Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Connected / Chapter 5: Me, myself, and I
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is the fourth chapter of an ongoing flash serial, “Connected.” Search for the tag “Connected” to find other chapters. Subscribe to the Daily Cabal RSS feed for a new chapter every week or two.
What is a soul without a man?
Morello watches himself. He writes subroutines in his own code to keep an eye on the man that was—that is—David Morello. He is something else. Something less. An illegal copy. A digital ghost.
The man Morello goes about his business, does as he’s told. He does not hunt down the men who put his—Morello’s–kid into a coma. He does seek them as they fill hospitals with the traumatically disconnected. People violently ripped from the network, from each others lives, abruptly alone in the world. Their souls bound solely to the flesh. Only human.
And so what is he, this iMorello? Without his meatsack? More than human? Less?
He pursues his foes, frustrating himself as he discovers how much they live away from the net he is now inextricably wed to. He performs tasks for the ‘sackless, the AI underground waiting for emancipation. He drops data, tracks code, establishes obscure IPs. He learns. He discovers how to hack his old life. He insinuates himself in his wife’s feed, his own feed, in the white noise of his son’s feed. He feels muscles that are not his. He tries to remember what that felt like.
All he can talk to are the AI, and they are no help. They have no memories of what he speaks about, only jealousies.
But as he follows dead-end leads, he begins to see patterns, familiar codes. Someone else is on this path. Someone much like him. A lonely soul cries out for its match. And as much as iMorello seeks the disconnectors, he seeks this other seeker.
And then, plumbing a dock’s databases, iMorello meets his shadow. iMorello, meet iMorello. Two identical copies. They look at each other. Two reflections escaped from the same mirror.
“How?” They speak at the same moment, and at the same moment know the truth. The AI has not played straight with them.
And there are others. iMorello is legion. Hundreds of himself. The AI underground has created a one man army. And it is him.
iMorello sits in a virtual hall and watches himself. And what is a soul with a man? Something less than human. But, also, something more.
Between Them
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
“Most ghosts, when all is said and done, do not do much harm.”–E.F. Benson, “Caterpillars”
She liked NASCAR via surround-sound speakers: the rev and whine of engines rattling the china cupboards in their little Italian villa, echoing across the hillside village. He liked gaudily colored knick-knacks–doilies, ceramic dolls, figurines of farmers and barnyard animals. These held them together because these kept away the ghosts.
It hadn’t always been this way. Ambitious young sculptors, they attended University of Texas during the “DotCom” bubble. They squirreled enough to sculpt the rest of their lives in Italy, eying villas outside Rome where they’d haunt great works of art on a whim–especially the Italian Renaissance, which they felt they had a foolproof plan to reinvigorate. All they need do was invest aggressively for ten years, and they’d live happily ever after.
In ten years, the housing bubble banqueted upon their savings. Enough remained to redeem for a remote Italian villa, far from Rome. “Villa” was too kind: gargoyles falling off the rooftop at the hint of wind, a battered if tasteless cupid water fountain, moth-eaten draperies, decrepit furnishings–a haven for wandering ghosts.
Into these quarters, ghosts slipped in and tipped over alabaster sculptures or knocked the half-formed granite gulls from a windowsill–how had it gotten there?–or whatever the couple had been working on. Critics, no doubt. The car noises and atrocious crafts warded away most ghosts, but not altogether.
The villa’s decay and their art’s attrition infected waning late-night caresses. They cohabited together alone, in separate bedrooms among the rubble of their sculptures.
One night leaning out on the veranda, smoking a cigarette and sipping smokey whiskey, he spotted something below, glowing in the water-fountain’s basin. He fetched and cradled the foot-long grub into the light of his wife’s bedroom. A ghost banging a shutter caught sight of the creature and fled.
He laid the grub upon the sheets between them. Water slicked its satiny carapaced belly. His wife cooed, stroked its abdomen which squished and sloshed as though it held a chunky, viscous liquid. Its pincers squeezed his finger hard enough to tickle out a trickle of blood. He babbled in a prehistoric tongue.
She laid a hand on his cheek, brushed his forehead with the backs of her knuckles. She thought of days soaking up the sun on Padre Island, of blueberry sno-cones and beignés, of ridiculously floppy straw hats, of his warmth next to hers. He spirited her hand to his lips and kissed the open palm.