned across the worktable, cat-eye glasses glinting in the lamplight like insect wings.
“Make me a female vessel and I’ll have no need for prophecy. Do this and you’ll get your daughter back.”
The soil erodes and crumbles to sand, hope and desperation deepening.
A bargain and a choice.
Outside, gathering clouds release at last their tearful exhale
drumming softly on the layered canvas
With shaking fingers, I pry loose careful stitches
I had sewn to close the esoteric eye
The completed vessel sleeps before me, perfect and whole. She dreams visions of embraces, of alien oceans vibrant with teeming schools of thought.
When you return to me
Let us find a joy once more in the infinite blue
as you did, kicking ruby heels higher, swinging fast against the heavens.
hand in hand we’ll find a future in the sunlight
turned away from melting stars.
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