Hope you enjoy, or feel pleasantly mentally stimulated by the concept here, and have a lovely day. See you Friday for something else.
Feedback Loop by Mac Clevinger, May 24, 2017
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Life poses questions to us all, rarely simple ones that boil down to two options. Simple tools, defined by what they could create, become instruments to be played however I see fit: destructive chords, mending tunes, or silent melodies of a wasted existence. These meanings aren’t inherent, none are more destined than the others; it’s my reflection, my image poured into an empty object to be read by me, a self-portrait painted by my trying to understand the world that I meet.
It’s easier to see the questions being posed when it’s someone else, or at least it’s easier to acknowledge what is being considered when it isn’t your pride and morality on the line. A choice between survival or adhering to your values; the pacifist firing a gun. Is the gun inherently a tool of our survival, or its rejection an act of denying violence in every occasion of its use? Probably not.
A screwdriver: build a cabinet, prop open a door, take apart a radio, stab someone else, maybe stab myself. The tool isn’t packaged telling me what I can do with it, there’s no instruction manual with informative images showing me these options: it’s a broken mirror with different angles of myself, and I’m wearing the tinted glasses of the awkward situation I’ve found myself in.
We’re connected. It isn’t madness at being trapped at the bottom of an alien ocean as the short-straw on a ship without enough life boats, or some kind of a coping mechanism that’s led me to imagine the ship as a person. It’s in my head, and I’m in it. We’re supposed to be like this, or… several-hundred-thousand of us are supposed to be like this. There were warnings about one person linking with an entire ship, but it’s…
I can feel everything. The frigid water pressing on the hull, the electricity coursing beneath my feet, the humidity in every room of the ship, the weight of simulated gravity as it varies to the preferences of men and women that long ago abandoned us. We gave the ship purpose, and it gave us control split between hundreds of thousands of people; and now me. Just me.
At first I felt like a goddess. The ship is in my head, and I am in every control panel and computer that makes the ship function. The light, the temperature, any computer… the gravity is at my whim. I can fly. Do you know how large the atrium is for a ship ten miles long? How many miles of circuitry and wiring run back and forth out of sight but firmly in my mind? I can feel everything, and I can feel her.
She’s scared. So am I. We’re trapped. I’m a goddess trapped in her own domain, only able to speak to herself and feel what her world feels as it struggles to escape. As she struggles to escape with only one person to help her, and I have no fucking clue what to do. She can’t just fix herself or engineer some device to save us both, that’s what the people who ran away were for. People who knew how she worked beyond how to ask her to turn the light on or let me fly.
She isn’t some puppy dutifully waiting for master to save it, she’s… databanks and memory and electrics that make a ship capable of piloting across the universe fly, with the caveat that she can only do what her crew asks. She takes the crew into herself, and we take our bite-sized piece of her in return but… just me creates a feedback loop. She is me, and I am her – it fucks everything up.
She can’t run on one mind; or, not my mind. There were tests and experiments on these kinds of ships, this neural-network symbiotic relationship, and it’s not able to work – I should be dead already. It’s a feedback loop; I’m supposed to have lost my mind in this limited omnipotence and the ship… she can’t run on one mind, it’s not enough, but… here we are.
Lost. Alone. Left for dead. Abandoned. Looking for meaning in reflections of myself and finding my twin in the ship I share headspace with. I look at myself, and I see the core of all the reflections. I’m not blinded by pride after years of this life. I see desperate measures, blind hope, eventual death, a planned death, my legacy… All the uses this tool has, through the tinted glasses of an awkward situation.
We are alone, but I am not, and I have hope. I’ve already done the impossible in still being alive, the ship has done the impossible in not killing me, maybe we’ll put something together and escape. She’s in me, and I’m in her, but I can’t talk to her. Maybe if I hope enough, she’ll absorb it and know how… grateful I am. To be alive and have found her after serving aboard her for so long.
That’s all I have for today. If you recover this, I’m hiding the next one in my room on deck C. Please find it.
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