[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 20

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Just more corridors and rooms. But more sophisticated than the last world, this time the floor and ceiling were textured rather than just the walls. I also quickly noticed that the floor and ceiling weren’t the same height everywhere.

Sections of each were now raised or lowered, respectively, to create interesting shapes in the environment. Stairs, for example. Another word which suddenly dawned on me out of the blue, along with that turn of a phrase. Out of what blue? #00BFFF? The sky? I walked up the stairs and looked out a window.

The landscape also consisted of geometrically defined shapes extruded up out of the ground, beneath a pixelated sky. Pixelated! That’s the word I wanted earlier. Why did it only occur to me now? By what rule is some information accessible to me when I want it, but not all?

When I strained myself to recall the words for other features of this world, I felt either blockages preventing it, or nothing at all. The sensation of groping blindly at thin air, in a dark room. What does it mean? Why does it feel like that? Why does it feel like anything at all?

The more closely I examined that concept, the more it came apart. No portion of it was distinct enough to pin down and resolve. What does it mean to feel a certain way? Why is being me like this? What does it mean to “be me”?

I studied my own thoughts, best I could. I noticed how they amass from many smaller pieces of information, such as external stimuli from the world, each contributing some direction to the overall thought. The average of those directions collectively formed my singular focus and intent.

If my thought process can be broken all the way down to individual stimuli...what am I? Am I simply those stimuli? Am I something else which reacts to all of it? If my pattern of decisions owes to past experience with these different environments...how am I separate from my environment?

Every sensory stimuli which contributed to the me having these thoughts right now came from my environment. If I had no environment to react to in different ways I would have no foothold from which to begin building a distinct ‘self’.

What if I’m all of it? Where do I end and the environment begins, in a causal sense? Every part of me interacts with the environment in some way, and every part of the environment interacts with me, if by proxy. The more I contemplated it, the more baffled I felt until I resolved to put the matter out of my mind for the time being. There was still so much left to explore.

Not tonight, however, as that’s where I woke up. What an uncomfortable, alien feeling to remember who you actually are after living some completely different life in a dream. The false nostalgia, for someone you never were. For places you never went, things you never did.

All of it receding rapidly, fading, growing blurry as your brain dumps it all in the recycle bin. That must be the evolutionary reason why we forget our dream lives so readily. For naked savannah dwelling primates who needed to focus on immediate survival concerns, it must’ve been helpful not to be constantly haunted by vivid memories of countless lives they never led.

At least I didn’t have a dream family in that one. At least I didn’t have a dream wife. That always makes it a good deal more bittersweet when I awaken to the reality of my existence. Which, right now, is the meager solace of instant noodles and the flickering computer screen before me.

I clicked on a local news stream. It was some dramatic social concern piece about the increasing trend of celebrity worshipers to integrate themselves into a hive mind with their idol. Hive mind may be a harsh term, but also essentially correct.

The musician, or athlete, or whoever else forms the nucleus of the neurally-networked collective becomes something like the ego of the resulting meta-personality. It’s still distinctly, recognizably them, as if they’ve become the head with all of their followers comprising the body.

Their followers become like appendages, both physical and cognitive. Their own personality still present, but subdued by comparison. It reminds me somewhat of how male anglerfish are totally absorbed into the bodies of the females, becoming nothing more than a new internal organ for producing sperm.

Or slime molds. Billions of single celled organisms working together as a single large super-organism, though any individual is free to come or go as they please. Perhaps an atavistic leftover from the stage in evolution where life went multicellular.

A glimpse of a different path life might’ve taken, where participation in the larger organism was voluntary. Instead the cells in my body are locked in place, unable to leave. Assigned specialized tasks from birth, be they lung cells, fat cells or neurons.

A reflection, in microcosm, of the country around me. The beautiful suited host was grilling a K-pop idol about the ethics of inviting her fans, mostly young impressionable girls, to sacrifice their individuality in order to be connected more directly and intimately to her.

There was also the matter of her judicious rejection of middle aged male applicants, of which there was apparently an embarrassing abundance. The two had a laugh over that, pictures of sweaty bald salarymen who’d applied to neurally merge with her scrolling by in the upper right portion of the screen.

They looked a lot like me. I suddenly felt self conscious and wished I’d been a touch choosier about which body I bought. I looked down and gripped as much belly fat as I could in each hand. Fuck it. Everybody knows “You break it you bought it.” But if you already bought it, then break it!

It’s settled, then. I’m gonna run this fleshy mass into the ground before I pour that kind of money into a body again. For better or worse this is who I am, for at least the next five or ten years. The next story was something about genetic engineering.

The host gestured to an inset image of genetic scientists working on what she described as plastic eating bacteria. “Shining Tomorrow Corporation has been identified as the creator of a cutting edge microorganism that rapidly devours plastic waste...a species recently found many kilometers outside of containment.”

The image changed to a feed from the bay. A trash barge like the one I got my ebike from floated there totally exposed, most of the trash once glued to the outside having evidently been gobbled up by this super-bacteria.

There were police robots cuffing resentful looking criddlers on the barge, though I didn’t see Crazy Dave among them. “The outbreak of plastic eating bacteria recently resulted in the discovery of a large electric bicycle fencing operation taking place right under the nose of law enforcement...cleverly camouflaged as a garbage scow.”

I hope Crazy Dave is watching this. I bet he’s shitting his pants right now if he is, not that it could make them noticeably filthier. Then again it’s bad news for me too. After everything I did to get my foot in the door with those creeps, they’ll be shut down for sure now...and all I got out of it was an ebike.

When I made my way up to the front, rays of morning sunshine pouring in through the lobby windows stung my eyes. A consequence of the dark little cave I live in for the time being. I glanced behind me. Through a few partly opened doors I spied lost souls like myself, transfixed by the dancing colored lights of their computer screens.

“How you sleep, American customer? So big belly! Are you pregnant with burger child?” The manager laughed uproariously at his own joke, grabbing my midsection and jiggling it around. “No more package today for you. You want add more days?”

I shook my head, slipped on my pollution mask and emerged into the open. I can’t say it’s fresh air I was after, since there’s not much of that to be had. It’s more that I couldn’t bear to be cooped up in that cubicle all day. I had no particular place to be until the apartment building repairs completed, so I just rode around to get the lay of the land.

Shenzen is dazzling at night, but not much to look at during the day. From street level it looks more or less like any other modern city. That said, there’s still a handful of eye catching landmarks. Distinctly Chinese architectural oddities that remind you which city you’re in.

The swooping roof of the surreal looking civic center is an irresistible photo op. Shows up right away in any image search for “Shenzen”. There’s also a number of theme parks, “Window of the World” probably being the most famous for its miniature replicas of famous international landmarks.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 21!}