Part 8 in an ongoing series by Lance Marwood

There is lunacy hiding in every corner of this world.

Behind every screen, every pixel; every leering walkway and idle chat. You and I look and see different things. We hear custom octaves, in the parlance of algorithms pushing us, driving us onward. We are results, not aspirations.

As it should be; the only ones who should be allowed any aspirations are the sons and daughters of the Dynasties. But if there are others who aspire to be greater, it’s only because they’re trying to emulate the majesty that the Dynasties hold dear.

There is a nervous breakdown coming and you don’t know it. Give a man access to the infinitude of this city’s grid, all of its screens and plynths and towers, and he can turn you into a gibbering mess within the day.

Because that’s what’s happening right now.

Gareth stops brushing his teeth when he notices a lesion on his face.

He’s clean shaven; always kept it that way. Which is why he can see the angry, red sore rising from the skin just under his right cheek, along the jawline. It doesn’t just look angry; it looks like something cancerous.

Something that spells the end.

A lifetime of self-care bordering on the obsessive might well hold off the spectre of mortality much longer than the person to your right or left. But in the end, it comes. And when it does, how will death find you? Will you be prepared? Will you be ready?

Gareth, to his credit, is found not wanting.

He’s a Harmony employee, fairly high up for a non-Dynasty attendee, so he’s fairly ambitious, which means he’s done the ascendancy work; the optimizing, the improving, the striving. Which means he’s more solid than most, at least when it comes to problem solving.

I watch Phelps do his thing. And I see the power he wields. And I hate him for it.

I hate his locked eyes and tight jaw, grinding molars inside a mouth that looks as if oral cancer took him in his youth. Milky whites in his eyes, as if they might spill over if he just leaned a little further. His breathing shallow and yet sounding, faintly, like it’s leading to climax. But he’s only just getting started, this fuck.

The thing about smart mirrors is the manufacturer applies colour correction and grading features into the undercell coating of the mirror to make it easier to sell in the store; flatter people to their face, and they will buy that feeling.

Apply the reverse logic, and you can play on hidden fears. You can make people self conscious. Or play on their dysphoria, mess with their sense of self.

You have to get your hooks into the subject’s history, their worldview. Their self. But to do so with their literal view of self, now that’s something.

What Gareth doesn’t have, however, is time.

He’s got a standard working week in front of him, which means he’s got just over ninety hours to negotiate around, to try and save and pivot and adjust in order to meet the service level he’s contractually bound to.

He gets to work, quickly configuring and sorting and proposing, calculating what can be moved in order to fit a ten minute video call with a clinician. He probes, trying to find the unlock that will free up a slot.

There. That tail-end of the stand up meeting. The group’s always expected to commit pitches on the way over to their rooms, but Gareth figures he can hang back, assume a coughing fit, give himself the opportunity to ask to use the bathroom. It’ll be noted on his file, but he knows his efficiency rating over the past few cycles will offset it.

With a plan in place, Gareth’s pulse starts to normalize. A childhood filled with memories of beds and meds and the smell and tang of odours and fluids that no one explained, for deaths of those closest to him that no one deserves; this is the reason why this threat was chosen. The reason why his flavour of torment was the looming threat of a death filled with indignity and indecency.

He shakes his head, now affecting a smile, a feeble attempt at composure, at trying to make himself feel better, all the while buttoning his shirt and putting on his slacks. Then he’s got his shoes on and walking out the door, his bag over his shoulder, his lanyard and badge around his neck, locks his door turns, and his heart stops.

All of the groundwork happens in the schedule, I see. It begins in the feeds, and the paper trails, and the internal machinations of the subject’s world.

They have obligations, calendars, administration; you have a life built on the fulfilment of your duties, and these are all tracked by your digital presence. Never singular, because that would be too powerful; but here, now, in this room, I see the virtual body coalesce and take shape. Cohering into this shadow self, become real.

Where before the lack of layers and tissue meant the subject could not feel pain, could not have pressure applied, now they have become tangible. Sentient.

And now we have something that we can turn screws into.

He’s on the Oak Moraine Estates, a not-too-awful district of the city where the more affluent of the Harmony working cohort get to call home. Gareth’s studio apartment is on the south edge of the square format building. It’s closer to the corner, avoiding the middle of the hundred or so units on this one floor on this one side alone. Rusted railings adorned with affectations of plant life to cover the corrosion. But nothing escapes the screens. In this world, we all need to be on the same page, as the Dynasties correctly spell it out, and to do that we all need the feed, and not in our hands, but in our communities.

So his next door neighbour Samira who’s also leaving to go to work glances at the screens and sees the weather, the local traffic times, and the blackouts schedule. His other neighbour Alex and their partner Kim see photos of their (recently deceased) dog and a prompt if they wish to speak with someone. Kim signals yes and the charge goes on their balance, the scheduling prompt already routing its way to their inbox.

But Gareth doesn’t see the usual assortment of helpful information that Harmony provides in the feeds. He can’t not look away at the towering central feed, on a screen as wide as two movie theatres’, wrapped up in a cylinder in the centre of the square, reaching all the way from the bottom of the courtyard to a few levels above the top floor, giving the building the appearance of a dreidel, albeit one of of steel and glass and concrete.

On this central column, everyone sees what they need. But Gareth sees something he wishes he had never seen. Somehow rendered real. Impossible.

It’s his mother, the last time he saw her, all those years ago. The cancer that ended up killing her so slowly did so by taking her nose and upper lip. Even now, he’s looking at her as he did when he was younger, over twenty years ago, a memory somehow escaped from pits of despair he’d long thought resolved, and now rendered here, in front of him, in his apartment building square.

Mirrors are smart, yes, but they’re still just mirrors. What is actually needed is a looking glass. Fortunately for Phelps, he has the entire city’s grid of screens to work with. And a screen is far more than just a single dimension.

You and I can look at the same screen and see different things. Yet another ingenious innovation courtesy of the Dynasties. So why then would we need phones? Why distract ourselves all the time, tap tap tapping away on our little devices, as Harmony explains, when you can be present in these collective spaces? So long as there are screens that are provided by the Dynasties, these are able to show you everything you want to see, even while you’re sharing the space with others.

His eyes are dilated. Pulse is now thrumming. Adrenals are now working overtime to match. Health history shows a usually decent resting heart rate, but as Gareth watches his mother in her final moments, somehow, here, on this screen, he catches himself looking at the necrosis of her flesh, just like he did all those years ago despite how many times he promised himself he wouldn’t stare.

“Don’t fucking stare,” he hears his dad admonish him. He whirls around, looking for the source of the voice. Gareth doesn’t think he hears this, he does hear it. He can practically smell the booze on his dad’s breath, the path his father made to his own premature end, the same thing that made him so mean and angry and hurt him so much more. Hurt him so much he was ashamed of how happy he was when his own father died, though years later than he felt he should have. But still dead all the same. So how was he talking to him? Where did that voice come from?

Bone conduction dispenses with the harmonics and soundwaves and pipes in the vibrations through contact. Everyone needs to speak when spoken to, so the conduction mics that are fitted in the collars of most Harmony workers are ample enough, but the company takes extra precautions. Phelps has tapped into the security badge dangling around his neck.

Gareth looks back at his mother, except this can’t be his mum, but it must be, because it was her, the same odd swirled flecks in her eyes, the same freckles that started at the top of her nose and cascaded down but then were eventually devoured by the cancer, the same cancer that turned the skin underneath her nose dark like wine, then eventually spread to her nose and past her top lip, turning them into ebonic clay, the flesh going black and the lips curling back to reveal teeth starting to fall out from gums also falling foul and suddenly Gareth doesn’t remember where he is anymore, his mind now screaming with revulsion and confusion at how his memories got in the screen and how could anyone have known the way her skin looked like rotten pulp.

And then he looks again and it’s the weather and a few concerned faces in his field of view.

Gareth blinks and then he’s apologizing and looking again and again there’s just the weather and the blackout schedule, with a prompt asking if he would like to give up his slot for a recent clinician appointment for another member of the community who could really use it right now.

He’s standing on the LTR platform, when he sees her again.

Except this time, her eyes are no longer swirling with the hazel he’d always known and loved, but are now a stark white, a cruel blank angry snarl on her already warped face and now he’s wondering how he can smell the picture, wonder how no one else sees this. And of course they wouldn’t. But how could anyone have seen her to know to get her mouth like it was toward the end, when the teeth started falling out with the merest prompting and the tip of her tongue began rotting away inside an already foul mouth.

“Don’t fucking stare!” his mom screams. The white eyes are a void now, a void that’s getting bigger. The void continues until it’s swallowing him.

Even as I watch Phelps work the subject into a nervous breakdown on the LTR, I don’t know how he does it.

What I do know, what we all know, is that if it is decided, then you are not long for this earth. Once the word comes, you have been selected, and this is the type of thing you don't come back from. If you do, you will not be the same.

After you have had our touch, our kiss, our embrace, you will know what hell is. You will know that hell is heaven on earth compared to what we show you.

But this, this is different.

The corridors are a destination. Every subject requires extraction and placement, no matter how trivial the distance.

In this version, hell comes home to you.

Hell is awaiting you outside your door, on the freeway, on the bus platform, in the elevator, at your desk, in your bed at your house. Hell is ready to show itself to you in the screens in your city, in the bus shelters on your street, in the feed on your phone. Hell is ready to swallow you whole.

There is a new way of pressing people. And as I note the way Eddie raises his eyebrows or the way he shakes Phelps’ hand, I am now concerned I am not much longer for this world.

∴ If this newsletter has done anything for you, it would mean everything to me to hear it. Hit reply and tell me what you think. One sentence is enough. Regardless, thank you for reading. Thank you for reading in an age of increasing illiteracy, cultural stagnancy, and attention divestment. You are doing something revolutionary. ∴

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