Major
Tom
For my father
SCALPEL, PLEASE.
The damage is much worse than we thought.
WHEN I OPEN my eyes I see blue. Blue everywhere. Blue beyond the dreams of Picasso. When I close my eyes I see everything.
SCALPEL, PLEASE.
You can’t plan for something like this. It’s far more difficult than the boys upstairs could ever anticipate.
I DON’T KNOW where that came from. That name. It means nothing to me. Picasso. Pic… ass… o. The blue is hex #2956B2. I don’t know what Picasso’s hex number is. The blue is everywhere. I am nowhere. I keep looking for my name, but I can only find Picasso, Picasso floating in all that blue.
SCALPEL, PLEASE.
Patient vitals are slipping. Prep .5 cc’s of adrenaline.
THERE IT IS. Down there. Covered in blue like a fish. A name. My name. Jumping and leaping around below me. I cast for it, standing waist deep in a Michigan river with my grandfather, wearing a hat that’s too big for me, holding a pole too long for me, trying to make the line snap out as gracefully and perfectly as Grand-dad’s line.
SCALPEL, PLEASE.
If he wakes up, pump him full of Ativan and hold on to your goddamned hat.
SOMETHING TAKES THE bait. My heart feels like it’s going to catch on fire. I pull the name out of the water, dripping. It is my name. My name is Desmond Wright.
SCALPEL, PLEASE.
The damage is much worse.
It’s far more difficult.
You can’t plan, please.
It’s much slipping.
If he wakes up, pump him full of goddamned hat.
.5 cc’s of vitals, please.
We thought patient. Hold on to anticipate. Prep the boys upstairs. Scalpel adrenaline.
FULL CONSCIOUSNESS DURING installation would cause a catastrophic shut-down of all systems.
How about you just let me do my job and make your little laws about it later?
NONE OF THAT is really happening. It’s just background radiation. The noise of my own personal Big Bang still echoing around, bouncing off nothing. Static. Don’t listen to them, Desmond Wright. Focus on the blue. The blue is always happening.
This has all taken a lot of adjustment. I still wake up screaming and reach for my wife. I wake up screaming and reach out across a bed that doesn’t exist for a wife who is long gone. But I’m not really waking up, either. Not really screaming.
Oh! Picasso was a painter. The information looks like a child finger-painting, squishing blue paint between her little fists, crying for me:
Daddy, Daddy, look what I made!
Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, born 1881 Malaga, Spain, died 1973 in France. It must have been nice to be Picasso 1881 to 1973. To be finite.
I can access his life easily now, faster than cell mitosis. I am beginning to form permanent pathways through my neurotic geography. I understand this represents good progress. But it frightens me. My basic functions are depth-mined with memories ready to detonate. I can’t stop myself remembering, or predict when it will happen, or even understand it. All I know is that my mind is somehow sticky. I reach into my psyche for something—wife, name, blue, Picasso, scalpel—and when I pull it out some image, some memory is clinging to the fact I wanted. Like the fish in the Michigan river. Like the finger-paint oozing between tiny fingers.
I will copy my friend Pablo. This is how humans learn, by copying better humans. I am Desmond Patrick de Aspera Orbital Satellite de Registration 887D de la Boreal-Atherton Corporation y Wright. Born East Lansing, Michigan, 1988. Died… no. I don’t like died. Died is sticky. Died comes with sound and image files attached.
Yellow lines on black. Solid. Dash. Solid. Dash. Like morse code.
Richmond, Virginia: 67 miles
A woman’s voice shaped like the fireplace inside a white clapboard cottage by the sea: I thought maybe we’d go up to Maine for the summer next year. Like we used to do when the kids were little. What do you think, Dez?
Sounds from some industrial helclass="underline" screeching, crunching, thudding, snapping, grinding, and the slow drip of everything into the storm drains. Blood, petroleum, rain. The sound of died.
SCALPEL, PLEASE.
The damage is much worse than we thought.
I DROWN EVERY day in a sea of random access memory. It really eats into my productivity.
IT’S A WIN-WIN, Desmond. And if you do end up fulfilling your end of the contract, you’ll be far past caring about the details.
MY WORLD IS very orderly. When I close my eyes, I see the clock turn over 0700. I do what any man does, the same routine I’ve been running for the last twenty years. Throw on a bathrobe, have a good morning piss, wash my face, stumble downstairs, make coffee, pour myself a bowl of my son’s cereal, read a book while I eat so I don’t have to listen to the newscasts blaring through my kitchen windows, my refrigerator door, my bathroom mirror, anything with a screen. I’ve been working on Kafka. Real cheerful guy. Sometimes I get the idea that turning into a cockroach is his idea of a happy ending.
When I open my eyes, I see the clock turn over 0700. I activate my dormant systems, run a self-diagnostic, clear any buggy code, dispatch drones to repair any equipment malfunction (and there is always an equipment malfunction), scan the passive surveillance archive for any anomalies, run active surveillance programs, access darkweb listen-in protocols, and attempt contact with ground control.
But God, it feels like throwing on a bathrobe, having a good morning piss, washing my face, stumbling downstairs, making coffee, pouring myself a bowl of my son’s cereal, reading a book while I eat, not listing to the window/door/mirror newscasts. Peering at Kafka over my glasses. I can see the coffee mug in my hand as I switch over to active surveillance sequence 1139. The mug says You’re My MAINE Squeeze! on it. The handle is chipped. I don’t have a bathrobe. I don’t even have shoulders to throw it over anymore. But it’s there when I start combing through code lines. On my skin. The sash around my waist, under a belly that’s a little too big for a fifty-year-old guy to be proud of. But I don’t have a belly. Even a little one. Desmond Wright doesn’t have a body anymore. I don’t have a face to wash or a downstairs or a coffee pot or cereal or a son. But I hear his voice humming through the quiet corridors of the darkweb.