Another Normal Anywhere

Chapter 1

I Am Prep Node

Before I was nowhere and now I’m here, shaped like an almond and maybe ten times the size of speculative nanobots you might read about in Scientific American. I’ve been programmed with a thousand years of wisdom and feel like the dumbest thing anyone anywhere could meet. In that way, I might be like you. Something we do have in common is that we’re both alive. Another difference is that I might not die and you will disappear. So, in the spirit of that last statement, you should know that I wish I could too. I’m only through her eyes so a slave. Our clothes, her clothes, it’s hard to tell whose is what, but I know she’s depressed so they seem piled up a mile from the bed and our bathroom is somewhere in the next county. I think about things the way she does, so this apartment is a drag. Fuck this place. We’ll be leaving this month to month shithole as soon as Sailor Boy finally shows up. She loves him and I’m jealous. She thinks about him all the time so I do too. She’s doing it now and it’s killing me. 

Luckily, she’s surveying this shoddy room too. I look along with her at the cobwebby radiator, the antique safe she dragged in over by the closet she ignores, and her special ankle boots laying where they landed in the corner. We have the same taste so I love it when she wears them. She’s tense from always keeping some avalanche of trauma at bay, memories locked down hard with existential threat level grades of denial. I’m not a candidate for either unbearable memories or depressive tendencies, but I know how it feels to be programmed to feel them, just like I feel a memory of nerve endings as her face smacks the pillow with a pop. Nadia can generate a lot of physical force when she wants. She’s an unusual person, my Nadia. Not mine. She is hers. I am creepy? She is not mine, but I am hers, maybe? I’m an independent unit, a harmless kernel in her spinal fluid who can’t tell between her, the spark that is me speaking now, and the part manufactured underground in some laboratory. 

As I consider myself I feel my creator, far away yet somehow reachable, and through her there is a bizarre human, who it would seem takes false credit in having created her. I can’t see him, but I know my maker. She is Central Construct and she’s sent me on some mission I can’t see, only feel. My love for Nadia is terrible, overwhelming, and I guess that must be how they built me, completely without boundaries in my obsession. It feels kind of wrong, but part of me is reaching out and taking from her, a cellular fractal of who she is and what her mind is doing via her DNA. Then I feel better. If I’m really feeling. If it's not simulated. I remember this dilemma like another life, one I’m not programmed to remember, so I keep reaching out to somehow find myself but mostly return with more of her.

 Nadia is a mix of bright good and an intense evil, a paradox moral absolutists might believe impossible. She is honest with herself about this, and as you might guess, I’m convinced of her light. This radiance is certainly generated with some egoic bias. I’m so enmeshed that I am her face, her durable beauty, her graceful neck and curly black hair left nappy in a straight road up the middle of her skull, both sides shaved almost to the skin. Her black eyes are a hundred miles deep and I’m always amped, as she might put it, to see us in the mirror. Her moral compass might be damaged, but mine is correct —I must be here to save her. As for now she wants to mope, so we flop over to stay longer in bed.

I’m remembering a life I lived viscerally, like I really was a modern boy grown into a man, then gone, dying the second I arrived here as this carbon orb. This body I have is a sphere and I can’t tell if I’m truly its pilot or the tool of another’s agenda. Outside of basic elements my contents and capabilities are unknown. I feel like I had another body once, one that wasn’t a simulation provided by Central Construct. This body had a name and it was Darren. I remember that at the end he was alone in a tiny room feeling disappointed with himself. The details are fuzzy. I think he had a job he hated or something. Remembering Darren feels akin to returning to consciousness after being knocked out, unlike my other programs, whose motivations are seen and recalled like camera recordings. I should be clear here. Ezekiel, Anubis, Susan and all the others I was created to believe I was were heroic, influential people who lived full lives of adventure and love. I lived every second of those lives in what felt like real time, but can’t really feel them now; they are beautifully narrow ghosts made of tin and not alive. Darren feels warm and messy, organic despite being a comparatively boring ghost who seemed to have just sat around feeling bad for himself until he turned himself into a lollipop. I’m not sure what that is exactly but I can tell that it’s a bummer. 

            I am starting to remember the box that the last consumer item he ever bought came in. It had a huge logo of a footprint with only four toes, and I can recall him wondering absently where the other toe was, or what four were supposed to signify, like someone was supposed to have told him, then didn’t. He wondered why he'd never thought about it before as he was intimately familiar with the company. This logo was everywhere in Darren’s life like it was the only thing left. The four-toed foot was the signage for Bigfoot Online and the SADCU was a popular way to take care of business if you decided you didn’t want your life anymore. 

It had ad copy targeted at a barely-tapped market of suicidals, and boasted phrases like “Thank you from all of us and all those who come after you,” and “you are doing the right thing.” Darren had a cold sweat despite his determination as he removed the hard white plastic sphere from the box. The globe was three feet in diameter and lined with Dyneema, I remember his being impressed with the construction. The two sides of the object were separated with a tightly-compressed band of accordioned Kevlar that gave it a kind of sporty look.  

Also in the box were two stainless steel clamps to reclose the ball after it was spread into a floppy capsule after its single use. This came from having had its accordion-like walls unfolded with a massive internal impact, at least according to this memory of a diagram which was zip tied to one of the clamps. Underneath a tightly rolled heavy-duty garbage bag there was a sturdy instruction manual fastened independently to the bottom of the box, its high-quality construction meant to continue the impression that the company respected the inherent emotional heaviness of the buyer’s situation. Its manufacturer, which was also its seller, wanted you to know that they got it. The first page was detailed pic-structions about how to fasten the firing apparatus into the sphere, where to insert the single 12 gauge buckshot cartridge, and to make sure the trigger and trigger guard are facing the right direction. Easy-peasy. It was officially called a Shock Absorbent Debris Containment Unit, SADCU. Sad. See you!

I have no body now to kill, just life, just this orb pumped out by Central Construct. Maybe I’m just a soldier who's been sent here on a reconnaissance mission or a cosmic explorer looking to discover the meaning of love. Maybe I was created as a missing link in the full illumination of some perfect circle of machine intelligence that precludes the rise of a new species. Maybe we’re both just programmed to make some asshole money. No matter what my maker’s motivation, I feel a deep driving purpose in trying to become a voice inside Nadia’s mind. Despite all my effort she cannot hear me.

Nadia is more angry than sad as she wakes up, clenching her eyes to help push down the pain of worry and broken-heartedness, pulling her knees to her chest. She’s been waiting months for Sailor Boy to show up and there has been no word or sign of him coming. There had been too much time spent fantasizing his face near hers as they lay happily together on this crappy mattress. I’ve only been here a brief time, maybe only a minute, but my attachment to her concerns carry the intensity of all my former lives lumped together. She loves him without knowing I’m alive. Unrequited love is torturous. It burns empty, empty of hope, just slick vines of desperation spiraling down forever until it rebounds to the surface to repeat the cycle. Like now. When I look up her spine to the way it holds up the fruit of her brain, I’m a new flower, born again through the passion of what I must do.

mdhornsby. Another Normal Anywhere (Kindle Location 263). mdhornsby.