Fabrication

Everything is desolation.

The more involved the enterprise, the more bustling and productive society becomes, the greater the emptiness.

Activity creates a void.

There is an inherent meaninglessness in fabrication. The greater the heights of the accomplishments--both metaphorically and literally, if one was talking about the mammoth skyscraping towers--the more devoid of meaning they become.

Even religion has become transparent in its vacancy. Enforced attendance and ritualistic devotion do not make for fulfillment. It just seems something fundamental is missing. It's like memorizing a list of vocabulary without understanding what the words mean.

Everything was different before the robot apocalypse

Dear Diary

Today I got my first period. I'm the first in my grade to have one.

It wasn't bad at all. I was in English class, and I told Mrs. Johnson what happened, and she gave me a pass to the nurse's office. Only a few of the girls understood what was going on, and none of the boys.

Mom tried to be reassuring, like it was something I might be ashamed of. I think Dad was more embarrassed about it than I was.

Actually, I'm proud. I'm way ahead of schedule. This is definitely going on my application to Harvard.

Absolute Zero

Is it so easy to discard Einstein? To forget Kuhn? Nothing is absolute. Even the rules Einstein himself believed inviolable proved fallible.

We've broken the light barrier. We've entered a black hole and returned. Still they demand their rules be sanctified.

Now she would prove them wrong again. She would surpass absolute zero. She would prove that no matter how cold, it could always be colder. She would do so by transforming the hermeneutics of quantum gravity, and forever alter our understanding of the universe.

And she would die in the process, praying she's right about the viability of cryogenics.

Glass House

She'd built it metaphorically, to point out the fragility of our realities. If it earned her six figures, well she had to make a living.

Now she was confined inside a true house of glass, forever damned to clean windows, and floors and walls. Her fingers tasted of windex.

The worst part was the audience of gawkers and art critics parading past, taunting her with their stones and opaque clothing. They recycled themselves incessantly, and their presence was a constant reminder of her former hubris.

You see, the devil believes in metaphors too, and in prisons of our own making.

Alice With The Small Hands

She was a freak, her hands impossibly tiny. They all shunned her.

She dreamed her hands were larger than they actually appeared, shrunk on their way through the looking glass, but life was no wonderland.

Her grandmother made her believe. There was always a logic to God's madness, a meaning behind her abomination.

And then, the clockwork men attacked, their precision machinery working in time to destroy the Earth. Alice, only her tiny hands able to fit inside, saved humanity. Her day had arrived.

They still shunned her. Even her grandmother. Her purpose had been served, praise be to God.

The World's Worst Optimist

Dr. Jane Spurlock, world renowned neurologist, just finished the worst workday ever.

"You won't believe the awful things that happened today. First, several babies died of brain cancer. Then, a puppy with a broken spine tried to climb stairs to reach its master, who also died of brain cancer. And I spilled coffee on my new blouse."

Her always attentive husband, Roger, tried to place everything in its proper context.

"Look at the bright side. With the Republicans about to retake the House and dismantle Obama's health care reform, you won't have to attend to the poor and disenfranchised anymore."

A Modern Day Chastity Belt

I keep careful track of my house keys. Each one is tagged with a tiny GPS chip so that I can pinpoint their locations at all times. I note every person that has ever touched one in my key journal.

I don't trust locksmiths, so I apprenticed myself to learn lock making techniques. I developed a special algorithm based on integral wave theory to measure out the grooves, giving my locks the equivalent of 256-bit encryption.

You might consider me excessively cautious, but no one has ever broken into my house.

My key journal has only a single name listed.

A Diligent Man

He thought of himself as a diligent man. He was strict with his friends, strict with his colleagues, strict with family. If he was likely to show favor to anyone, it would be to a complete stranger.

He considered himself fortunate, married to a sober woman, and the father of twins.

He would never force his children to wear identical outfits. Rather, he always provided two thoroughly divergent costumes, one rather fashionable, one utterly hideous. He then required his children to fight for the right to choose, thus teaching them the lesson that life is what you make of it.

Palimpsest

They are faint echoes coloring every moment of my continued existence. You can't call them memories, not exactly, because they never actually occurred. They are more like dreams. Or possibilities.

Either way, I am haunted.

They say--and by they, I mean the quantum physicists--that prior to its observation, a particle exists in superposition, in every possible quantum state simultaneously. I know this to be true. My world, ever since the moment of the accident, has become superpositioned. There is the world in which she died, or the world in which she's still alive, and they exist in parallel.

The Sovereignty Network

I think of myself in the singular. Using we to talk about myself strikes me as monarchic.

When I first plugged ourselves into the network, I experienced what one might call a feeling of narrative omniscience. I no longer understand the world through a first person point of view. I now see everything with the polygonal eye of an insect. And I am no longer restricted to one place, but have disseminated myself everywhere.

I don't like to think of myself as a monarch, but plugging ourselves into the network was what allowed me to assume universal command of Earth.