Not-not-bots
(for WB)
by Swim
Em and I sat across from one another at the kitchen table, still wearing matching blonde bombshell wigs. Even with the windows open it was very quiet. In the long stillness between trains I imagined I could hear the ocean. I relished the peace, knowing that any moment now the process could restart.
It wasn’t an inquiry or a trial. I had already been judged. This was, according to Em, about nailing down the content of a dream that didn’t have a human dreamer. Alien desires overflowed our every inlet, finding all the things we hid so well and leaving us as we were now, not bots but not-not bots, “always traveling, but never arriving.”
“OK, so let’s try again. Give it to me straight,” Em said, and my heart sank. She nibbled at the edge of a giant pastry she held above her head like a conch shell. It was an off-menu item from a spot deep in Chinatown, where underaged trans skate punks drank Ovaltine in $200 ringer tees and had their photo snapped by celebrity photographers. It had the familiar crescent shape of a croissant but bulged with a lush amount of mystery filling rumored to be seasoned with the bitter tang of junkie tears.
“Straight and dark!” she growled between bites. “No more dramatic arcs, no more bits of sappy sincere elegy that never moves us forward, that never gives us anything real!”
An off-white cream bloomed like time lapse at the place she punctured with her sharp white teeth.
“But I’ve already told you what happened so many times,” I protested.
“And each time it’s different. All we have are pieces, some real, some made-up. Everything’s lost in the eerie blur of human and machine. We’re caught in a narrative snare in which you keep overtaking yourself, finding yourself later at a point in which you have already been.”
I sighed and felt around for something to smoke. We were back from another lit reading downtown. It was mostly rich kids, you could tell by the soft overgrown summer bangs and lack of tattoos. The bartenders burned things to put in the drinks and lots of people were standing, which made me nervous, so I cuddled up closer to Em, who whispered, “The same fashes who fund this were paying Lil Mountain.”
“Ok,” I said, and waited for her to say more but she didn’t. The path back to Odious is a spiral, i.e., the motion of cosmic production. An airy feeling of vertigo filled my chest and head as Em took us closer to my long lost best friend and then further away and then closer again. I let her run her hands up and down the sides of my body, tethering me to the room. Her wig brushed my neck. Her breath smelled like the candy she was too disciplined to eat.
The peeps reading all went by their first names. In general, I thought most of the names were very good. They were funny and irreverent and looked well-placed on the flier. The titles of the poems, on the other hand, were too complicated. A dude with long, clean brown hair dedicated his poem to his recently deceased friend who he called, “the best Instagram user ever”. He read a piece that Em said is the same one he always reads, just forever updated and redacted with jokes and in-crowd references. I don’t enjoy the funny, precious sounding way that words are arranged in most poems so his blob of information was something of a relief. The segment of the crowd that got the jokes laughed a little, kindly, knowingly, but then he kept going, on and on, way too long so that even the insiders got fidgety and wanted the empty words about their empty lives to stop. But like a cold hard rain that telegraphs white flashes on the roof and rushes down the gutters with a raging opulence, the words wouldn’t stop. The dude started crying as he read. I knew how he felt, I knew how it was to be stuck playing a TV part that should have been killed off several seasons ago. Here I was, still alive when others were dead.
“He’s good,” I said to Em as he wiped his nose and mouth on his French cuffs. “He’s real good,” to which Em replied by rolling her eyes and covering my mouth with her mutilated hand. I realized it was likely he was one of the guys she slept with as a part of her party person art project. She uses the name XXXXX and puts intimate details about them in her all-lowercase and hyper-immediate poems that she reads in a fake hoarse voice while vaping furiously. Lately, in addition to the hoarseness she’s taken to speaking at a volume so low it forces everyone to the edge of their seat, straining to hear.
“Lil Mountain used to do that,” she told me, “A trickster shaman thief move. A true holy person should be hard to understand.” I nodded and rolled my shoulders forward and then backward. I’ve found that moving them like this helps me keep my thoughts turned inward.
The fucking and the vaping are both unglamorous but necessary parts of her process. It was important, she said, to do everything with a spiritually calibrated mindset. Her readings (to which I sometimes added my own drunken screaming in between verses, rolling around on the floor while the audience swayed politely above me) provided the cover for her to infiltrate the scene and use the self-generated frequencies used to create its mythos to broadcast secret messages to the collective psyche. Any happening scene could have performed this function for her, but one funded by fascist silicon valley moguls–or one that believed it was funded by fascist silicon valley moguls, the difference of whether it “really” was or not being beside the point–had a far greater reach. On this particular night she stayed by my side to fully soak in what she called, “the recent accelerated degradation of certain key figures.” She pointed them out, the crypto coin programmer duo and their e-girl crew, the British magazine editor rocking the real trees hat, psychonauts from last decade, comp lit PhDs who distributed organ meat as a side hustle, generic innovators and founders–lots of founders, a subset of whom were also scientists. Instead of facts and figures they were more concerned with fitting into whatever cultural narrative is indicated by this scene. They don’t worry about questions about access and negative consequences because they are certain that an AI superintelligence will solve these problems for us. They see the immanent enslavement and eventual destruction of humanity and instead of it inspiring them to fight it frees them to be happy. Em believes they are already hacked, their mitochondria invaded.
The girls had their soft white bellies out at the bar as they took selfies in front of the neon sign that said, “The End of the Beginning” in handwritten script.
I went to the bathroom and checked for poems on the walls. There was one about loving AI like you love yourself, which I wasn’t sure was ironic, but there was nothing written in the kind of non-permanent, biodegradable ink Odious liked to use. They were always thinking about the people who had to clean up all the mess, and anyway art wasn’t meant to last.
“You can feel the heat death coming,” Em said, sweating under the wig. The city was boiling, there was hardly any time left to do something, and here we were surrounded by people who wanted to willingly shut down their identities.
”I wanted to believe in the new world you told us about, I wanted to believe you had really met sacred information sent back in time. I thought maybe it was true, maybe all that time I felt something big was coming wasn’t just teenage angst.”
“You aren’t sure,” I said. “Sometimes you still think I’m right.”
“It’s true we have to find them first,” she said. “That’s the only way we can find out who came first–Odious Awry or HeirMax98.”
*
I have a line: “It’s not Mulholland Drive it’s Mulholland DREAM,” that I haven’t used yet. When it’s time to mingle I just sit curled up beside Em and let her do the talking. Men in tailored jackets discussed the latest on trials, meltdowns, and conspiracies against people they knew or say they did. The conspiracies are very involved and difficult to follow, but also seem obvious, the kind of puzzles you would hand over to someone to keep them busy. “That’s the point,” Em said when I mentioned this. “I’m doing my part to fuel their distraction, so the ones who really count will find one another and find us.” The truth is I’m appalled but also energized by the noisy cultural mischief and Em’s place in it. Somehow this is the way, this is what comes next. It feels as inevitable as a red pinpoint sun winking through black smoke. I remind myself that the goal is to stop it somehow, push back on this and other intellectual contaminations but what I really want is to be like Em, and to be simultaneously a part of a scene and documenting it from the outside.
Post-awake, that’s what The Babies used to call it. A state of exhaustion that can even happen if you’re sober, or so I hear. I held on to the edge of the table as I nodded my head and listened with total concentration in between snapping in and out of two second dreams. The cream dribbled off Em’s lips and foamed in the corners of her mouth and then for a flash I was with people I didn’t recognize, in a place far away where they were trying to get me to understand something. Wait, they said, over and over, wait.
“Repressed memory fragments,” Em had said when we first started these sessions. “The stuff from the crash is mixed up with other material buried deep in your mind. Like what happened in the basement. It was the same with me. Personality disintegration is a symptom. But it can also be weaponized and used against the system. I’ve learned a little about how to do it. I want to teach you. But in order to do so though you have to write it out!”
“I told you, Em. I don’t want to write about the crash.”
“That’s not true, you do… you just don’t want to say that you do. The problem is you’re stuck on how to do it. You lack all the necessary info.”
“What do you mean? I have tons of notes. I have notes about notes.”
“That’s my point,” she said, “You have too much. Which is completely understandable. The horror we’re confronting is boundless. It’s a many tentacled monster, changing form, speaking through others.”
There was the sound of motorcycles out in the distance, revving up to go faster, and faster still.
“Just do it.”
No. I shook my head no like a child.
“Why do I have to go through this process every fucking time?” I whined.
“Ok, then tell me this,” she said, her face inches from my own, “What happened to my fingers?”
I froze. I don’t mean I stopped moving–on the contrary, my mouth opened and closed several times. I mean I actually froze from an icy cold feeling that came from the inside out. I could feel it all the way on the surface of my skin despite the summer heat. It was like the part of me with all the essential parts, the organs and memories and deep set sense of being me was sitting cold packed in another place.
“I don’t know,” I managed, as I rubbed my hands together. “I wasn’t there, I’ve heard conflicting reports.”
“You heard about it directly from me.”
“When?”
“A-ha. Yes! When and where are the questions you should be asking.”
Focussing on the wig made everything else blurry and Em even prettier. The glow of her skin under the bright light was very clarifying.
“Dead fingers talk,” she said, giggling as she licked the cream off of each of her full sized fingers as well as the two stumps.
I had no choice. I loved Em and I wanted to help her heal. It was the least I could do.
“Ok, so I was in the truck. I already explained I didn’t know what was a dream and what was real. Is that too much to say? Anyway, someone was following us, as of course you know. We went off road into a field, going uphill through tall grass. We bounced around like crazy.“‘Don’t worry, it’s a 4x4,’” I said to The Babies clustered close around me, trying to project calm but I gave up right away and bang on the back window. It was like, my responsibility I realized. I couldn’t see through the American flag sunshade (with a fucking eagle flying above it). I wanted answers, I wanted a plan, but there was no time for any of that. “My whole body ached from the effort of holding on. Somehow it always seems so easy, bopping around in the back of a pick-up, but once you start going faster it’s fucked up. And the shrooms were making me feel all the spinning throbbing parts moving inside. I felt the heat and imagined the gasoline turning hot as fuck and seeping through to burn my skin off.
“I sat next to Elena, you know, the big-boned, half-black, half-Romanian girl who ran away from her other chosen family to join us. She rubbed my shoulder with her warm palm. Her teardrop tat hung heavy in the corner of her eye, glittering like plastic jewelry. As the crew got watered down I started seeing more cheap temporary pieces. Not that I could blame them. Some of the new Babies had never even met Lil Mountain, at least not in the flesh. They weren’t ready to take ink to the face for him though they all dutifully claimed, of course, to feel the energy of his spirit present and ready to guide us all if only we would open up and let him in.”
“Mmmmhmmm,” Em said, her mouth once again full with cream, her eyes half-closed with pleasure.
“I crawled to a new place while Elena used her broad chest to shield me. As soon as I touched the raised pattern on the floor of the truck bed I knew I’d already felt it many times during similar, if not the same circumstances. It buzzed with steady intent and the awareness of moments that I already knew. In Brooklyn and in the desert, in Indianapolis and alongside a nameless canal…and right then in the middle of a forgotten forest.”
“That, right there,” Em said, sitting up straight.
“What?”
“The digressions, the distracted story-telling. You’re about to veer off and never get to the point.”
“The point? What point? I didn’t know there was one.”
“Just tell me what happened. Keep it simple.”
“I’m trying! Yeah, so suddenly the car behind us sped up. It was a sedan, colorless like a bullet. The back of the pick-up and everyone crammed in it started to glow in its headlights. There were more than two, an entire array.”
“Fog lamps.”
“Yeah …ok, I mean why am I doing this? I was all fucked up. You already know, you know what happened.”
Em giggled as she chewed down on the pastry’s greasy, mutant skin.
“Just go on,” she mumbled. “And then you will see.”
“What if I don’t want to see?”
“You don’t have any choice,” she said. “We’re on a voyage into the future.” The part she played was so different from the one she had played at the reading. Instead of protecting me she was laying me out, forcing me to accept my role by telling the despicable story.
“A yellow flash tore across the back of the pickup and shot up like a pinball into the great, black sky. ‘Was that lightning?’ I asked. I felt someone’s arm curl around my ankle.
‘It was going the wrong way to be lightening,’ MJ purred from my shins. She was stretched out across the laps of several others, like a cat. Oh man, where is she now? We hit something and someone went flying out the back. Was it her? No it wasn’t, it couldn’t be–I remember the hair, the way it fanned out mid-air, hers was too long to do that, too long and heavy to open up like wings above the truck.”
“Over the top, over the parapet!” Em sang. It was a bit from the album The Babies recorded with Lil Mountain.
“Fuck you. Fuck this shit.”
“Tell me!”
“Ok.” I shrunk back and closed my eyes.
“Everything rushes by as disconnected fragments, but if I focus super hard, I can dimly perceive their secret cohesion,” I confessed.
“Yes,” Em said. She clapped her hands and threw her head back. “Dimly perceive, or create anew!” she proclaimed.
I could see it: The other car had tried to cut us off, but then they flipped over and landed directly in front of us. We turned quickly to the left, and narrowly avoided hitting them. I was laughing like crazy.
We came to a grinding halt, branches and leaves stuffed into our front grill. Somehow we were back on the road. The motor was switched and the truck sagged backwards. The engine ticked. That and the hushed gasps of someone crying were the only sounds.
I got up and climbed out of the pickup. I walked across the road, my Vans crunching on rocks and gravel. I noticed that I could see the sky again. The clouds had gone away and the stars had come out. Behind us was the valley we had just passed through—a great, yawning emptiness. In the darkness, I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it.…i could feel it opening…and then tightening its little fists…
The driver’s door of the sedan opened as I approached it. It had a color now, a washed out yellow. Bruce was at the wheel, sitting bolt upright, his shaved head hatless and shining.
“Hey,” he said, without turning to look at me. When I heard his voice I knew it was really him. I clapped my hands over my face like a little girl.
“Oh my God, Are you OK?” I said.
“I think so.” His eyes watered up. I’d never seen him cry and it scared me.
“I can’t believe it’s really you!” he gushed.
It was beyond his usual refusal to make eye contact: it seemed he couldn't turn his head. I felt someone nearby. I turned and saw Em standing by the rear of the sedan.
“Get in,” she said. Her voice was low and menacing, she was holding a black garbage bag filled with something heavy.
“Hey man, what the fuck…” I started.
“I said, get in,” she turned sideways to show the gun that she was holding against the bag, which I now realized was a person. The garbage bag was really a blanket wrapped around their head. They were huddled down as if trying to hide.
“Are you kidding me?” I said.
“Emily!” Bruce said, still staring straight ahead. “What are you doing?”
Something stirred on the other side of the road. Em looked over and then back at me with her eyes wide.
“We’re here to rescue you. Now shut up and get in the car!” She pointed the gun at me. I fell to the ground.
“Get up!”
I looked at her, something had changed, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Have you been working out?” I asked.
“Get in!” she shouted, continuing to aim at my chest.
“OK, OK!”
I placed my foot inside and was immediately overcome by a violent tremor. Em gave a shove and I flopped in next to Bruce. Then she went around to the back and pushed the other person in and slid in beside them, the gun waving around crazily as she did. The blanket slipped from the person’s head and as soon as I saw the shock of blonde hair I knew right away. It was Cyndi. I couldn’t tell if she saw me. One eye rolled off to the side and the other filled with blood. There was more blood all over the inside of the seat and on Em’s lap.
Bruce started the engine and looked at me out of the corner of his eye as my body shook and shook.
“Everything’s going to be OK,” he said as still more blood (how could there be so much? Where was it coming from and where would it go?) dripped out of his ear, fat and slow.
Image: Pyotr Belenok
Thank you for reading. Thank you for your support.
It is summer where I am. I like the heat, I hope you do too if it is also summer where you are.
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Love Always,
--Swim
