This Weightless World, page 14
“Why my best interest and not somebody else’s?” Sevi said, talking quickly so as not to sound dumbstruck, but so fast the man opened his eyes to make sure he wasn’t lunging at him.
“Not your best interest, but, like, the best interest of humanity. Herodotus isn’t ideological, it’s teleological,” the man said. “It’s inherently nonconformist. It produces novelty. Right now, we’re so busy trying to decide who and what to believe, we have no time to ask what’s best for humanity.”
“And how do you determine what’s best for humanity?”
“Good grief, Sevi, have an imagination,” Ramona interrupted.
“Good grief?” Sevi said. He didn’t know what “teleological” meant.
“For fuck’s sake. Better?” she said. “I’m trying not to swear in front of my team. As fun as doom-and-gloom sci-fi is, uncovering some grand conspiracy at Google isn’t going to save the human race. Doing something about the problems we face right now will.”
“And what will the Ramona version of the internet solve first?”
“It’s not my version. It’s curated by an unbiased AI fed by decentralized deep-learning networks. It’s solutions-based. Teleological.”
“What’s it solve first?”
Ramona swallowed. “The everlasting question. What is one to do? It will make us better citizens, better voters, better friends of the planet, safer, more peaceful, happier.”
“Better, faster, stronger. Fitter, happier, more productive,” Sevi said.
“Nice,” First Amendment said, and Ramona cut him a look.
“How’s it do it, though?” Sevi said.
“By teaching us how to be those things,” Ramona answered.
“With what?”
“Our own mistakes. For once, something will help us learn from our own mistakes.”
Sevi realized he was tilting forward, rubbing against the man next to him, who was starting to squirm. He touched all four legs of his chair to the ground.
“We’re creating a VR simulation,” Ramona said. “Using some stuff Herodotus finds useful.”
“Of what?” Sevi asked, annoyed.
“Being attacked by a US drone at a birthday party.”
“Sounds like a great video game,” he said, mincing the minced garlic in his stir-fry.
“Yeah, for kids who want to grow up to be drone pilots. That way they know what it’s like to be on the ground.”
“The Empathy Machine,” Sevi said. “That’s what you should call it.”
“Sounds like Bradbury,” First Amendment said.
Sevi sipped from his can of craft beer.
“The potential for humankind to understand itself and improve itself based on that understanding is tapped. That’s why, no matter how much money we make, or how advanced our science gets, we keep making the same mistakes. Herodotus lifts the weight of our miserable history off our shoulders, remembers it for us, and teaches us how to be entirely free right now. And it has to do this now before we really start dragging down our future, burying it, drowning it,” Ramona said.
Sevi shook his head.
“That’s just a TED Talk,” he said.
“You’ve heard of Ted Jenks?” First Amendment asked.
“The conspiracy theorist?” Sevi said.
In Jenks’s circles, Barack Obama was not just a Kenyan Muslim but a serial rapist; climate change was a covert military technology operation designed to drive rural white America into poverty; Omni had not shut off its signal but been silenced.
“Watch this,” First Amendment said and handed Sevi his phone.
A YouTube video was already playing. Ted Jenks sat in his usual makeshift studio in Richmond, Virginia, behind a long IKEA desk cluttered with electronics and before a green screen, which featured the familiar graphic of Omni orbiting one of its binary stars. Jenks brought viewers up to speed on what they already knew: Omni had been trying to send instructions from Jesus on how to solve our planet’s morality crisis when Obama pulled the plug.
The team of cryptologists I and a group of philanthropic patriots have assembled, which our own federal government refuses to listen to, have had a major breakthrough. They’ve uncovered a Rosetta Stone, of sorts, and have begun translating the message. They’ve decided to move backward because we assume the most crucial information was coming toward the end, when Omni realized what our overlords were probably going to do. In the final hours of their transmission, the Omnians made a call to arms, my friends. I quote, “The people of Earth should unite against their leaders to prevent doomsday.”
“Then he starts ranting,” First Amendment said, taking back his phone. “Herodotus’s analysis of this particular piece of rhetoric predicts a major event before the end of the month.”
“Major event?” Sevi said.
“Mass shooting. Bombing. Kidnapping,” Ramona said.
“One of those things happens every month as it is,” Sevi said.
“When it reaches 75,000 views, it’ll be a matter of days,” Ramona said.
“It’s at forty k, right now,” First Amendment said. “Which means we can prevent it if we take the video down.”
“That violates free speech; he’s not directly inciting violence,” Sevi said. “People won’t stand for it. How do you expect to get anyone to sign on to something like this?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Ramona said, “We’re Google,” and laughed. When she saw Sevi’s face, she stopped.
“Then what’s stopping you?” Sevi asked her.
“We’ll find out at this meeting.”
* * *
WHILE RAMONA HELD her meeting with leadership, Sevi took a bus to a nearby campus gym to swim. He crawled the pool in Google swim trunks for over an hour, entirely alone in the natatorium save for a group of teenagers playing an odd variation of the game Marco Polo in which they screamed the words Ibn Battuta in place of the Venetian’s name. Exercise, it was said, especially swimming, with its return-to-the-womb physics and sensuality, cleared the mind. But efforting his body through the water, Sevi did a tremendous amount of thinking. About Ramona. About the future. Of the future, he realized he would never be ready for it; it would undo him and destroy him. He was the creature in the fable who neglected to store food for the winter; not because he was lazy or careless, but because he’d never heard of, much less experienced, winter. All the while, people like Ramona were building the containers storing the nuts. They called it the cloud. He stubbed his toe on a word in his brain. Luddite. And for the first time he understood it was not only a frame of mind, but a class and a prison. He could have Ramona teach him some things, programming, coding. He, too, could essentialize his life and take charge of his own fate, he supposed. But how would he know when to stop? Hitler and Stalin claimed cutting the pudge of personal liberty from society made for faster, stronger, and more productive systems than fat-ass liberal democracy. What lean visions were the automated internet age conjuring?
He swam and swam. The cold, blue water a dizzying monotony. Air and the blaring natatorium lighting overhead, a white wash of breaking water, the concussed blue of the pool floor, the water breaking in a wash of white, the overhead lighting blaring through the air. The exercise was carnage against his lungs, he could feel them shredding apart, but the rest of his body was streamlined and perfectly repeated, algorithmic, and he felt the need to get away from something. When it wasn’t Ramona and her AI historian chasing him like Jaws, it was Eason dragging his cello across Humboldt Park in search of him, calling out his name and knocking on doors. He tried to remember what he’d said to Eason the last time he’d seen him. He hoped it wasn’t something stupid about Bach. He hoped it was something real, having to do with the living, but he was pretty sure he’d left him with Schopenhauer’s line about all other art speaking of the shadow, and music speaking of the essence. It was a good line, but what had it meant in that moment? If music was its own object in the universe, indistinguishable from raw will, it should do more than stand for something. If Schopenhauer was right, music should be able to stand in the way of things, ward off spirits and flag down cars and convince aliens the human race was worthy, but it hadn’t. Then again, human beings themselves, with all their empathy and concern, their ability to scorn someone with a bassoon and cry out in pain on a piano, hardly adjusted one another’s fates either. Music, as it’d turned out, wasn’t magic, and Sevi had to escape Eason, too. Eason, whom he couldn’t save; who was a part of the life Sevi had left behind; who hardly existed at all in this new world Omni and Sevi had created, much less the one Herodotus would eventually create.
In the deepest section of the pool, lurking in the glossy blue shadows near the bottom, was the murky figure of his brother, Samson. Sometimes, always, again. A man who’d gone to stand in the way of things, convince us we were good. He’d been pointing out connections to Sevi ever since he’d disappeared: the obvious, the invisible. In a single daytime news session Sevi had learned of a train derailed in Spain, ribboning track for a quarter kilometer; a thirteen-year-old boy in New Mexico who’d opened fire on his classmates; and a woodpecker gone extinct in Canada. Each of the events seemed to secretly know one another, lovers in a crowded room hiding an affair. While he watched the news, outside his window, people protested buses. A white man on PCP spent an hour trying to get into cars stopped at the light before the police picked him up. These were the different shapes and signals of depravity and disparity, the things Samson had loved to talk about and Sevi had loved to ignore. The signals were impossible to ignore now. Signs, everywhere, for the seeing. In their speeches, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Vladimir Putin, and Angela Merkel blamed one another for Omni’s silence. Liberal democracy was enslaving the world under a single transnational order seeking control of every resource we had left. Illiberal democracy and kleptocrats were indifferent to the suffering of others and made us look barbaric. Civil wars among the oldest civilizations on Earth went on, day after day, funded by people like Putin and Obama.
At first, these connections had only made Sevi cringe—conspiracies were like religion, an excuse to take things out of and off your hands. Taken too literally, these ideas could turn you into a crusader or a martyr. But watching a clip of an Athenian bus strike, he remembered a story Samson had told him about sleeping with a pack of dogs in the Parthenon, and Samson began appearing in the sea of North African faces in the video. Samson washed up on the shores of Greek islands Sevi had thought only existed in mythology, an orange life vest stretched over his bloated body, one of the countless drowned refugees appearing every few weeks like debris from a faraway hurricane. In the pool, Sevi tried to tell himself these were feckless parallels. He tried his best to let the visions, the nightmares, go slack, dissolve with logic. That’s life. Logic said it didn’t matter where Samson was. It didn’t matter if Samson was coming back. He’d leave again. Samson always existed someplace else. You could be in the same room with him, and the guy still wouldn’t be there. Sevi had spent years awake at night, wondering, worrying. From each of Samson’s disappearances, Sevi had imaginary memories of where he’d been, what he’d done, what he’d seen, how he’d died. To hold Samson in his mind was to fissure his own consciousness, partition his own person with improbabilities. Swimming, it could drown him. It didn’t matter that Samson was always sorry when he came back. Sevi figured there were people you loved whom you never thought about. The cosmos kept itself together without ever knowing its composite parts. There was something even Zen about not caring about Samson. Not caring could be a practice. Already he wanted in one fell swoop to chop every wrinkled umbilical cord tethering him to the far, draining points of the universe. It was exhausting having to give so many shits. An empathy hangover. He’d read somewhere the human brain used to think about its own life 80 percent of the time; now, it reserved most of its resources for others. More burdens for the most considerate generation that ever lived; a generation measuring its worth in concern. Letting go of all concerns both personal and societal, he felt whole and weightless and remote as he swam. He felt resolved. No Omni to shame him, no Samson to shame him. Now, how long can I make this last? he wondered. It worried him that it’d go away. It worried him that Herodotus would make the world at large his constant companion. How would Herodotus keep from drowning him too?
Ramona appeared at one end of the pool with a towel in her hands. She wasn’t a hallucination. She was beaming. It could’ve been the fractured reflection of the pool swimming across her face or the halo of lighting encircling her head, but she looked angelic.
“Hello, hello,” she said to him as he toweled off.
She looked at him hungrily. He had no idea what interest women had in men. She had once shocked him by saying if she could keep four of his body parts in a box she’d collect a wrist, a shoulder blade, his penis, and his lips. What’s more, she’d laughed when he said he’d take her breasts, her vagina, her hair, and her eyes. “That’s the way a girl is defined in a children’s drawing,” she said. “You just want to make sure it’s a girl you’re keeping.”
She had a conquesting look now.
“You look happy,” Sevi said, heaving, dropping water, woozy.
“Promise you won’t be mad?” she said.
“I promise,” he said.
They’d promised it was okay to be happy.
“I am,” she said.
He tried holding on to the weightlessness of the pool, the faith in the idea that feeling nothing was a good thing.
“Can I ask why?” he said, ignoring his better judgment.
“No,” she said.
* * *
AT HOME, SEVI explained he was in no condition for sex. The pool had destroyed him. All his shame, anger, and concern had returned.
“I can barely lift my hand,” he said. “I haven’t exercised like that probably ever in my life.”
She said, “I don’t need a spotter.”
From below she looked like an acrobat, and he winced every time he thought she might fall, but understanding the charity of other people’s bodies he stuck to it, lending her his hands and the occasional kiss. More ghosts had never passed through his mind during sex. Sensing his body’s mechanical pleasure only distantly, he experienced guilt, mostly. Mostly over having taken so much pleasure in not caring, even if only for a few fleeting laps.
INOCULATION
Taka keeps a cat. A nutritional virus, Taka calls it, an anomaly ghosting through its code that messes with things when Taka isn’t looking. It’s an AI within the AI. When it’s feeling cheeky, it will manifest itself in the ship. A little, orange, white-belly tabby with pink paws and green eyes. It leaps at me from behind corners or sleeps in my bed. The cat simulates network hazards, the ills of the connectivity Taka has lost this deep in space. The cat is meant to keep Taka’s immune system up, so when it connects with foreign systems in the future, it will not be destroyed. The cat cracks encryptions and keeps Taka’s privacy security up to date too.
How do I keep my immune system healthy?
By ingesting the diseased world I was so desperate to escape.
* * *
The greenhouse, a corridor of glass cubes receding several hundred meters to a vanishing point. It is dim and calm, and the robotic gardeners give off a pleasant hum. I enjoy the muggy, sweet fecal smell of the place.
A medical library, I tell Taka and take a banana plant’s hand.
The smallest bird, a little orange, a little mossy, appears.
Cute trick, Taka, I say.
It lands on my chest, and I can feel it, its tiny feet clinging to the fabric of my shirt, the insanity of its heart against my own.
Not mine, Taka says, and the bird disappears into the shadows overhead.
It’s the thirtieth generation of its family. It makes a magnificent nest, Taka says.
Taka takes me to the shallow brown crown, a bustle of sticks and fibers. I recognize a part of my uniform in the weave. The diseases the bird must carry, I think.
I see a shadow move, liquidly, in the corner. A crouching figure.
Do you see him? Taka asks.
* * *
I look at something more chimpy in countenance than me, but no less elegant in curiosity, which, when it turns its face away again, it expresses with its back, a fur cloak rippling and buckling like an inquisitive brow, rolling forward with its left shoulder. I walk around him—a sculpture in a museum, a tree in a conservatory. Its fingers are in potting soil, drawing rivulets. I think he might be playing, gardening. A stowaway of history.
NOT A HALF HOUR AFTER his latest drop-off with Julio—who was ten, a fact that left Eason feeling scummy inside—Germaine showed up at the apartment in a LeBron James jersey.
“I saw the light,” Germaine said. “There’s no denying it, LeBron James is the greatest player of all time.”
The Heat had defeated the Thunder in the NBA finals and LeBron had earned the MVP title.
“Since when do you even like basketball?” Eason said.
“Since D. Rose come on the scene.”
“You’re dumb as hell,” Eason said.
“You’re just a hater. People don’t like LeBron because he’s too good. Ain’t nobody ready to see a man with that much skill. I’m ready.”
