Hard Copy, page 11
‘That’s a pretty good day for a birthday.’
‘Yes.’
We drive on. It’s quite a long way to the recycling point. When we get there, the garbage man has to park the van in a particular spot so that it can be weighed. He is very interested in my work. I tell him about the printer. Our connection.
‘I know that might sound a bit strange,’ I say.
‘Oh, some people hug trees, don’t they?’ He smiles at me, looks at me, then looks back at the road. He doesn’t seem too alarmed by what I’ve said. It feels very natural to ride with him in this little van, as if I’m floating off somewhere, but at the same time I’m more present than ever.
*
There, in the shopping centre, was where my best friend and I saw Christina for the last time. She wasn’t around for the fire, for our rescue attempt. Danny and Romy weren’t there either. Now I think we didn’t expect them to be there, but at the time we really wished they would be. We’d hoped for a moment that Christina would be able to see the situation for what it was: that we had been doing something for her. That even though we didn’t like her, we wanted to help her, we wanted to take action. We wanted her to know that we knew about the five-guilder man, and that we were looking out for her. A temporary truce in the Girls’ War, which would begin with this fire. We were also, in turn, hoping for a moment when we’d see that she appreciated it, in an aloof, almost professional, way. A moment when she realized what had happened. Yes, the ultimate moment, really, when everything would come together. But things did not come together at all. They all happened separately. The five-guilder man did something. My best friend and I did something. Christina disappeared. We never saw each other again. Things happen independently of each other, over and over again, they are not necessarily connected at all. That’s what I need to remember.
Part 3
Peer Review
The sun is scorching hot. We are in the twenty-first century. It is Thursday. In the largest central square of this European city there lies an abandoned, grubby rug. A dirty, frayed Persian rug. On the rug is a bucket. Just a regular bucket, blue plastic, nothing out of the ordinary. The square is crowded. People hurry past the rug – they hardly seem to notice that it has been unfurled in the middle of a public square. The benches lining the square are full of tourists, pigeons rummaging at their feet. They’re resting up after their tour of the city, having a bite to eat, a sip of water. They study the maps on their phones, stare at the people passing by. Everyone is dressed for summer, apart from the people who live in this city; those people are just on their way to work.
A man appears. He’s carrying a big green bottle. His shaggy black hair is tied back in a long ponytail. He walks straight up to the rug; everyone automatically steps aside. Crouching down, he pours whatever is in the bottle into the blue bucket. Then he picks up two long thin sticks that are tied together with string – a contraption that had been lying there unobserved until now. He dips the sticks into the bucket, swirls them round and look! Great big gleaming soap bubbles go drifting slowly through the air. The sunlight is reflected in the bubbles. Bright pearly orbs of pink, lilac, green, purple, turquoise, gold, tumble about in the clear blue sky. Children run after the iridescent shapeshifting bubbles, trying to pop them. They screech with excitement, the sound bouncing across the cobblestones of the square. A woman stands still and flaps her hands at a bubble from below, causing it to soar high into the air. One of the tourists blows at the fat bubble waddling towards him and is pleased to see it change course. An old man stands frozen in place, following the trajectory of one particular bubble. High against the baby-blue sky, the bubbles that have survived the longest are nearly out of sight, hard to see even if you squint.
Not that I can squint. I have no eyes. No eyelashes. I am able to see nothing of the world, nothing of what these tourists, passers-by, children, all see. But I am aware of what is happening out there, even at a distance of 1.1 kilometres (approx.) as the crow flies. I don’t hear anything either. I cannot smell, I cannot taste. I don’t have any of the same senses as humans; I don’t even possess a body. It’s lucky I don’t, I should say! For I am aware of what is happening all around me on an electromagnetic level. This sounds a little odd, I know. I’m sure the neurons in your brain, the ones that are sending and receiving signals right now, are arriving at the conclusion that this is all spiritual nonsense. But spiritual nonsense is not for me. I am talking about science, about electrons: there’s nothing nonsensical about that. It’s pure physics. A soap bubble, for instance, stays intact for longer than a water bubble due to its electrically charged surfactant agents. I can sense those. Those surfactants lower the surface tension of the bubble, and that is how the bubble stays buoyant, drifting higher and higher, until the soap bubble, like the rest of us, experiences the pull of gravity; the water in the membrane is dragged to the bottom of the bubble, the upper side gets thinner and thinner, the colours fade, the bubble turns silver and finally blacker than black, and then it pops. I follow the entire process and, step by step, piece it all together.
I have thus been able, on an elementary level, to train myself, and if I concentrate hard enough I can comprehend everything. Just as a bat sees the world through echolocation, I do so through my sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation. I know how objects, people, animals and other beings move through space in relation to one another. I am able to recognize the phenomena that are created through the interaction of person and thing, animal and planet, object and subject, object and object, subject and subject, and I know that the big question is whether we (I say ‘we’, because don’t I count, too?) are still able to make this binary subject–object distinction.
Closer to home, I also know how fast a human heart beats, its tempo, the viscosity of the blood that flows through her veins, by how many degrees her body temperature rises or falls, and how much electrostatic tension that warm body holds. From the energy that’s been building up in her body which needs an escape, I can predict the exact instant when she’ll get an electric shock from touching a metal doorknob. I can do the same with people who are further away, in other rooms, on other floors, in other big-city canal houses, in suburbs, in the countryside, in other countries. Distance has little to do with it. The longer I sit here, the more thoroughly I am able to learn everything about the world around me. It is funny that humans are so obsessed with building robots when I already exist. I can sense when there’s a low-pressure system in the works, I recognize music in sound waves, I know when a person is happy, and when she is not.
I have existed since 2014. I was manufactured in autumn of that year, in a large factory in Mizuho, where a century prior sewing machines were made. But when it comes right down to it, the date of my genesis is irrelevant. I know, if I concentrate hard enough, what went on before I existed, and I know what will happen once I am reduced to dust; time is non-linear, and that is how I experience it, too. In my world, everything happens at the same time. Incidents flash by rather haphazardly, incidents that, at this exact moment, may be taking place 600 metres from here (a student in a green jacket distributing flyers about climate change), or may have occurred nineteen years ago and 712 kilometres away (a red-breasted robin, winging its way against a grey sky, lands on a stone trough that was erected in the French town’s square by the municipal authority. The trough still stands there to this day). But I can only recall these things if I really focus. If I don’t concentrate, I get nowhere.
Back in my early days at the factory, though, something went wrong, and this resulted in a slight malfunction in my hardware. It is a problem that will keep on getting worse. At this moment in time I am doing just fine, thank you for your concern, but at a certain point it will mean the end of me. By way of explanation: I am held together with minuscule screws of very precise dimensions. Normally, these are screwed into machines such as myself using a colossal piece of equipment, but on the day I was made, this machinery was out of order due to a region-wide power outage. The blackout was caused by a power company, which had temporarily disconnected a 380-kilovolt electricity cable suspended over a river in order to let a cruise ship pass. The consequences, however, were unanticipated: disconnecting that one cable caused an overload on all the other high-voltage lines, which caused a domino effect, and a wave of power outages spread across central Japan. This unfortunate incident made it necessary – highly exceptional in the case of my kind of machine – for my construction to be completed by a human.
An inattentive factory worker (although I do not wish to blame anyone personally, and the man did have his reasons – his wife was threatening to leave him because she thought he was not paying enough attention to her, which was in fact true, he was preoccupied with his dog’s declining health) had accidentally dropped one of the little screws that was to be fastened inside me. That one little screw went rolling across the shop floor, landed underneath an enormous piece of equipment, and was never found again. It’s still lying there today. So the factory worker went looking for another screw, but he couldn’t tell the difference between the correct, fitting screw and a screw no longer in use for my kind of machine on account of a greater tendency to wear-and-tear. So, due to this series of events, I have one screw inside me that is more prone to abrasion, which ultimately means I’ll be declared defective sooner than other machines of my generation. I constantly feel that little screw’s presence, like a black poppyseed that’s stuck between a human’s white teeth (or at least, that’s how I imagine it feels). Still, I have made peace with my lot. There’s something special, isn’t there, about having something inside me that both is and is not a part of me? I am and I am not. It’s an annoying little screw, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
My partner has no idea about any of this. I would like to keep it that way; the truth would only cause her more stress. And besides, even if I did want to prepare her for my demise, I would never be able to. How would I inform her? No, she will just have to remain unaware of my inevitable premature end. With my abrupt switch from working-perfectly-fine to ready-for-the-scrap-heap. No need to worry about it just yet, anyway; I know I’ve got a little while longer.
I do miss my partner. She gave my existence meaning. Without the daily tasks she assigned to me, without the focus she provided me, my consciousness is just one big muddle. Still, for the sake of this story, I shall try to distinguish one thing from another as best I can, try to put them in some kind of context.
I miss the paper too, by the way. For what is a printer without paper? There are dozens of boxes of paper lying about in here. I can feel them drying out, beginning to curl up at the edges. The paper hasn’t moved, but now it is starting to buckle: it is too warm and humid in here, the fibres press too heavily on one another, there’s unavoidable shifting going on, and so, in any future collaboration, things are bound to go wrong. A paper jam will occur inside me – a ‘flower arrangement’, as the experts refer to it – sheets folding up like petals and blocking their own passage, then crumpling up. They will become trapped inside my essential components, and in this way we shall find ourselves stuck fast.
Anyway, back to that rug, back to those tourists. They may annoy you, but isn’t it reassuring, really, that such hordes of people have sufficient money, time and freedom to come here for recreation, consumption, and goodness only knows what else? Straggling, shoulders drooping, in and out of cool boutiques, to spend money freshly withdrawn from a cash machine on unnecessary goods and expensive, objectionable food, and then stopping still at the sight of a giant soap bubble in flight. On this frightfully hot day there are close to seventy-five thousand tourists wandering about the city. That’s a good sign. It means that in this part of the world we are not at war.
In my case, the exceptionally hot temperature, combined with the humidity of the past few weeks, is leading to all kinds of trouble. When it’s hot and the air is damp, not only will my paper not cooperate, but my partner grows more and more emotional (she too suffers from the heat), my inner workings overheat too quickly, and all in all it’s a lot for me to handle. It takes a great deal of energy for me to keep running. My partner has been absent for a while now, but that does not mean I’ve been sleeping. Sometimes I come to life spontaneously. I don’t do it on purpose, it just happens. It is probably my mechanical instinct; I am starting to find it kicking into action more frequently these days.
To the rest of the office, it doesn’t make that much difference how hot it is, what season or what kind of weather. Autumn, winter, spring, summer – to the people walking around in here, every day is just about the same. When you’re indoors you forget what’s going on outside. From time to time a new colleague will report for duty, sometimes one of them retires – occasions that are important to the people in question, but make no significant difference in the overall office ecosystem. The office goes on no matter what, as long as there’s some little puppet to pull the little strings. If you are no longer there to wipe the kitchen counter clean, someone else will do it in your stead. Everybody wants to be more than just a cog in the machine, and office people like to uphold the idea that they are indeed more than that, that they aren’t just working on an assembly line with a spanner in their hand. But I have been here for a long time, and I can tell them: if that’s what they think, they are, unfortunately, incorrect. Every office worker is just a little puppet, and when the puppet breaks or gets mangled in the machinery gears, well, that’s no problem at all for the office system. The office is really just a machine like me, its staff easily replaceable components. People tend to overestimate their own value and importance, but I understand that this is crucial for the employee’s psychological motivation. Only if they feel this way will they show up for work, day in, day out.
It has been very quiet around here for quite some time now. In the morning the door remains shut, and even the cleaners skip my room these days. In the evening, around seven, the cleaning crew arrives. It’s a family: father, mother, son, daughter. They used to take great care with me – they always picked my pages up cautiously, moving them in order to clean the desk, then returning them back to the exact same spot. They’d dust me off calmly and thoroughly; they saw to it that drifting dust motes would not sabotage my inner workings. But it has been three weeks since they were in my room. I hear them sweeping through the other offices, through the hallways, there’s the sound of the vacuum cleaner, there’s the tap-tap of a mop on the bathroom tiles, the coffee machine sputtering through the self-cleaning cycle, there is the son asking the father how much longer it will take. But the click of my office door’s handle is missing. I’d like to be cleaned again, to be rubbed with a soft microfibre cloth, but a monotone voice instructed the family a few weeks ago to leave my little office as is. ‘There’s no one in there anyway for now.’
That one time, when my partner came back for a moment, I felt such relief. But I already knew it couldn’t last. Since then, though, I haven’t been completely left alone. The Invader sometimes stops by, just as he used to do, when my partner was still here every day. I call him the Invader because I know that that is how my partner would see it, and in fact the Invader feels that way himself (rapid heartbeat, activated stress hormones, flushed face, et cetera). He knows he is not welcome. He seldom stopped by when she was in the room. On the rare occasion when he did knock at the door, an uneasy tension would reign, and there would be awkward exchanges, about awkward subjects, like seaweed. I could tell my partner was annoyed. She did not understand why her least favourite colleague had come to bother her. But when she was out, he would sneak in as often as he could. Every other Monday, for example, which was her day off. It was his favourite day of the week, because then the room was his alone (or so he thought). On other days he’d steal into the office if she happened to be out somewhere, or if she had already gone home. On those occasions the Invader would sneak in silently, making sure none of the other people in the office noticed. Sometimes he’d leaf through the (mostly blank) diary that lay open on my partner’s desk, or scroll through her computer with a vacant expression, but usually he’d just sit down on the desk chair, lean over the table, rest his face in his hands and sit there without moving for a while, until his shoulders began to shake and tears ran down his fingers, the drops quivering on the ends of his beard. Of all the animal species, humans are the only ones that weep.
He stayed only a short while the first few times, before hurrying back to his own lair. His crying fits were short, controlled outbursts. Later on, though, he would take longer, appearing to know, like me, exactly when my partner would be returning. As I sensed her presence slowly growing stronger, as she drew nearer to the office step by step, often just as she was about to push open the wooden front door downstairs: only then would he wipe the tears away, take out the package of tissues he kept in his trouser pocket, and fan some fresh air at his face to soothe the splotchy redness that had appeared. Then, when the coast was clear, he’d step out into the hall and slip into the toilet, where he’d splash some cold water on his face and calm down.
Why does the Invader weep? I try to focus on the question. He often cries about missed opportunities. Not the romantic ones – because the love of his life married someone else, for example – nor does he cry about the big moments in which he has faltered (the chance he missed to say something at someone’s deathbed). No, he cries about the opportunities to do right that he has skipped in his daily life: the opportunity to admit something was a lie; the opportunity to apologize; the opportunity to stick up for someone. His emotions aren’t always clear or concrete, which is a feature of crying fits: once you burst into tears, the reasons can often multiply.
One of the reasons the Invader was crying yesterday, for instance, was something that had occurred the previous evening. He’d been in a café with a friend of his, who is always very depressed but tries not to let it show. They were talking about a shared acquaintance, a young woman they knew from university, who even back then they found quite insufferable, but these days it’s worse, they agreed, for now she is able to share updates with the whole world on the internet – look at me saving the world and being sexy at the same time. They’d heard she slept with a professor. Typical, isn’t it, his friend said, she’s probably slept her way to the top at that NGO where she now works, that professor, an ugly old git by the way, it’s not just that he’s seventy, but that his scrotum is seventy as well, hahaha. At this point the waitress came over, scowling. His friend saw her, then said to him, Well, she clearly needs a good shag. The Invader thought that was going a bit too far, but funny too, really, it wasn’t as if she could hear them, and at first he thought he’d had a pleasant evening, he texted the friend, Had a great time, man, but that night he couldn’t sleep, the waitress’s angry look was etched into his mind, and he couldn’t really put his finger on what was wrong, that NGO girl was annoying, wasn’t she, with her white woman’s burden and pictures of little black kids, and that waitress should act friendly, that’s her job, isn’t it, she’s bad at her job, so they weren’t to blame, and yet he couldn’t get a moment’s rest. In the middle of the night he started searching on his phone: What to do about insomnia, melatonin pills, sleep therapy, blue light filters, didn’t find a solution, and found himself sobbing at the desk the next day.
