She couldn’t move.
It was as if waking from a long, traumatic dream. A drawn-out nightmare of losing the self, chasing after another’s hope, being surrounded by a thousand jeering chipmunks happily digging out the ground beneath your feet. A grave.
A fluttering of the eyelids and a jolt of terror, aching at the base of the skull—which indicated a potential to radiate sharply down the spine were the neck to be scrunched the wrong way, so—luckily—she couldn’t move. Groggily wondering what has happened and how did I get here and thinking of all the mistakes that were made and the fleeting, faraway tendrils of long-ago happy memories, brushing against the cheek like mother’s long-nailed fingers—leaving just enough of an impression to make a mark.
She couldn’t move. And then a dawning awareness, holy shit.
She couldn’t move.
But it wasn’t that. She couldn’t move but not because she was made immobile. She couldn’t move because when she tried to move, she had too, well, try. She had to, you know, exert. In order to move, she had to, I guess, actually fricken move. And this was a novel sensation. Effort.
Depending on where you’re reading this, and—I guess—I should add that where now carries both the question of where (in space) and where (as in when [as in where, in time]), the novelty of this predicament—the mix of shock and curiosity and fear that makes one wonder if suddenly one is in one’s dream again—requires a variable degree of explanation.
How much things change when things change! Discoveries, inventions: truly the grammar of our lives et cetera, et cetera, and the rest.
So I should first ask you, wherever you’re reading this, have they implanted neural networks in Hud yet?
Hmmm, okay. Is there any talk about exo-suits? People trying to sew nanomeshes over their eyes and nostrils? Or guys walking around a place called San Fransisco covered in some kinda sticky, gooey jelly?
Really? None of that? Really? I didn’t realize humanity developed the technology to pick up these kinds of frequencies back then.
So have you even had The Virus yet?
Shit, whatever. I’m not explaining all of that. I don’t want to go back that far. There once were seven billion people on Planet Earth like that guy narrating the science film everyone had to watch after one-year. Then shit him the fan and shit got EVERYWHERE. A long story that’s been told at least a thousand times over the millennia of human history, so why tell it again? Most of it’s not all that important anyway.
I’ll tell you this. Cataclysm crept up on them. Came in so silently, in fact, that nobody even noticed it. Suddenly there was only a tenth of them left milling about, and the survivors were all wearing suits. Full body suits. Head to toe.
Slow, massive change that occurred in subtle, gradual increments over generations slammed into the race of humanity with a sudden realization. Nobody could go outside.
Listen, I know that wherever you are, you’ve lived through or maybe heard about a time when it wasn’t safe to go outside. There were airplanes or a rapid, rabid dog or germs or an elderly gentleman wearing a clown wig hiding in the bushes and wielding his longest knife while glaring at you with an excitement you’d normally expect to see on the face of a dog greeting his owner after she returns from a long day at work.
But it got to the point where nobody could go outside. It had something to do with the heat, certainly, the way you’d always start to cough and develop a nasty sunburn within a few minutes of stepping out the door, but, also, it was just too much. Nobody could go outside because nobody wanted to go outside. It was just too much to deal with. People were just too tired.
The people who worked in the fields and in the mines (because, again depending on where you are, there was a time when the majority of society extracted its resources from the earth instead of synthesizing them in a lab) and who built the buildings, maintained the roads and who stocked the shelves and who cared for the sick and elderly and who taught the kids how to read and write, well they were tired of having to slough crackly, burned-up chunks of skin off the parts of their body that had been exposed to sunlight during the day, tired of succumbing to chronic respiratory diseases before being able to see their children reach puberty, tired of always holding out for the hope of a better dream in the face of this waking nightmare, tired of having to nurture and be nurtured by that solitary, dying ember of hope while their world was swallowed by blackness—or, against the metaphor but towards reality, cooling and cooled by a sliver of melting ice while their world was consumed by the heat of a thousand hellfires.
The people who typed the computer machines and who sat in offices and who wrote, read reports and who managed the people who did all the above work that was so necessary, well, these people were tired too. They were tired of always having to hear about all the other people who were losing their skin and dying at young ages while doing the work necessary to maintain society (or, worse, tired of telling them that they had to keep on doing that work and, sorry, a raise just isn’t in the budget this year), tired of how hollow their treasured leisure had become—seeing as it now mostly consisted of viewing in a semi-catatonic the same recycled myths of dream and progress and then complaining to whoever was nearest about how they just don’t make anything like they used to—but tired most of all with balancing the dissonance of feeling smugly satisfied that they weren’t with the worms beneath their feet alongside the insecure jealousy of wanting to fly with the hawks above.
The rest of the people, the fourteen or so who had all the money and did nothing more than sign the checks that allowed everyone else to live—well, they did that and also had terrible opinions about how everyone else should live—see, they were tired too: tired of hearing everyone else complain about how much they (the people with all the money) had fucked everything up for everyone else. What a preposterous thing to believe! If they had such terrible ideas, how had they been so successful in destroying so many lives in order to amass a fortune that they could not, even if they tried, spend in a thousand lifetimes? If they were so stupid, why were they so adept at closing off their minds to the calls of compassion and justice and instead following the siren song of the oldest of human ideologies, the lizard-like dictates of scrambling on all fours like ravenous beasts in the pursuit of more, more, more? Besides, most of them weren’t even that craven. All they needed to do to get rich beyond compare was wait for their parents to die. Still, they grew weary of the complaints
So there was a change. It was really a quite clever series of moves that brought us from where we were, teetering on the brink of total destruction, to where we are, comfortably sitting two or three paces from that cliff’s edge. First, you see—but—ah, sorry—things are happening.
She, with the force and deliberateness of one—severely headached, waking from a night of heavy drinking—forced her eyelids open.
It was a bright room, clean. The ceiling was white, like the ceiling in her and every other apartment she had seen, but somehow the color did not look right.
She felt feeling coming back to her fingers, to her toes, felt them twitch feebly. These movements felt weak, but she could also feel her movements struggling against a strange and heavy tightness wrapped around her body. She craned her head forward, feeling her neck have to pull hard to complete the movement, as if her skin were too taut, contracted like a rubber band.
She saw the rest of her body, naked, floating in a tub filled with water—or some other kind of liquid dense enough to keep a body floating. She forced her hands—again fighting that same rubbery, stretchiness at her shoulders, wrists and elbows—over her torso, but she felt nothing, nothing but smoothness through her palms. Had she lost her sense of touch?
And her body, like the ceiling, just looked different somehow. It was the same shape, had the same contours, but the color was off. But how? Maybe a little more yellow or brighter somehow?
Again, she tried to glance around the room. It was a small room, a doorway, a little space and then this vat in which she floated.
She noticed, after a few moments, that she was having trouble breathing and that her chest began to ache. She had never, never in her life, felt this before, but it was panic.
What was the last thing she remembered?
Sitting with that professor, asking him about his research, accepting the scholarship. Walking out of the room and down the hall, and then what happened? Something more must have happened. She must have kept walking, right? She could not have just been grabbed by someone in the academic offices and dragged off, could she? Someone would have seen, something must have happened. But what had happened, and how had she gotten here?
At this moment, a man walked into the room. He seemed familiar but also nondescript. Beet red eyes and rusty orange hair with a mauve skin tone, as was the fashion. As she stared, she felt herself nearing the dawn of a recognition.
It was – but before she could recognize who it was, she noticed something strange about him, something that would have, if not for that restrictive rubberyness wrapped around her body, made her mouth fall open, slack with terror.
The man had, it looked like, three arms, or—more specifically—below the man’s right arm hung a second right arm, splitting off at the elbow. It hung, boneless and limp, flapping gently as he walked.
“You are awake,” he said and stepped toward her. And then, once he stopped in front of the vat in which she lay, her gaze fixated on this man’s right hand. It was a different color, paler and pink, than the rest of his body. It was a hand that looked so much like her own, but it was covered in strange wrinkles, and its fingers were capped by some strange shell-like substance.
He began tugging on the floppy hand that hung below, and she watched in horror as more and more of his purplish skin peeled away, up to the shoulder, then a split formed along the right side of his torso. He grabbed the side of his scalp and pulled, until his face came away from his face, and pulled, until his torso came away from his body.
It was no longer a man but a strange form that looked down upon her, with icy, bright eyes, flat nose and thin, lips without expression. The torso that was revealed was itself an alien creation. Pink and slimy, it was ridged with bulbous veins and the striations of muscle. The two peaks of the form’s chest were crowned with strange, pasty, puffy protrusions and in the center of the belly was an unfamiliar dent.
This strange form now uttered, “Deepest apologies, my dear Delphi / there is no way for one who’s live so long / among the flock to escape the shock, no reason nor song / can better show what we are as I. / But, against fear and fret we trust, with / time truth overtakes all myth.”
The form turned—that other torso flapping behind, hanging from the waist—and shut out the light, and left Delphi, heart pounding, floating in the darkness.