They say the life of an influencer is easy. Perhaps that’s true. Jessica Heine certainly has never found it difficult per se. Sometimes she finds it hard to cling on to, but not hard to lead. Her immense, well decorated room would be pink if it weren’t dark, but it is. Jessica would be asleep if she could be, but she can’t, so she isn’t. There’s a cat outside the window and a person inside her room. The presence of both is unanticipated and unnerving, though not unwanted. “The life of an influencer is easy” they say, hovering just above the carpet. Voice; male, form; ambiguous. She wants to ask him what he knows, being as unfamiliar with life as she is with hardship, but she won’t. She is glad to have a guest and wouldn’t want to upset him into leaving, rude as he may be.
“Harder than uselessly floating about.”
“Have you ever done it then?”
“Float? Sure.”
“When?”
“We have this thing called ocean. Besides, not like you could use social media.”
“I do not want to”
“And I don’t want to float. I just need some sleep.”
Her voice is hollow as though constructed foundationless in the void, each syllable threatening to give way if examined too closely. There is no ground, and she fails to fall. There is no guest, and he fails to leave.
The alarm clock rings jarringly, jars ringingly the resting in ringwise interwoven increments. Morning is threatened by the piercing waveform, though Jessica already stands in her mirror as well as in front of it. She does not know for how long. At some point in the night hope had been abandoned and sleeplessness accepted. A bit of work had been done on her pet-project, but not enough to make up for the vague nausea of protracted pernoctation. The clock’s threat is rendered mute unlike the voice speaking it. Needle-prick-knife-twist-bell-clangor punishment in its own right. Jessica hates it, loathes it, but likes hating it. In that same spot there was a radio clock once. Its voice was soothing, and she enjoyed it, though hated enjoying it, since when the overpriced speakers sang of morning there would be a cat outside the window, and she would be awake and bottomless and blurry and in dire need of something to hate. Sometimes, limbs atwist in frantic pillowcase reshuffle, she hopes to find sleep just so she can dream of smashing the vile crash hail metal cacophony. Same sound but final. Same sound but gone after. Her reflection, eyes bloodshot, glares knives of the non-clattering variety at Jessica while she directs the same look at the clock’s mirror image, still ringing. Perhaps this makes sense optically, makes sense with light and angles, rays and surfaces, but she doesn’t feel like it should. She doesn’t like being stared at that way. The mirror-her looks like disparate body parts haphazardly and unsteadily stacked atop each other. An anxiety inducing, shambolic art piece waiting for the glue to dry. This at the very least feels accurate.
From below, the mother complains about the noise. Not with any spirit behind it but like dutifully crossing a checkbox, like a clock herself. She has always been the sort of person who makes a habit of making habits and a show of sticking with them. Slowly rising to her feet, Jessica pops a battery out of the alarm’s always-unscrewed compartment. It has an off-switch, of course, but this is just another way of taking some small vengeance on the contemned instrument. Besides; she doesn’t like the ticking.
“What’s happening?”, the text-input beckons on a phone screen. “What do you want for breakfast?”, the mother calls from below. “Everything up to now, and more to come, if we so deserve.” It’s an honest answer, to the first question at least. Jessica in not sure whether she might not have also said it out loud, in which case it would however be false. Her posts are rarely honest answers to the prompt though. Rarer yet does she intend them to be. More often than not they are random thought fragments or meaningless combinations of words. Now at least. At some point she had posted normal things: “Good morning!”, “Really excited for the shoot today!”, and at another point she had stopped. People have been liking the new format. They enjoy being troubled by it. Along with the text comes a picture taken yesterday, at a time when Jessica had looked more presentable. Only a lie if one does not believe in truth. All pictures are taken in the past. There is no pretense that they are not, and besides, it’s another valid answer: “Me”. “I am still happening”. “We will continue to happen, if we so deserve”.
When the mother calls again, and Jessica is making her way into the stairwell, the likes and retweets have already started flooding in. An unshackled steam of humanity, hopefully precursor to an equivalent stream of future income. Sometimes she thinks of each interaction as a grain of rice thrown her way, sometimes as an army. Both are unsatisfactory, but pictures are necessary to understand things so big and abstracted as broader humanity. She wonders how many likes a grain of rice actually corresponds to, wonders if she could topple a small nation, wonders if she should. The woman in the stairwell is growing restless waiting for the start of a conversation she’s uncomfortable initiating. She nervously reshuffles her posture, placing one arm precariously atop itself and yawning in boredom as well as provocation. Her whole frame seems somehow mirrored along all the wrong axes, like the infinite limit of a person meticulously imitating themselves.
“The stairs stopped working.”, she finally says. Her voice matter-of-factly and crystalline.
“They look fine to me”
“I didn’t say they look like they’re not working, I said they don’t”
“Oooookay, so do you need help then?”
“No, no, it’s alright, I think. Don’t have anywhere to be.”
She radiates anxiety of the type one would expect from a person who was told to not look anxious, or that of a small animal uneasy around its own reflection, so Jessica sits down beside her. The stairs do look fine, but they feel off.
“Then why are you here?”
“It was the easiest, I think. Conceptually. “Here” is always quite a natural place to be in, even if it isn’t a good one.”
“And how’s that?”
“Well, the stairs for one, you know? Makes it hard to be somewhere else.”
“Yeah… Yeah, I probably do.”
Jessica calls an elevator, which does seem to work, but the woman doesn’t join her. She says it’s not her place.
Three “ding!”s further down and the mother is preparing breakfast. Eggs, which she’s not very good at, but when this is pointed out, she would retort that she’s making them for precisely that reason. “Exact repetition makes perfect, after all”. Jessica will tell her that the saying goes differently, and she’ll be silent for a bit. Then they’ll eat burnt egg and pretend to have learned something. It seems strange that the elevator doors, or at least her eyes, should open in the kitchen, but she must have somehow gotten here. “The browning of eggs, the good kind around the edges, is facilitated by a thing called the Maillard reaction”, the mother says as she wraps her arms around Jessica. “Amino-acids and reducing sugars undergo amide-aldehyde condensation at high temperatures, producing unstable intermediaries. These then undergo Amadori-rearrangement to form ketosamines. Among other things, polymerization into the desired dark and brittle melanoidins is possible from there, but the interwoven paths of reaction quickly spiral into untraceability. Now of course eggs barely contain any reducing carbohydrates beyond a little Glucose, so milk can be added to aid the browning when you make omelets. Actual burning on the other hand results more from general pyrolysis and produces a far greater variety of carcinogenic compounds.” Jessica nods. She had been homeschooled for as long as she can remember, though she doesn’t know how long that is. She also doesn’t quite remember how Amadori-rearrangement works. By now, the eggs have undergone pyrolysis and are diligently garnished and plated. She smiles.
The mother is not unkind. The mother is not unintelligent. The mother is a beast Jessica has only ever been able to describe in negations. Not short, not ugly, not talkative, but also never quite the opposite. Never quite anything concrete. She is a person who is not, contrasting nicely with the non-people who are, and who have made it their past time to levitate about the corners of Jessica’s day-to-day. Friends of the green-eyed. She can’t see the cat right now, but it’s rarely very far. Always hiding somewhere just under the surface of everything. The egg tastes terrible but thinking of how many novel carcinogens were discovered in the meal’s preparation lessens the discomfort mildly. Jessica cherishes novelty. She enjoys being troubled by it.
“The man from Kalpa is waiting outside already. You remember, right? For the tourism campaign. I think he said his name was Perrault or something like that.”
“Tell him I’ll have to get dressed and do my makeup first.”
The mother looks puzzled and points out that she clearly already did these things. A muted note of worry accompanies the statement, which she hits perfectly.
“Pan-system entropic increase demands that time be subjugated to one-way rectilinear progression. From this premise all but a few thinkers are comfortable concluding that the causes of current conditions must lie in the past.”
“oh” says Jessica, before sitting down in the passenger’s seat next to mister Perrault, who introduces himself as “Basile, Angelo Basile of Kalpa Cybernetics and Dialogic Infrastructure, pleasure to meet you.”, which is just as well. The car smells new in an unpleasant way, like it should be aired out for a while, like it belongs in a showroom, not on the road, though mentioning this would be impolite. The mother once told her that these things are meant to be impressive, so she tries to be impressed instead. She isn’t, but she tries.
“You know, originally one of my supervisors would have come to pick you up, but I have been a long-time follower of yours so….”
Basile makes it difficult to be impressed by him, even more so than the car, when his frantic speech traces out the contours of a hardcore fan obsessing over the life of a teenager. Moreover, something in his balding, hand-rub-side-glance-prone disposition triggers the gag-reflexive part of Jessica’s throat at just the right angle to produce a pitiful cough but no wider-reaching fallout.
“I’m sorry, should I open a window?”
“Yes, please” croaked, but polite. She probably could have asked for it earlier, had she not been mentally preoccupied, but the temporary victory in terms of air quality is immediately cut short when the man from Kalpa takes her verbal response as permission for further conversation.
“Really, you have to pardon my curiosity if this is a touchy subject, miss Heine (Can I call you Jessica?), but it’s been a point of interest to me for a long time: Is it true that you had an exorcism once?”
She doesn’t know if she should feel relieved that he says it wrong. Her name. Some parts do, but they dig themselves painfully cog-wise into the systems that insist on her existence as somehow being contingent upon appellation. Though a worsening of most facts is possible, it is a truth universally acknowledged that having your name mispronounced sucks badly, and her whole life Jessica has found despair in the fact that she couldn't even tell people they're wrong when they do it. They’ll look at the symbols and read it again, just as wrong but with an additional note of judgement now sharing a vibration with those dreaded sounds. “dʒɛsɪkə”. And she’ll tell them that yes, that is the standard English pronunciation of the name, but hers is pronounced “jɛsɪkə”. With the same j-sound as in hallelujah, the thing we usually orthographically denote as “y”. “Yes-ih-kuh”. In those instances where the prosecution doesn’t resign itself to disgruntled acquiescence, her trial proceeds as follows: They will ask if she’s foreign and she will rebut. Then if her parents are, which she doesn’t think is the case either. This is simply how they’ve always pronounced it, and is that not worth more than the arbitrary determination of what verbal complements are common to deeply ambiguous sets of lines? Aren’t our names given phonetically just as much as orthographically? If not more? Think of Sha(c)k(e)spe(a)r(e)! She will shout, but the judge does not care for theatre and will rarely humor the point. It seems to him, in his indolent, pretend-conciliatory tone of voice, like this is just needlessly confusing and if it would be that much of an imposition to pronounce it normally, to which Jessica can never do more than meekly protest that “It’s not my name though.”
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that”
“Nothing, nothing. Yes, I did have an exorcism.”
Him not knowing her name is fine, she decides. Reassuring. It provides some much-wanted distance across the untarnished, supposedly-impressive charging station and cup-holder, mercifully dividing their seats.
“Not much to tell, really. I was very unstable after the fa- after my dad died, after Nasir left, which wasn’t helped by people’s tendency to diluvially glut the nervous systems of minor celebrities undergoing a traumatic experience.”
Basile interjects that she shouldn’t sell herself short as minor, and his car becomes comparatively more impressive by the second. It is unwise, in Jessica’s position, to upset one’s fans, so she makes a commitment to keep talking until they arrive at their destination. While she talks, he won’t.
“The sort of traffic these individuals bring to bear, online and in front of one’s home, is difficult to handle for a so-destabilized construction. At least I was uniquely ill equipped for it, and we had to move, me and the mother. Go and haunt a new stack of bricks, which I was good at, I think. Worryingly so for the onlookers. They tell me I was a disconcertingly self-destructive specter in my televised unraveling until the friends of the green-eyed put an end to it.”
“The ghosts called an exorcist for you?” he laughs, believing this to be a joke.
“Well, they got the mother to do it. They don’t really interact with people, which is probably part of why they were nervous around me. Worried about my worsening state just as much as the fact that I stared back when they looked, and not always kindly. The cat thought me disquieting. The priest thought it disquieting that there were so many cats around, and honestly, I get it. It’s unnerving to be seen in such quantities. All-encompassing. Glaring. Did you know that’s what they’re called? Groups of cats? Like with a murder of crows, or a parliament of owls, or a kaleidoscope of butterflies, it’s a glaring of cats, which… yeah. I’ve always thought there’s truth in those terms, like, regarding the dynamics of their multiplicities. How they feel to encounter. I wish people would use them more. “Group” gives the wrong impression that the ways in which these creatures cluster are remotely similar, which they’re really not. Not even within the same species. See, there are also clowders of cats and pounces of cats, but mine is a glaring or at least became one after the exorcism. They always sort of mirror me, I think, so they might have been a destruction before. Either way, it’s not because the exorcism did anything. The priest went through his motions and concluded that I wasn’t possessed, probably, at least not by anything except grief and insomnia, which weren’t his métier. They were still suspicious, that’s just how ghosts and cats are with creatures that dare to observe them, but it eased their minds a little, and the staring became mutual. I think that helped more than anything two years ago; transitioning from a tactile into a visual mode. Retinal tissue is almost devoid of pain receptors.”
Surprisingly the rest of their drive is rather quiet. Basile seems to have gotten more than he bargained for, and Jessica sees no reason to go on, so long as he also contents himself with silence. There are a few bumps in the road, especially as they near the ocean. There are cats around a few corners too, and yet, quiet has wound its misty claws through the open window and robbed not-Perrault of his perfunctory curiosities. Jessica wonders what it’s like to run out of things to say. She wonders whether she would have made relevance her profession, intentionally or not, if such were the nature of her predicament. A mass of people gives conflicting responses because the question leaves her brain ill-posed, but that itself is answer enough. Jessica’s silence never extended far beyond the confines of this car, and she would admit freely to her legions of followers, as she often did in unintentionally cryptic ways, that the screen beneath her fingers barely registers as an independent object these days.
Twice does she only become aware of having posted when Basile’s phone lights up in alert of the corresponding notification and she is uncomfortably reminded of whom his wallpaper so prominently displays. Both times Jessica quickly averts her eyes and turns to typing again, though her spree of multi-platform esoteric vague-posting is cut short relatively soon after the second instance, when she realizes that they had apparently arrived at the beach already. A shimmer of orange pays tribute to the dying star, dragging its unfathomable mass towards the blurred-out horizon, hinting at a passage of time, but maybe the sun was already setting when they had breakfast. Small word, as they say. The idea of living close to the ocean doesn’t strike Jessica as particularly impossible. They’re rather big after all. Stupefyingly big and deep and encroaching. She hadn’t considered that the tourism campaign might not be directed at those who come to see the sea but at the gnawing waves themselves. They do look excited to see her. Hungry but excited. Not untypical for tourists.
“Are we waiting for someone?”
The car stands still on a sandy parking lot with salt-bleached rope outlining its perimeter, but Basile’s posture remains unchanged. He’s leaning slightly forward, giving away a stubborn unwillingness to accept his rapidly declining eyesight, while soft, sweaty hands shackle him to the steering wheel. Occasionally the Kalpa employee investigates shapes in the back view mirror or scratches his face, but there’s now a manic energy to his motions that they didn’t possess when he was actually driving, however long ago that was. The sun fully sets after only a few minutes of failure to respond, whereupon the little girl on his backseat proceeds to yawn, get up, and open the passenger door, inviting Jessica to follow.
“You could really do this stuff by yourself from time to time”
“What stuff?”
“Opening doors, getting downstairs… I know Jade likes you but-“
“Jade?”
“The cat. Come on, keep up! You don’t want the thing that got Basile to catch you. The quiet took a lot more than just his voice.”
“I always thought it was a boy”
“Maybe, I haven’t checked, have you?”
“No, but Jade just sounds like… I don’t know, I didn’t even know it had a name.”
“A name isn’t something you have, silly. It’s something you’re given. I call her Jade, but that doesn’t make it the cat’s name, it makes it my name for the cat. You can’t give others that sort of power. If it turned out the cat was a boy, then I would… hmm… nope, can’t think of a better name. I’d still call it Jade. Can’t boys be called Jade?”
“Sure, they… uhh… yeah. Do you have a name?”
“Were you not listening? Come on, you have a photo shoot, don’t you?”
In her frilly blue dress, she skips ahead from rock to rock so naturally that it almost looks like her feet are genuinely touching the ground, but Jessica knows better. It hasn’t escaped her notice that the friends are out in unusual numbers today and the mounting concern of her followers indicates that this observation isn’t lost on them either. She wonders what they think the ghosts stand for. She wonders if they do stand for something. Less or perhaps more importantly she also wonders if this pondering is detrimenting her pace, or if her impractical choice of footwear is solely to blame in that regard. Either way Jessica finds it difficult to keep up with her spirit guide.
“Hey, so… can I call you Serpentine?”
“Weird, but I like it. Why?”
“It’s another green stone for a start, and the word sort of reminds me of how you walk in a way… I don’t know, I’ve never tried giving you names. I wanted to know what it’d feel like.”
“And? How does it feel?”
“Solid… I think. Or at least more solid. Less like falling. Are you gonna give me a name?”
The girl turns around and mercifully pauses for a bit, the ground beneath her a laminar mass of black cats that Jessica hadn’t noticed before, though it hardly surprises her. It is doubtful that anything happens without observers, from what sparse bits of the mother’s physics class she can remember, and that certainly feels true. Should no eyes be provided, Jessica brings her own purringly vigilant guarantee of continued existence.
“Hmm… Nope!”
“Why not?!”
“Because I haven’t even decided if I like you yet. You’re weird, and I don’t really feel like I know who you are behind the retinal epithelium. You did give me a good name, which is a plus, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t just form an emotional bond with everyone who grants me phonological representation. Words are cheap. Even the ones we find pleasant.”
Jessica sheathes her phone for a moment to look up at the bright girl-shaped specter, attempting to remember when she last revealed information to an audience of one.
“Um okay… I’m Jessica as in “that’s the name my parents gave me” and maybe “Heine” as in “that’s the name people who call themselves my friends give me”. Not really friends though. People who have made their attentive observation of my existence in this world part of their own personality for reasons beyond me. Some of these refer to me by the familial appellation I have inherited to stand out against the crowd and I have a lot of them, because… because they got used to me being a person to be aware of, and never quite felt a reason to sever that link? Because any stimulus is good stimulus. Or perhaps there’s just some voyeuristic impulse born out of the human mind’s compulsive pattern recognition that makes us want to know facts about strangers we see too often. That’s what celebrities are, right? Strangers you see too often? Maybe it’s like when you walk past the same building day after day and at some point, you feel like you ought to look it up or at least to go inside. Like it is somehow wrong or improper to be uninformed about the fixtures of one’s commute. Maybe on some level I wanted people to have that opportunity. To come in and explore, to have a look and satiate that irrational curiosity so they wouldn’t have to bear the gnawing urge.”
“Did it work?”
The glaring perks up its collective ears in perfect unison.
“No. Or at least not the way I intended. I ran out of emotions which could be communicated in words without a shared context: the easy ones, the weak ones. Not intentionally of course. With the glaring I was run out of them. Run over and out into the alleyways of lonely feral concepts. So I stopped trying, stopped acting or started, but the thing is: they liked that. The vibe or the mystery or the fact that it was difficult to understand. They saw me fail to communicate and they wanted more of it. Never let it be said that I don’t deliver the noise that is asked of me. Even becoming the noise was sort of comfortable at first. Effortless. But I do try. For myself, in my off-time. I write. I try to figure out what it’s like to actually say something again. There’s this site I’m working on, or at least bashing my head against, I guess. Programming was always more my brother’s thing. Kind of a message board but more of a public chaise. Not too public, not hungry, but communally public. A local café or the living room of a good friend. I want to be able to look back at people and talk about something that isn’t me. Wanna see it?”
It’s not that there’s much to see yet; a few rough and tumble chatrooms and a buggy cat themed bot to occupy digital space when the three or four people who had god-knows-how found the project were busy, but it’s something. A piece of her the world held no claim to.
“You know I can’t hold a phone. Also, you’re missing the point. None of this is who you are. It’s what you do. You’re confusing names and object again. Confusing information for insight, intentions for progress. Every time we pick up a little speed and get to going somewhere, you fall back on that.”
“Well, you’re going too fast.”
“Too fast? I’m not going fast enough. The escape velocity of a person sized subject is eleven kilometers per second. Orders of magnitude beyond us.”
“Escape velocity isn’t even size dependent.”
“Mass then.”
“Also irrelevant. It’s only the attractor that matters.”
“Then there you go.”
“Don’t pretend like you made a point. Besides, you’d burn up.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I’d be fine because I can’t go that fast-”
“Then that’s not an option. Look, we’re doing our best, but we can’t get you out of the gravity well if you don’t hurry up. Promise me you can do that.”
“I would if-“
“There you are!”
Basile stands at the shore, visibly and audibly out of breath, tie loosened and hair misshapen from wind just as much as panicked ruffling, as the cats escape skyward with Serpentine in tow. Just like that. Besides an overwhelming feeling of having remembered and then forgotten something of such monumental importance that it leaves the mind a lacunal mess of conceptual detritus, Jessica feels cold. Cold and wet from the knees down where the frigid waves lap at her skin with rough tongues of suspended sand. The Kalpa-employee claims that she had just gotten up and left while he was talking. That he had found it impolite, but assumed she had to go to the bathroom. That they were already running late. The statements in the form of statements are supplemented with statements in the form of questions: What the hell she is doing in the water and whether she wants a towel. Jessica gives various responses whenever it is expected of her. She congratulates him on his return, which he takes with an indecisive mix of annoyance and confusion. By conventional standards they weren’t late, but convention is no more than a glorified average and some of the individuals with whom Jessica was to take pictures had a habit of showing up early, Basile claims. Care is put into the way in which he walks back assertions made to project authority more so than to communicate truth, and Jessica can respect that. It is a popular technique in her field after all.
Attempting not to get too distracted by her escort’s sudden return to the realm of the living, or her ocean-induced shivering, she looks to her phone to see whether she had already been presumed dead in her short period of inactivity, which is luckily not the case due to such a period not existing. No wonder Serpentine was criticizing her pace if she had been typing. Maybe she was holding back. A post in her drafts reads simply “Initiate puss-in-boot-sequence.” and Jessica has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it must have been what the glaring was going for. Successfully? Unsuccessfully? Inconclusive? Either way it’s a funny line. Send. She pauses for a bit. Nasir had always read that story to her: A cat leading their master towards a better life through trickery… Was that what the friends were attempting to do? Was she even their master? Jessica had always seen the ghosts more as maverick roommates than anything else, creatures that intersected her life in their shared space, but who always seemed to have their own thing going on. When did that change? When did they start following her? The beginning of Jessica’s latest bout of insomnia seems to fuzzily line up, even though all the days within it are blurred beyond recognition. Last month. Thirty servings of burned eggs. Fuck does she need to sleep. Jessica concludes that her last bit of genuine shuteye had been a two-hour nap in the middle of the stairwell on Friday, so it’s hardly surprising she’s wandering straight into oceans. Maybe that’s why the stairs don’t work.
“Are you coming?”
“Yes”
Well, if she is their master, which already feels off; what would the glaring even be trying to help her with? The life of an influencer is easy they say. Jessica has a house, more money that she knows what to do with, and a cat outside her window when she can’t sleep, which is always. Why is she trying to shake this up? “Confusing intentions for progress”, is what Serpentine said, but progress where? What intentions? Last month was when she started work on the site. On her message board. Was that when they started acting strange or when she did? Is this another intervention? Another exorcism? Attempting to compose herself, Jessica tries to get her hair in order. Atop their little ocean-view hill, people from a variety of professions are gathered, waiting to take pictures with her, so she ought to look presentable. At the very least they are dressed up to evoke a variety of professions. Full gear with props to convey an archetypal caricature. Farmer, mailman, coastguard. Jessica wonders if that’s what she’s doing: Playing the celebrity, or if her role is different since she’s the centerpiece. Maybe being the centerpiece is playing the role of celebrity, even without a costume. Barista, construction worker, nurse… Not necessarily the jobs one associates with tourism, and for good reason. Folks on vacation rarely end up in hospitals, despite how stupid they tend to act. It’s not that their status as travelers protects them, but simple selection bias. You tend to travel when you’re young and healthy. You tend to be in hospitals when you’re old and sick. Tourists are not a representative sample of the population and treating them as such leads to probabilistic mirages of the sort the mother warns of every chance she gets. Often fruitlessly.
As the pictures go by, Jessica tries to figure out whether her costumed companions are actors or not. Looking for hints and calloused hands, for telltale signs of occupations she is intimately unfamiliar with but finding as much corroborating as contradictory evidence. Click, yes. Click, no. Click, no. Click, yes. Click, no. Hundreds more shutter sounds than answers, until she eventually just asks the man with the stethoscope. Apparently, he’s the only one left. Everyone else already went home and his face looks familiar.
“You’re not a doctor, right?”
He smiles broadly as though he had been waiting all day for that question. As though he waits for it every day like a causerie anglerfish with an overly restrictive palate.
“Mostly I fail to be one in any way that matters, but that’s quite alright I suppose. A lot of people aren’t doctors these days.”
“Oh”
“Oh?”
“I didn’t realize you were one of them. Thought you were… you know… part of the shoot”
The lab coat wearing figure is clearly not touching the ground and Jessica bites her cheek a little for having lost time again.
“For what it’s worth, I am helping you, aren’t I? Helping you heal?”
“Sure doesn’t feel like it.”
“Hm, I do get that a lot. Can you lift an arm for me?”
“Which one?”
“Mine if possible”
Jessica stares blankly at the pretend person, attempting to figure out where she had seen it before and whether this conversation is worth it.
“I- don’t think I can.”
“Alright. That’s fine, that’s fine. We’ll get there.”
“How?”
“Don’t ask me, I’m not that kind of doctor.”
“Right… sorry. It’s been a while, but I think I remember you. You were part of the destruction.”
“Part of the solution.”
“Same difference.”
“That is an exceptionally unhealthy outlook on psychiatric medicine.”
“Sure, maybe. But that doesn’t make it wrong, does it? Isn’t that the whole issue?”
“To you, yes. But there’s no wrong way of looking. Even if you close your eyes, you see your eyelids. That’s not a wrong thing to see, just not a particularly useful one for most purposes. Since you’re always looking at something, you should make it worth your while, no?”
“Since when do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Say cryptic shit like it’s a lesson. Serpentine did it too. You’re starting to creep me out.”
“You gave her a name? Wonderful progress! And I always creeped you out, don’t pretend like that’s a new development.”
“This isn’t an answer.”
“Well, what is it we were saying before then, in your mind?”
“Noise. Just noise. Cryptic noise, soothing noise, but noise.”
“Could it not be that you’re just finally looking?”
Jessica chuckles.
“Healthily?”
“Oh, that’s for you to decide, but you must have started for a reason. That little project of yours, it sure means a lot, huh? Either way, these are all terrific developments, really. We were starting to get worried, Miss Heine. It’s been two years after all.”
“Well, whatever it is, I don’t like it.”
“Sure you do. You’re so giddy you’re practically shaking. Come on, introspect a little! You’re scared, sure, but you like being scared by it. You like that it feels like anything at all, don’t you?”
She does. It had been easy to pretend her quivers were caused by the freezing sea water on their way up the hill, but now that was more than an hour ago. Likely longer. Even before Jessica’s fingers complete their stuporous journey upwards to probe at facial musculature can she tell that there’s a smile on her lips. A nervous, manic one, but a smile nonetheless. A smile on her lips and a cat outside of its normal routine, or many cats rather. Doctor Fieldsworth still stands amidst their sea of black, but the voice no longer seems to be coming from his mouth if it ever did to begin with.
“I don’t know what’s going on.”
“No, no, no, you’re just not used to the feeling of agency anymore. Look at your phone, read your thoughts a bit: “Initiate puss-in-boot-sequence”. That sounds like an order, doesn’t it?”
“But for what? To whom?”
“Come on, you have all the answers. You gave yourself the answers.”
“I-“
The shaking has made it difficult to get words out.
“Stay calm. Just breathe. In and out and in and out, then try it again.”
“Try what?”
“Raising his arm. Don’t say you can’t, don’t argue, actually try it. Calm breaths, focus… and raise his arm.”
The Fieldsworth’s arm does rise. Slowly and steadily. It even stops when Jessica suspects foul pay and stops willing it upwards for a bit. She lowers the appendage, straightens his back, turns his head and makes the doctor disappear.
“Wonderful. Now to the good part; why are you here?”
Despite knowing what she would say, Jessica pauses; assures herself that she wants this. She breathes in again, and a second time for good measure. Eyes full of factory reset and an endocrine system attempting to process an entire bio-history of swirling psycho-chemical mayhem in the span of a prolonged instant.
“Because “here” is always quite a natural place to be in, even if it isn’t a good one. Because I’ve gotten used to floating. Because the fucking stairs weren’t working, so…”
“So..?”
“…I called the elevator.”
“See? Raboter - chat botté. It all rhymes. Even the chat bots have their place if we look at it orthographically, if we look at Sha(c)k(e)spe(a)r(e)... Do you think it’ll work?”
“It has to.”
@Heineofficial
The great feline merger of 2019 is upon us.
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Queen Jess is becoming even more powerful! O_O
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Fuck does that mean?
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
J should direct a surrealist TV-show. Her posts always have that texture to them
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Totally!!!
“It has to”. Jessica repeats that sentence over and over again in her mind, as she runs back to the car, jumping over the seaside shrubs and ripping her dress in the process while reality collapses to a dimensionless point. The feeling of gravitational solidity she had felt when naming Serpentine returns with a vengeance, shooting straight past neutron star and tearing teeth-wise into its own accretion disc. Identity reassembling from scattered pieces as her smile grows wider and wider. Attempting to unhinge from the top down; first jaw-wise than fully.
@Heineofficial
Have you ever associated? Like dissociating but in reverse. Crashing down upon yourself at terminal velocity? The fallen sky is clearing.
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Peak schizo.
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Loving this arc
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Jess are you okay? Do you need to talk? I’ve been thru a lot of mental health shit, my DMs are open.
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Simp!
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Guys, I know this is exciting but doesn’t it remind you of her breakdown two years ago? You remember what she tried to do, right? If anyone here knows her personally, please call for a welfare check!
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Stop taking her so seriously, she’s doing this for attention.
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
How the fuck would you know?
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
Don’t be so gullible, she’s clearly faking
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
She was in the hospital for weeks you sociopath. I don’t want that blood on my hands
@◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼
whatever
Basile’s car comes into view behind the trees, likely still smelling just as intolerably new, but even that would probably be bearable now, just as long as-
“Boo!”
Jessica hadn’t even fully processed the face or the implications of his presence here, when she was already hugging him, his stubble scratching the side of her forehead. Nasir’s voice sounds older than she remembers it, but still unmistakable in its characteristic energy.
“Been a while, but you got there.”
“So, this is Jessica then?”
“You don’t recognize her? Surely you do. My little sister’s famous after all!”
He spins her around as Jessica attempts to make sense of the other person who had just emerged from behind the car.
“I don’t really keep up with that sort of media.”
“Of course you don’t. Jessie, this is Kos; my apprentice.”
“Miriam Koskinen, and the word Heine appears to be in search of is ‘colleague’. Either way, nice to meet you”
“Colleague, apprentice, it’s a sliding scale. Remind me: which one of us has disappearing-privileges again?”
“There is no such thing as disappearing-privileges, but you’re the one with the unfounded temerity to test your luck regardless, if that’s what you mean.”
“That is what I mean. Isn’t she a riot? I think she’s a riot. Now, you don’t have to worry, I’m going to be fine. Everything is going to finally be fine. You cannot believe how fucking proud I am of you, okay? Just get in the car and let Kos and me disappear the ever-loving shit out of you. Had I mentioned how fine everything is gonna be? Fully.”
He opens the door. Basile still, or maybe again, sits in the driver’s seat, lights shining, pretending to operate a motionless vehicle into the wave swept night. Earlier it was unnerving, but now the robotic motions feel more like a comedy routine to Jessica. Like an absurdist dance. The whole affair only briefly swings back into unsettling territory when Nasir pushes her former sentinel aside, causing him to fall rigidly onto the sandy ground and shatter into myriad pieces like a misshapen vase. “This is not real. He has come back before”, Jessica tells herself as she assumes her place in the passenger seat next to Nasir. Miss Koskinen for her part unfolds sideways across the back row, immediately opening up a laptop and beginning to type at inhuman speeds.
“Miss Jessica Heine, do you hereby agree to having your death faked by way of drowning on the eleventh of April 2019? In so doing you forfeit the right to sue Kalpa Cybernetics and Dialogic Infrastructure with regard to all matters related to your administrative expiration. You also agree not to take any actions which are likely to call the state of your corporeality into question. Should you accidentally call the state of your corporality into question, inform us immediately. Contact info at the bottom of the contract. Compensatory documentation and accommodation will be provided by the second division in perpetuity. Please sign here, here and here.”
Nasir smiles and nods when Jessica looks to him for affirmation, so she signs.
“What about Perra- uh Basile?”
“What about him?”
“Won’t he get in trouble if I die under his watch?”
“Oh yeah he’s a goner. Never seeing that fuck again. Two birds dropping out the stratosphere simultaneously through the power of one perfectly aimed stone.”
“I insisted that he could be an asset.”
“He can be an ass-hat, and he can be one of those elsewhere. Good riddance. We can’t have pieces of shit like him around when we’re in charge.”
“We won’t be in charge if we use company resources to run ops vanishing family members.”
“I will deal with that. You didn’t need to come if you disapprove so much.”
“I don’t. I’m simply pointing out contingencies.”
Jessica’s brother grumbles a little before he turns back to her.
“How’d you get out anyways? Last time I came to visit you and mom you seemed like you barely recognized me. Only staring into space and talking to yourself.”
“I think it was the experience of making something that wasn’t me. I think that helped my draw that boundary again.”
“The Glaring?”
“You know about that?”
“Who did you think your users were?”
“I-“
“Speaking of; give me that.”
Nasir takes the phone and smashes it full force against a bit of metal at the underside of his seat.
“Sorry, but you don’t have the best track record when it comes to the kind of silence befitting of the dead. No more prying eyes. That’s a promise.”