A Short Sentence Oft Contains Much Wisdom

In the morning my dog’s neural monitor started beeping like crazy. We thought maybe the battery just needed to be replaced, but we all did a scan anyway. Turns out it was me making it go off. Fifteen minutes, from the first sign to the diagnosis, and it’s still too late, says the doctor-agent. No known cause, no known cure. A glitch.

My mother demands to speak to a human. Typically a laughable request, but this is the type of “emotional emergency” they’re reserved for. She dials in a telehealth video call from the refrigerator while my father and I pace around the kitchen island, nervous and muddled. Finally an electrocuted-looking female with an askew swirl of auburn hair, and statuesque, perhaps artificially-enhanced cheekbones appears on the fridge. Her name, displayed on the lower third, is Doctor Charybdis. 

“Yep, so the doctor-agent is right, you know, we hate to see it, but, you know, where would we be without it? We're here, having this conversation, and that’s a step in the right direction,” says the human. “We’re gonna throw everything we’ve got at this. There’s already a package of peer-reviewed therapies being drone-shipped to your house innnn…. Let’s see, let’s see… Pasadena? Lovely area.” 

Scrolling through my file on her computer, she bites her tech-branded ballpoint pen in a way that seems shockingly sexual for the moment. I’ve read rumors that they hire actors to play doctors now, since you don’t really need anything but high EQ. This one apparently lacks even that. She raises her eyebrows like she’s discovered something interesting. “The good news is you’re not the first case of this. There are about a dozen out there that have popped up with similar cellular mutation. That means there’s some attention on this in the scientific community. Accelerated research. You may have months. Are we talking years? No. But months, plural.” She grins encouragingly. 

“How many of the people who have this are still alive?” I ask. The Doctor blinks, then nods. “Great, great question.” She turns to her monitor, types, looks back. “Let’s see, the first recorded case was six months ago and the survival rate so far is… about half. Not bad! Especially for something so aggressive. We’re lucky your dog caught this early. Good boy. Good girl? My advice—fund the research programs. If you have the—” 

Suddenly the screen on the refrigerator goes black. “What happened?” says my father. “I hung up,” says my mother. 

“Seemed like she was on Speed,” suggests my father. He opens the fridge door, swinging the blank screen away mercifully, the type of physical manipulation of matter that marks a strong man, unleashing a blast of cold air as he pulls an IPA out of the side door. He offers me one. I shake my head. It’s 10 A.M.

“I kind of liked her matter-of-fact abjection,” I admit. My parents just look at me and then we’re all quiet for a while. 

“Do you feel alright?” my mother finally asks. “I mean, do you feel anything different—” 

“No, I feel normal,” I say, even though the truth is there’s been weird aches in my body for weeks. My mother comes over and hugs me while my father drinks his beer and watches. “You’re my baby,” she says. Our bloodhound, Titan, whines.

I go for a long aimless walk around Millionaire’s Row, dumbly attempting to shake the Grim Reaper. The early summer air smells like peanut butter and jelly on burnt toast, or maybe my bodily senses are already being altered. The scene is all Sour Polyester mommies speedwalking behind babies zoomed in automated strollers, and fit pepper-gray guys running in all-black athleisure, meditating on the latest alpha for their various remote warfares. Such a sacred light hour of holistic restitution in which I am suddenly a smoggy invader. Marred. The sunlight is off this afternoon, the whole world washed out and desaturated. The geodesic dome over the city has caused the light to fall differently, casting a disorienting new vocabulary of shades onto the day. I’m still getting used to it, this new brutalist slant to life, the way shadows have harshened, morning has whitened, sunset has paled.

When I get back to my room I pop a bluelight pill and connect to my synth guitar. My brain spits out violent, screeching chords. I’m out of tune.

My father pops up in my doorway, wearing a grimace that’s supposed to be a smile. 

“Sounding good,” he says. “What’s up?” I take off my synth, returning. “Your mother… your mother would like you to record videos of yourself, and your voice. You know, like I did.” 

My father, once a mildly successful character actor, had retired early by donating his likeness to an Artificial Intelligence company. The AI actor had turned out to outshine its human shadow’s career, even earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Artificial Performance. Sometimes on a weeknight, I’ll catch my father in the den watching his likeness star as the leading man in some action flick. If I come in and watch with him, he’ll enthusiastically point out minuscule traces of his influence, often pausing and rewinding to show me again in play-by-play. “See the way his eye twitches like that? That’s a touch I added when I played Iago. Hear the lisp in the voice? They used my self-tape for Cyrus the Virus.”

I push past my father and walk down the off-white carpeted hallway into the master bedroom, where my mother is laying, puffy-eyed, on her phone. She looks up at me and extends her arms for a hug. My feet remain rooted in the carpet. 

“No need to record my likeness since I’m not fucking dying.” Her face contorts and she pulls the duvet over her chin in shame, like a little toddler throwing a tantrum. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I just went on your Instagram and you don’t have any videos of yourself, you don’t have many posts at all, and I don’t know your Twitter and— You know, if—” she gulps and attempts to pull herself together. “If I ever wanted to—” 

“You’re remembering me like I’m not sitting in the next room.” 

“I’m sorry,” she says again. 

Titan plods up to us and his neural monitor begins emitting the same earsplitting smoke alarm alert that interrupted my protein pancakes. I rip the monitor off his head and throw it across the floor. It's simply a crude communication device; even without it I stink of disease. Titan bounds after the device excitedly and runs back to me, wires and dog slobber spilling from his leathery jaw. It starts beeping again. I throw it down the hall and slam the door. “I told you we shouldn’t have put that stupid fucking thing on the dog,” I say. 

This statement hangs idiotically in the room between us, my mother making no protest. The bedroom door begins to open gingerly, and my father peaks his head in. 

“Everyone okay?”

I look back and forth between my parents and I feel trapped between them and I wish I had moved out. 

“Let’s all just be as normal as possible for the rest of the day. Please can we all do that? For me?”

I text Spaz, Tf u @. He’s always late, but is now 45 minutes past the one-hour grace period. Here, he responds. I look out the window and there he is, in his grandpa’s green Jaguar, texting. Want me to come down? I send.

Can I cum up, he responds instantly.

Sure, I send. I look out the window and watch him text for another minute.

Spaz seems annoyed with me and I feel it and I kind of savor it, silently. The annoyance, the inconvenience of myself. Spaz cooks a kief log over the open flame of his lighter.

“You know about Six Bronco?” 

“Nah.”

“What about CTEPedro?” 

I shake my head.

“You don’t fuck with streamers?”

“I stream my life to myself every day with my eyes.”

He hits his joint and coughs. “Well, not everyone is such a privileged egomaniac like you, Declan. Most people prefer other lives to their own nowadays. And that’s beautiful. And it’s got me thinking… Do you know what people would love to do on livestream?”

“What?”

Spaz grins. “Drive around with a drug dealer.”

“No one even buys drugs from you anymore, man.” 

“What are you doing right now?”

“This is the last time.”

He glances up at me. He can tell I’m serious but he doesn’t ask why.

“That’s why I’m going to become a streamer,” he says, bending over in my chair and opening his case. He’s committed to selling drugs out of a laptop case for the aesthetic appeal. It pisses me off when people do Andy Warhol things like that. Spaz pulls every baggie and vial out of his mobile apothecary and spreads them across my freshly steamed off-white carpet. He’s still digging for something.

He pulls out an opaque sapphire-blue container.

“I don’t want pills today,” I say. “I’ve taken too many.”

“This is that new-new. Remember Smart Charlie with the mole? Him and his GF devved this at Bard. Have you met that chick? Veronica? Scary vibes. Really weird side profile too. Underbite. Heavily edited pictures. I honestly think Charlie is just such a drug addict he can’t tell what she looks like IRL. Anyways, I tried this with them yesterday. ZERO1. It makes the over-the-counter blue light pills look like Aspirin.”

Unconsciously, I’ve begun stabbing my finger into the carpet, forming a small crater.

“Charlie always knew what was cool. Lemme try it,” I say in a voice near tears. Even a surface chiller like Spaz can probably tell I’ve got something really bad that I can’t talk about, but he hands me the pill without protest and I swallow.

Where’s my phone? I scramble across the floor towards the wall where it’s charging. My mounted flatscreen looms above me with an ancient foreboding as I tug my arsenic iPhone off its charger and flip the silver bitten apple into my palm. A text from my mother blooms across my lockscreen. I can feel her hovering over the emojis before pressing send, scrolling through hearts of different colors, smiling faces, full of confusion and despair, embarrassed they would all be too much, before simply sending Love you.

Ringing in my ears. A new notification from Spaz, texting me a link to a Six Bronco livestream. The world spirals rapidly. My skin prickles and I feel the screen zoom into me, first in particles, then in waves. My surroundings shift to brown dirt and white bedrock. Six Bronco is setting fire to an iCar Mini in the middle of the Mojave desert. I can smell white sage and creosote breezing through the cool waterfall of pixels. “Siri,” declares Six Bronco, “blow up this vehicle.” Siri refuses, politely. Sorry, I can’t do that. Six Bronco hollers and grins into the camera. Offscreen, his homies whoop. “Oh, but Siri,” sneers Six Bronco, “if you don’t disembowel your big brother iCar, I’m going to blow you up. And then Chat will be destroyed. And we wouldn’t want that now, would we, Chat?” To the left of my body, I feel Chat scream for mercy. A million simultaneous NOOOOOOOs flood the mainframe. Sprinkled between these pleas I see Spaz, username spaz, spamming What’s up Declan, what up D, what’s up, what is up, what is up, are you okay. I navigate over to the corner and lodge myself into the center of the shrieking ocean of comments. No. No. No. No. Bro. Noo. Please god. God help us. I stand at the ends of the screen, turned in towards some Z-axis of oblivion that connects to the myriad network of darkened rooms where Chat originates. I can hear Six Bronco’s glitching cackle behind me. Without opening my mouth, some ill-formed, garbled confession rips out of me and gets swept into the flood, clinging onto Spaz’s sagging treebranch of perception before whirling on towards absolute truth.

I’m pulled into the current of my own comment and flung into darkness, careening past a flipbook of virtual scenes, before washing up on top of a large metal orb attached to a long metal rod. My eyes follow the beam to its end, in the clutches of a giant hand with long burgundy press-on nails. A booming female voice echoes from above. Yes, thank you. My eyes trace all the way from the gargantuan hand to the gargantuan, lipsticked mouth. A smattering of flashing lights hit my back, illuminating the mouth and the American flag on the wall behind it. I realize I'm livestreaming a White House press conference. The mouth must belong to the Exponential Vision Party’s new Press Secretary, Phema Matador. From the torso up, she’s a sultry brunette with a set of dowsing rods clutched in her rubber hands. Her lower half is nothing but a podium embezzled with the Exponential Visionist crest. Miss Matador, Miss Matador, clamors the crowd of reporters, does the president have any concerns about the possible health effects of 7G technology? Phema whirrs. The metal rod begins to move. Though I appear to have no physical body, I have to shift my weight around like I’m on the subway to keep my balance on the orb as it swings out towards the gilded wall.

No, thank you, booms Phema.

I swipe out of the stream, in a motion that feels like banging my head, and drift down into the muddy puddle of apps on my home screen.

I can’t look at Spaz sitting across from me. He’s still tapped into Six Bronco. I hear an explosion emanate from his phone, and moments later the heat wave rolls through me. Riding on its rolling shoulders, the gleeful death-squeals of Chat crash through the window and out of my room. I feel the glass crack but I can’t feel my own body. I am a pure force, skating across a hard surface, sliding between gleaming objects with rounded edges.

There’s silence for a long time. Then Spaz texts me,

Fuck man.

Next text,

I love you

Next text,

You’re my brother.

I open my mouth and vomit onto the off-white carpet.

Over bag salad that night, our phones all buzz at the same time. It’s my Aunt Grace sending a long email to me and my mother and my father, explaining why my disease is caused by 7G and providing an extensive list of products we can purchase online to protect against electromagnetic radiation, before signing off with a GIF of Jesus stretching out his hands, the words BLESSINGS TO YOU sparkling in gold letters near his crotch. The traces of Z1 still working their way through my system make GIFChrist’s hands appear to stretch through the screen, attempting to touch and purify the decaying form currently observing Him. I hear His voice, faintly, in my ear. The answer is within. I think back to the dowsing rods of Phema Matador.

I text Spaz, Send me Charlie’s number I think I lost it

My mother proposes a no-phones rule at the dinner table. I point out that we would still get notifications on the refrigerator.

“Alternative Futures is building a New Pasadena on Mars. I’m looking at a winter rental,” offers my father. He shows us a property—a cheap-looking, eggshell vinyl structure resembling a Palos Verdes beachside condo. The listing advertises that it’s made of durable plastics that ship easily through space, boasts of aerogel windows and otherworldly views—literally!

“It might be good for your health…” he nods at me. “For all of us,” he adds. 

“That’s a nice thought,” my mother says with dull hope. 

First they want an exact AI replica, now they want a new house on another planet, with no memories of me, I think but don’t say.

At 11 P.M. I meet Charlie by the condos outside Caltech. He’s driving a fucking iCar. “I just saw one of those get blown up on a livestream,” I tell him. He swings his long hair out of his face. “They’re explosion-resistant, it must’ve been AI,” he drawls in a Californian gravel.

Upon climbing into the passenger seat I’m startled to discover a girl in the back, with lavender hair and triple-pierced ears. She’s wearing headphones and fingerless pastel-blue mittens. This must be Ron.

I haven’t seen Charlie in probably six years. He looks and dresses exactly the same, except he now has multiple ear piercings, like his girlfriend. Hardware, I think. “How— How was Bard”? I ask.

“It was maniacal. A new frontier. I met Ron. We’ve been developing experimental hallucinogens for a few years now, but the pill is our premiere product. You know, before this, the big problem with technology that VR couldn’t really solve— It just felt so removed. We’re the first to break the barrier.” He stretches his long legs in agitation. “Look, Declan, we’re down to do some with you, maybe screen record your sessions and catch up. But it’s hard to produce. I only sold a very very small batch to Jackson, and honestly Ron is pretty mad that I did that. And she’s right. She’s totally right.” He looks towards the backseat and grabs her chin. She does not appear to have the underbite that Spaz claimed.

“Your insight is godlike,” he coos.

She looks back at him blankly. Her features are thin and spindly on top of a rather compact, stocky body. Her mouth twitches a bit. “She’s on it right now.” Charlie explains. “She’s teaching herself to connect without any devices.”

“Look,” I say, “I’ll pay whatever you want.”

“We… don’t need money,” he winces. “We… need to keep this thing under wraps.” 

“I'm not a regular customer.”

“Explain,” he murmurs, craning his neck to locate a button on the iCar. The top of the roof peels open noiselessly and Charlie pokes his bony index finger up through the rectangle of sky, towards a bright dot in the center, and declares, “That’s Mars!” like I’m supposed to understand some deeper level of significance to its presence.

“Charlie,” I say, “do you think that maybe, with this drug, it’s possible to, you know, fully upload yourself?” 

His chuckling head tilts up towards the solar system. “You’re asking the question everyone asks.”

“I’m asking for personal reasons.”

He makes the same face he used to when stupid kids couldn’t answer questions in Chem. “What, are you dying?”

I look away from him and thumb at the iCar’s shellaqued interior. Finally, I nod. 

“Oh shit, really? From what?”

“I don’t know. My crazy aunt thinks it's from 7G.”

He sighs. “You know that cell-tower radiation is non-ionizin—”

“I know it’s bullshit,” I cut him off. “Do you really think I'd be asking for your bluelight pill if I thought the wifi is what gave me a terminal illness?” The truth is I don’t really know anything. 

Something fuzzy grips my shoulder and I yelp, turning, and then feel embarrassed to remember Ron in the backseat, hand moving off my body, her indigo child stare turned onto me for the first time.

“It’s forsure terminal?” Her voice is disproportionately nasally to her delicate nose.

“We’re throwing everything we’ve got at it,” I say, borrowing the doctor’s line. She nods, slowly.