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Cold
Love
Foreplay We live
in cities to be observed. It's just too cold "out there" for
most of us. I don't mean physically. It's too empty. There's too much
"self" and not enough of that social fabric which provides
padding for our frequent head-on collissions with ourselves. That social
fabric we hate! Like others,
I have dreamt of "getting away". Buying the camper and equipping
it like a mini house. Everything small. "Small is beautiful".
But still the comfort of home: C.D. player, computer, modem, digital
phone, uplink. Even the electric toothbrush features in my immaginary
camper which takes me to the beaches and deserts of my dreams. Why am
I still here? "We live in cities to be observed". This is
my only comprehension why I have not swapped my present life with it's
concerns about finance, employment, strategies for tomorrow, next week,
next year, even strategies, in case I end up, like so many, finding
myself with a terminal illness: how to die! Why have I clung to this
excistence instead of trading it for the ideal life by some perfect
beach with all the time in the world to just observe nature, get fit,
quit smoking, drinking. Maybe even get close to who I really am..? You're
in the same boat I immagine! If I ever find the way out, I'll just fade
away! You'll never hear about me. "The
meanings we generate for our lifes are constructed by the facts we choose
to remember and the facts we choose not to remember"(W.H.'98). In the
meantime?? For the
present, I'm happy to tell you a few stories to take your mind away
for awhile.
Eternal
life Eternal
life was no longer a dream; it had, long ago, turned into a nightmare.
This is a true account based on recently received data. Data which,
as a consequence of a time-loop phenomenon late in the 20th century,
was picked up by a randomly lucky netsurfer. At first, this surfer suspected
that he had encountered another "infocaster" who had amazing
imagination. Most of
the scenarios referred to the future and of course he had not as yet
encountered it. His only concept of merging tenses relied on a sprinkling
of facts about the Australian Aborigines "Dreamtime". He could
only imagine that what he read, night after night, was the product of
an TRULY fertile imagination. He had become so absorbed in her stories
that his daily life was just becoming a annoying necessity of routine.
This routine
had taken on quite complex dimensions. He could not share his experience.
He had to remain healthy and rest enough that no-one suspected his double-life.
Her strict demands were made during an early encounter. He had just
logged onto a server he used from time to time to gain access to a on-line
dating service when he found a unusual message crossing his screen in
48 point Helvetica bold. It said:
"I am the memory of the last survivor of the most ambitious human
experiment ever conducted" after a momentary display that looked
like his new screensaver the monitor flashed: "do
you want to meet me?" He was
dumbfounded by the unusual quality of the approach. At the very least
he had met someone more interesting than his usual net dates who never
lasted longer than the cold erotic bridge of mutual masturbation via
prompting's from a lonely, horny woman (or was it men?) somewhere on
the planet. Prompting's
which gave a slight personality to the eternal "I want you to fuck
me"scenario. "Do
you want to meet me?" It seemed
to fade. He quickly typed: "YES". Again, the mandelbrot image
appeared and this time it remained on the screen while words formed
from graphic formations in decay. The following
message was extensive and he read it several times before he replied.
The message read: "If
you want to meet me, it will cost you your life". Well, this
was getting intriguing. He typed: "what do you mean?" thinking
aloud 'what a weirdo'. Leitz was "in-between relationships".
At least that's how he described himself on the few social outings such
as work-parties when someone took enough notice of him to ask if he
was here with a partner. He thought
that "in-between relationships" sounded kind of sexy and confident
and it alluded to a willingness to share something with the right person.
The fact that it had been over two years since he had last been in a
steady relationship was never brought into the conversation by Leitz.
He had
few friends and even his friends knew virtually nothing about him other
than where he worked, and that he drove across the whole country once
a year to visit his mother for Christmas. He usually stayed away for
four weeks and various friends had taken it in turns to look after his
cat and a few plants during this time. On return
he always took them out for a lovely meal as a thank you and then returned
to his routine of infrequent social contact. No-one thought it strange
that he never hosted a dinner in his apartment. He had always described
it as small, even crammed, but handy to the inner city where he worked.
All Leitz's
social encounters took place outside his flat and no-one knew that he
had purchased a fairly serious computer and cablemodem so he could spend
his evenings in the comfort of encounters across the anonymous datascape
of the Internet. The reply
to his "what do you mean?" came dancing onto his screen. The
letters were animated and choreographed . When they finally arrived
in their intended locations they constructed the following paragraph:
"You
have never met anyone like me, you have not even read about anyone like
me. I am the last survivor of an experiment which began some thirty-five
years after your time now, but which has already lasted many, many lifetimes.
I am a human god. I am able to live for a unthinkable long time, but
I have decided, since time is close to touching itself and will do so
on the day of your death, to join you in death so I can stop - finally!" "You're
joking-who are you?" was Leitz's response. Her impatient
reply came rapidly: "find
out about the 'Bose-Einstein Condensate' experiment" she wrote,
text appearing now quite unceremoniously on his screen. "It begins
in your time. The whole order that you and all around you believe in
is wrong. The experiment will prove it within your lifetime". Leitz had
never heard about this eperiment but a quick search revealed that the
'Bose-Einstein Condensate' concept was indeed a theory first considered
by the physicists Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose. It involved
exceptionally complex processes that lead to a theorethical leap in
quantum physics. A kind of atom trap in his interpretation which causes
a transmogification that changes many atoms into one. Outside
It fell apart! Kranz screamed: you stupid fuck, why did you touch it?.
What are you screaming about? You didn't put it together and it isn't
yours anyway hissed Andu. The bickering had turned nasty again. Waiting
was not their strength. Everything had split. The old and new technologies
separated ideological differences. They became the symbol of political
opposites. Power was now definitely in the information-rich digital
realm. But the resistance, denied access to the digital environment,
had resolved to re-invent the wheel so to speak. Hidden in unlikely
pockets of the most difficult terrain lived small tribes of recusants
who had committed to create new hope in this vast emptyness outside
the corporate giant controlled population centres . The resistance had
gone underground (literally) by necessity. All alternative lifestyles
were banned and those who lived outside the cities were prey for hunting-parties
held by the super-rich. Alarm
A red light
suddenly pierced the solitude of the darkroom. Someone had discovered
him. Already he heard yelling from behind the door for him to open or
they would shoot. Whoever was shining the torchlight through the safelight
shaft could not see him, the safelight was simply a piece of ruby-coloured
glass in a shaft that he had dug up, into the garden, and it only worked
by daylight. The fact was however that he was trapped. They would not
yet know definitely that someone was inside the room, but, he was certain
that they would just stupidly open fire at the door and keep firing
until there could be no-one alive in the space beyond this simple wooden
door. He could have used a heavier door, perhaps a steel reinforced
one, but he knew that by the time his hide-out was discovered, he had
no chance at all. Grey
Grey was
in again. Ase nearly laughed at the interactive monitor. He knew that
despite Goethe's pioneering thoughts on colour theory, the new German
mind craved the comfort of grey. The palette used by Anselm Kiefer back
in the 80's (1980's that is) echoed across a human landscape of 600
million Germans. Some, of course had genetic material from pre-amalgamation
days. Latino and Gaellic visages made brief appearances in line-ups
for screen-encounters. They provided some light entertainment amid the
serious faces of the German achievers. Unlike the clowns in the circuses
of earlier times, the latinos and other ethnics wore digital make-up.
Their purpose however reminded Ase of the clowns he had watched on footage
from pre-amalgamation times. Tokens
Just a
few tokens would have been enough to buy the connection. Hanna had lost
his last tokens on the game and his only remaining currency, a ten megaflop
RAM chip was too large to exchange on the street without causing suspicion.
IDE
The IDE
card was out of the question, they were near enough to catching him
without Hanna giving them a precise location by using the card. The
card which contained a range of credits, his ID profile, medical information
and numerous access codes for "pay as you use" services also
contained a device for LSE, location signal emission which was transmitted
every sixty seconds by the cardÕs internal processing engine.
The low radiation of the card's signal could be muffled until it's emission
was no more than an electronic whisper by wrapping the card in layers
of foil and plastic. Hanna had learned this trick from the pirates near
the border who had slipped in and out of heavily guarded terrain without
detection as a matter of daily routine. Agents
It was
already nearly one year that he was on the run and in this time he had
nearly been cornered three times by agents who, despite their electronic
blindness because of his stealth measures, had almost been close enough
to him to identify him against their continual observe/compare function.
A third of a second in full frame mode and two seconds in crowd monitoring
mode was all that was required by bionic agents to match anyone they
saw with the Identifit software that took up seventy percent of their
processing ability. Once a match was secure, the bionics simply transmitted
the alert to the enforcers who, despite their armour and weaponry, still
had strong appearance-links to their human handlers. They could have,
Hanna thought, made them into seamless spheres ore cubes because their
hover and fly capacity required no external fittings for the magnetic
pulse capacitors. These magnetic storage and amplification devices gave
the enforcers their acrobatic skills and inhuman speed which they practiced
with the same silence as their mind-numbing violence on a target. But
the enforcers had themselves not been fitted with the Identifit software
which meant that they required the electronic arrow which the bionics
locked onto targets once identified and cross-matched against central
data. Only with central confirmation would the bionics receive the PIN
number that unlocked a electronic arrow which could be shot at the target
and, once embedded , locate the target for ten years before it's atomic
battery failed. No target ever noticed the arrow's penetration which
was usually just below the hairline on the neck of the subject. Any
range within 10 meters would place the supersonic ÒarrowÓ
projectile far beneath the skin at a speed which exceeded the awareness
range of the human nervous system. The arrow would, after activation
become the target for the enforcers. They would destroy the arrow with
violent precision and their 20mm laser beam would burn towards the arrow
from any angle that made a direct attack possible. The most spectacular
came from directly below the target, as the laser superheated each progressive
layer of skin, tissue and bone during it's split-second penetration.
The laser would already be inactive by the time the explosion took place.
Human skin would stretch and stretch to impossible dimensions before
it ruptured and made way for the ejaculate of death. Hanna was sick
to death of continent one. He had never managed to pay the exorbitant
fee that the underground specialists demanded for the creation of a
perfect alias. Therefore could not disappear from continent one without
the constant fear of trackers following him to continent two or three
which were the only alternatives other than the primitive lands below
continent two. Far away from the life - support facilities of the civilized
continents were the Asian, Polynesian , Arctic and Australian sites
which had been the battle-grounds of the last war and which were still
too contaminated to support any normal infrastructure based lifestyle.
Only waste disposal and mining crews lived there on a six month rotation
roster. High pay for shit work in the most dangerous places on the planet.
Hanna had no desire to escape to the waste-zone. He might as well let
the bionics tag him in preparation for the millisecond blast of deadly
heat from some enforcer. No, all his running, hiding and hardship over
the last year had to count for something. He still had the digital key
in his mind. They still had no idea he had been close enough for long
enough to write himself a back-door into central storage. If he could
ever get into the powerzone again, and remain undetected long enough
to logon to the central database, he could really wreak havoc, or make
the difference to the sixty million level one's whose entire life, since
the four day war that erased much of the human presence on the planet,
had been spent being totally controlled by the powerzone elite. Hanna
was no longer willing to entertain the thought that the level one's
could be rehabilitated into free agents who made their own decisions.
For six long years, all level one's had been wired. the implants could
detect every private thought, every intention which would in some way
be construed as subversive to the absolute control held by the powerzone
elite was dealt with by the level three controllers and their armory
of parallel processing computers which would automatically set the level
of "treatment" that was required to bring rectify the "situation".
Level one's knew that the third "treatment" was termination
by one of the two-thousand enforcers that could locate a target targeted
by an arrow within minutes. The second treatment included the implant
procedure of an arrow and it's electronic activation was not reliant
on a bionic. Any of the level three controllers could activate the arrow
from their monitor. So here he was, thought Hanna, just a connection
away from Red, his old intellectual adversary whom he could vaguely
trust to provide him with sanction in continent two and a good enough
alias to at least buy him some time before the trackers caught up. How
could he make the connection? The time window for contact would only
remain open for another sixty five minutes he decided after checking
his info-card which was worn by everyone like a dog-tag. Info-cards
had no commodity value and therefore could not be traded. He did, however
have some interesting extras on his which he could sell to the right
buyer. Digital keys for arsenals and utilities which heÕd extracted
from central data during his luckily undetected visit a year ago. But
who could he find that would exchange these keys for green tokens? Green
tokens would not arouse suspicion as their value did not require central
authority cross-check before use. But they
were difficult to amass as they were frequently disabled and thus required
an exchange procedure which would immediately alert authorities if more
than a few were handed in for exchange by anyone. He would not sell
his keys or even one key for pittance. After all, if their use was ever
detected, it would not only render the other keys useless as the codes
would surely be changed, it would increase the risk of his detection.
The war/Sarin He had prepared the dinner. The guests had been selected
because they all had at some point disappointed him. He made sure his
choice also considered the criteria that none of them had ever met before.
This was his game. These were his rules! Introducing the feast made
him very happy: he said "the exits of the house are guarded by
my men" when the guests had exchanged brief comments about this,
their attention returned to him. He continued: all the implements in
front of you are capacitors. Your knifes and forks hold a variety of
electric charges. One of the spoons has been dipped in Cyanide. I have
no idea which. It will be an entertaining dinner! Lets eat, I'm starving!
Irony The irony
was obvious- the war which lasted four days began with the release of
SARIN in mega-quantities. Millions of people died in convulsions from
this lethal mix of alcohol, isopropanol, sodium fluoride, phospherous
trichloride and acetonitrile which made a cocktail that, named by Hitler's
chemists a hundred years earlier, sounded like a friendly food additive
or washing powder. The spiral towards death which the nerve gas Sarin
produced was horrific. First the victims experienced nausea and vomiting,
lack of bowel control which resulted in diarrhoea, to be followed by
a complete outpouring of the bodies wet matter- bleeding from all orifices
eyes, ears, nose, urine, blood, feces and more blood; the obscene ritual
of convulsions and involuntary spasms produced moments of reality lockout
by the tortured brains of victims before the blanket of coma released
them from the experience some minutes before the inevitable system breakdown
and death. Surgery
The average
consumer had been completely conditioned by now. Nothing, no product
or service which was not provided by a major corporation would or could
be trusted. The technique itself was quite dated, but personal welfare
and health issues had completely deteriorated for the level one and
two subjects. Telepresence
surgical techniques invented in the 1990's which used remote control
surgical tools had been superseded long ago by the far less intrusive
DNA manipulation, but level one and two still had no option but to undergo
"operations" which were conducted by burned out medico's who
only cared about how many credits a procedure could earn them. Loss We had
lost something. We had lost something, thought Hanna. It was difficult
to assign a time to the event, but the loss itself somehow related to
the human condition. The choices had somehow become narrow. Life extending
options all linked to hungry survival. Placidity and dreaming belonged
to the past. Hanna realised that everyone he knew epected to be entertained
by a constant flow of new experience. No film was viewed twice, no book
re-read, no lover given a second night and no thought was made welcome
if it re-occured. Everyone was hungry and no matter how much everyone
consumed, the hunger stayed the same. The end
(for the moment). ©Werner
Hammerstingl, 1998 |