finished Saturday, January 29, 2022
I started this many years ago, and every time I looked at it in my collection, I changed it completely
<Saele pulled back my hair and began to french braid. My eyes remained closed as I rested my head on my folded arms over the back of the alunimum chair. I guess I was still a little out of it.
"They're going crazy out there, man." The faint sound of rapidly clicking buttons mingled with the equally miniscule chiptune from the top of the bed. "They will figgrusout eventually and end up catching us yet again."
"I don’t care right now, Slymie. I'll be fine. I still got *this,* see?" I waved the long, narrow barrel of my red chrome pistol at the mirror at the foot of the bed and my eyes stayed closed. I just needed to feel Saele's fingers teasing my hair a little longer.
"He's right. You know he is."
"I know, Sae. I know."
Its hands tugged at my hair with a white-noise evenness, and I felt the first seed bead slide up a tiny cord of tightly braided hair.
"Sae?"
"Hm?"
"Do you feel for people like people do?"
Saele cocked their head. "Well I'm not a person, Mim. I'm a robot."
"Android, though."
Its hands didn't stop their mechanical weaving, fingers split into subfingers, snake scale-like machinery and micro jointing moving individual strands of hair with precise movements. "No. Not android." Its voice smiled out the words, "I had fertility hardware installed, though. I could bear genetically perfect offspring if I felt like it."
Slymie's rapid low-volume chiptune suddenly sounded a mission fail trill.
Saele sighed in frustration. "Slymie. It can be lucrative!"
"I don't wanna hear about it."
Saele synthed out a chuckle.
I felt the braids slowly recede lower and lower, finally to the nape of my neck. Each millimeter-wide bead slid against my hair, now in quick evenly-patterned sequence. Hands, motors whining a slowly gyrating evolving rhythm, gradually slowed, as they raced down a tapestry, each strand of the artwork summing to exactly 25 hairs all the way down at each interlacement, the full plait weaving in and out of itself, layer upon layer of mathematically perfect multicolored latticework art; as my eyes gently wandered over fine linework of plans, plans we had spent noon, evening, night to draw...
***
Saele grabbed Slymie's outstretched hand and pulled him up onto the overturned perfect three-dimensional rectangle matte-grey truck, which had only so recently contained hundreds of tightly packed drones.
I was sitting on the edge, overlooking our handywork. My handywork. I rubbed my thumb along the black-metal inlay of a mantaray as I watched a drone struggle to stand on the scorched blacktop below our feet, flailing without legs and without eyes. The plan had worked. I blinked away a bead of sweat and raised my gun hand to my shoulder to massage a dull pain there; as consortium planners bashed and beat their systems to get a signal from the millions of now dead cameras throughout the city. They simply weren't there, anymore.
"They'll come back," Slymie said, unusually solomn.
"Yes," said Saele, effortlessly hauling slymie to the top, "and my mothercomputer will someday be bought by the consortium."
I spat off the side of the truck. "We just killed off the entire eyegrid. The conso can't see! We've blinded them! Just us!"
"But it won't last, Mim." Slymie rubbed his wide nose. "They're just too big for us."
Saele's smooth plastic face synthesized a downward glance through the chipping painting of a swan across the otherwise plain and scratched surface.
Without warning, I raised my gun to the sky and fired a single bullet, raising a hundred birds to the sky, and making Slymie and Sae almost fall off. I dropped to the ground, some 6 feet below, and screamed, *"It doesn't matter! *Nothing* matters, anymore! Don't you get it?"* I kicked the brutish, mass-produced matte-grey head of a gently weeping drone, and waved my arms, yelling madly. *"NOTHING MATTERS! THERE IS NO LOVE, NO HUMANITY! THERE IS NO JOY OR UNDERSTANDING OR MEANING!"* I twirled around, laughing joyfully.
I stopped. "Everything is taken from us. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is real anymore, and nothing ever will be again. Every last scrap of what life was supposed to be is now... *GREY,"* viciously, I kicked the drone's head again, savoring it's synthesized pain, *MATTE,*" again, **"PLASTIC!"** I heard it cry out, as the last wire connecting its head with its body tore apart, and didn't even bother to watch as the last LED in its forehead dimmed and greyed out forever. I turned and shot it, and five others, five raw, emotional rounds in quick practiced succession; and the ear-splitting sound raked the buildings, bouncing around the always empty city exterior in a dying roar of angst.
I looked up at my friends. "Sae?" I called up.
"What-?" it mumbled, blinking away synthesized tears.
"When you look at my hair after you've finished braiding it, do you feel pride?"
Saele looked at me, confused and frightened. "Yes. Yes, Mim, I do."
I screamed out a wordless yell, feeling my voice crack and shred painfully. *"THERE IS THE MEANING!"* I screamed. "My hair eventualy falls out, the paint rubs off, Slymie's game runs out of batteries and *everytying* is lost, *BUT THERE IS STILL MEANING!"*
I stopped. "There just has to be."
Analysis: Note that vagueness mixes with clarity smoothly in the narrative.
The theme here, if you're confused, is my young generation's need for meaning in a meaningless world (the matte-greyness), and our inability to accept the homogeneous meaning given to us by people in power.
© Thor Smith, 2022