Welcome to DeathStream (short story Pt. 3)

         Everyone dreams, it’s just a question of whether or not you remember. When people say that they can’t dream I always assume it’s because they don’t care enough to try, because it’s easy to train yourself to remember. All it takes is that one fleeting moment retained on wakening, and if you start to write it down, start to pull upon that thread, the rest of the dream will often begin to unravel in reverse, until a whole spool’s worth of thread is piled up on your notepad or cellphone or whatever you reached for in that first impulse to write. Each morning that you do this, the more you remember and the less effort it requires. The exercise of remembering trains a neurological muscle pertaining to memory, lubricating the tunnel you must crawl through to access these subterranean experiences.

         SoulStream is no different than a controlled dream, except that it’s often harder to remember. Our brains struggle to assimilate the foreign experiences which SoulStream provides us, and for a first time Streamer it can be difficult to remember more than an image, a feeling, a scent, even though the Stream might last as long as ten minutes. Our brains are all functionally similar but wired differently. For the minds of new users, trying to encode a memory of a Stream can be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. But, just like with dreams, the more you Stream the more you remember, and if you make an effort to remember more, to record every detail that comes back to you, to explore every nook and cranny of the memories you do retain, then it is only a matter of time before you can remember almost everything, as if it weren’t someone else who lived that experience, but you yourself, only a few minutes before. You’ll never fit the square peg into the round hole, but if you try enough times you might find your edges worn away until you’re something else entirely.

         I used to be into SoulStream the same way that everybody else was. I’d Stream celebrities, athletes, porn stars, friends of mine on vacation— you know, normal stuff. Not that it’s ever really normal to live in somebody else’s head or to have somebody else in yours, but it wasn’t looked down upon. Nobody would think of me different for spending two hours every night living as other people. But just because something is socially acceptable or even the norm doesn’t mean it’s natural or psychologically healthy.

         Even before, when social media was less invasive, there were already plenty of negative psychological effects. You might grow depressed or jealous or obsessed from looking at the lives of other people, people who posted photos or videos tailored to a narrative they wished was true. We used our profiles like avatars who could act out a life we may never really have lived. You might take a vacation that’s all misery and stress, then post three photos of yourself looking happy in a scenic location, and now five hundred people all get the impression you’re some cultured, well-adjusted world traveler, when really you’re as nervous and self-loathing as everybody else on the platform.

         When SoulStream came out, all that pretension was suddenly gone. No more presenting a false image to the world— you were literally bearing your soul. Maybe it seemed that would be good for us. We’d be able to see that we’re all fundamentally similar, that we all share similar anxieties and fears, that we’re all basically the same on the inside. As a twenty-three year old computer nerd bouncing between Streams of my ex girlfriend, of European footballers, of porn stars, of adrenaline junkies in wing suits, I discovered that we are not all basically the same. Our thoughts and feelings may run on the same operating system, but the programs we run are all totally different. It’s not just that we have different interests or different experiences. Even our simplest symbols and objects— a balloon for instance— are infused with metaphorical meaning which can make an ordinary object something totally unfamiliar. I come out of Streams with other peoples’ weird thoughts lingering amongst my own and making me feel crazy. I get confused by everything that bleeds over. Childhood memories, phrases in other languages, senseless prejudices and phobias, faces in dreams, smell-oriented flash memories of things that never happened to me.

         SoulStream’s big breakthrough, ironically, was to make their technology less invasive. The technology existed long before SoulStream became popular, but no one wanted a microchip in their head or EEG equipment all over their scalp. All you need for SoulStream is one of their magnetic ear pods to broadcast your brain waves to the world or to sync your brainwaves to someone else’s. I guess it wasn’t enough to let Alexa into our homes to listen to our conversations. We had to welcome SoulStream into our minds to listen to our very thoughts, and it was the “uninvasive” design which made it sound so appealing.

         Lunacy, and yet, who could resist? Certainly not I— I who had lived twenty-three years without leaving the country, never played a sport or gone on an adventure, never had money for comfort much less luxury, never been smart or funny or cool, and needed only one hand to enumerate my entire history of sexual liaisons. Of course I wanted to experience someone else’s life, no matter the cost. Who in their right mind would want to be me?

         I discovered DeathStream by accident. I was Streaming a high school friend of mine named Aidan who had gone to Vietnam on a vacation. I wanted to see what he was doing and if he was happy. I found myself in a karaoke bar surrounded by Norwegian girls singing songs from High School Musical. I lit up a cigarette— everyone was drunk and distracted so it seemed permissible— but this one fat girl I disliked almost solely for her appearance asked me, as politely as she could, if I would please smoke it outside because she had asthma and didn’t like the smoke. I complied just as politely as she has asked, but I felt shamed and irrationally angry about it. Once I was outside I just got on my bicycle and left, thinking “now they’ll have to do without the pleasure of my company.” i pedaled ten blocks toward my hotel when I came upon an intersection with people all in the street, and I was wondering if there was some sort of festival going on and why there was no music. As I got closer I heard sobbing. Some of the crowd turned toward me as I approached, and between them I saw a car that had been hit by a motorcycle. The motorcycle had broken into a thousand pieces, but the largest part of it was still imbedded in the side of the car, a green tarp thrown over a mass on top of it that must have been a body. I got closer and saw blood on the crumpled side of the car and blood pooled all over the street, running in a thin stream toward the sidewalk. The person crying was an old Vietnamese woman. She was there on the sidewalk with someone crouched down beside her and rubbing her shoulders. I kept pedaling. I was entranced, and I think if I had been alone I would have lifted the tarp to see the mutilation, but to stop now would have invited hostiility from the locals. I kept moving. On the other side of the car was another green tarp, another body, this one laid out on the ground with just as much blood around it as the other one. Two bare feet were protruding from the end of it, heels up with what was left of the soles pointing right at me. The right foot had no skin at all on the bottom and near the toes you could see right through to the bone. The undamaged skin was pale, a foreigner, and from the shape of the feet I suspected they belonged to a girl. Probably some drunk Australian chick that caught the wrong Grab on her way home from a club. Tough luck. I pedaled off and away, and after a few blocks I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. It was Amalia, a smoking hot Norwegian brunette I’d been hitting on for weeks, albeit unsuccessfully because she had a butch girlfriend from the U.S. named Grace. My heartrate picked up when I saw the call. Maybe this was the bootycall I’d been trying to inspire since I met her.

        “Aidan? Hey, are you at the karaoke bar?”

        “No, I just left. I’m by myself. What’s up?”

        “Have you seen Grace?”

        “No why?”

        “I just called her phone and someone Vietnamese picked up instead of her, and I’m worried she got robbed or kidnapped or something. Someone said she left the bar with Vinh on a motorcycle, but that was over an hour ago and she definitely had her phone when she left.”

        “Jesus Christ.”

        “I know right? It’s so weird that…”

         Her voice became nothing but noise as it dawned on me what had happened, who it was that I had seen in the wreck. I started to panic, and I thought of all the people who would watch my Stream, who would know how little I’d cared when I saw them, how I’d thought “Tough luck” at the body of the girl who would turn out to be Grace. Grace Abendson. Christ, I’ve met her so many times I remember her fucking last name. I needed to end Stream and delete it immediately. I reached for my earpiece, and as soon as it was out I was back in my own head, back in my apartment in front of my computer, where I always did my Streaming.

         Grace Abendsen, that was the name Aidan had thought of, and unable to contain my curiosity I searched for her name on SoulStream. There were seventeen results. The top one was GracieA1 with one mutual friend: Aidan. It was set to private, but I knew how to access it. I couldn’t waste a moment. Her Stream could be deleted any minute, her account permanently blocked. I opened the necessary programs on my desktop, found her again on the software. It got me behind the block, and I could see that her most recent Stream had ended only thirty four minutes earlier. I commenced the download. Two minutes later, I had the last four hours of her life saved in a new folder on my computer and I couldn’t contain my curiosity a minute longer. I put my earbuds in. You can only Stream a maximum of ten minutes at a time, so I set it for ten minutes, the final ten minutes of her life. I pressed Begin Stream. Are you sure you are ready to begin the selected Stream? Yes, I thought. But I was wrong.

         As unpleasant as it was, I came back to it, then kept coming back to it, in the same way an addict might come back to an unpleasant drug. There was a sense of familiarity and normalcy that was comforting simply because I knew what to expect. Just as cigarettes were Aidan’s psychological anchor, so Grace’s death in Vietnam became something I could return to again and again and know I’d have the same experience every time. No matter how unhinged I’d feel in my own mind, I could always return to that fountain in the same way I’d left it the last time. What was to Grace a comforting then frightening sense of unfamiliarity became for me an addictive one. In the Stream I’d have no idea how I got there, no idea that I was someone else looking in, and I could revel in that same unfamiliarity that Grace had found, and then when I’d come out of it I’d want to go back only minutes later. I’d want to reclaim that same feeling through the most reliable source I knew of, which was always Grace’s death.

        Like most addictions, this one burned itself out not through any effort on my part, but through a sense of boredom with the source of my high. I knew Grace's final minutes better than I knew any other experience in my life, and I knew there was nothing more to gain by reliving them. SoulStreams are like statues, in a way. They are life captured in a single, rigid glimpse, never changing. You can Stream an experience a thousand times and not one detail will change, but every time you'll still have the illusion of free will, like you're actively involved in everything unfolding. I guess, with that in mind, I never had a choice when I sought out DeathStream. It was part of the rigid structure of my life, no more a result of my own actions than my birth or Grace's death. I hate to think that some people were only made to become what they are. I like to think that if this body were born with a better soul, then things would have been different, and this life would be a monument to something else, something better. Anything other than what it is.

TO BE CONTINUED

Cover Photo: Image Source