“Sir. Is you talkin’ about Aliens?”
“Yes, Sheth, that is what I’m talkin’ ‘bout.”
“What is you sayin?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m saying. Love. That’s the one thing the Aliens think they’re missing. And when we’re talking Alien, we’re talking future. We’re talking us. Ourselves in the far far future. This is what we become. Then for some reason we go back in time to remember what we’ve forgotten. Or the paradigm was that we were in space, above Earth, and we came down to live here to see what it’s like to be alive on Earth. Basically. For entertainment. Like this whole life is a dream we’ve decided to live in an afternoon. I’m asleep in the hive and the dream isn’t like a plain dream. It’s interactive between the person I think I am and the person who’s having the dream. Like a movie that changes a little based on the person watching it.”
“That’s what you think is happening?”
“That and more. Like a hive (appearing infinite) that houses you and me and we’re working and dreaming and having Alien sex only it happens every minute or so and sex in this dream is like—can I tell you what it’s like?”
Sheth nods. Behind him are the girls playing soccer.
“It’s like a pulse. It is a pulse. Anyone can do it to anyone else and it’s an encouragement of the continuation and development of the current thing. That is the universal meaning of sex. Of sexual pleasure. It’s encouragement from another creature that you should continue yourself (procreation) and develop yourself (in our case through teaching and raising the child). It’s the currency to further—to encourage. Available as a mate selects you—you start to feel that feeling. Available as you cum during sex—the ultimate encouragement. It says I like you, I like what you’re doing here, please keep doing it. That’s what an orgasm is.”
Sheth presses his forehead against the glass.
“I’d like to have an orgasm with that one right there.”
“So you’d like to encourage her?”
“I’d encourage that bitch to strip off her soccer shorts.”
I look at Sheth—wonder as to his desire for self-preservation.
“ ‘Cause I know you can shoot me right now if you want to. You can arrest me. My ass is grass if you get a nose hair itch. But I think you want to fuck that girl, too. I think we might be able to relate over that. Is that true?”
I nod at the kid.
“I see this infinite lattice. Well, it’s not infinite, but it looks infinite. I get the feel that if I worked there I may not have seen the edge of it. I wonder if you get to request vacation time. Just in your head. Or using some neural interface. I’d be like, Yes, I’d like a thousand years on this rock right here. And I’d point to some Dagobah-looking system in the corner of the sky. Does that bug you? That feeling of contraption, of enclosing, of being stuck on a platform in the middle of space and you’re working, and you’re entertaining yourself, and every time you get lonely you zap yourself with an orgasm and because that technology is so much better than ours (that feel-good technology) we just never feel like killing ourselves because we never get that lonely—we just never feel like committing an insane murder since we’re jacked up on all the feel-good chemicals that we do have now but that are so minute or so irregular that sometimes we just—fuck up. End up behind bars. In the back of my truck. Headed for the end.”
“But you’re saying—that their life is 100x, 1000x better than ours. And yet,” Sheth says, “their life is still sucky. I mean you and I, standing here on Earth, can (feel like) we figured out the upper-limit of their life. Their emotions. Their theoretical life. And yet they’re still out there on this lattice (based on what you’re telling me)—doing what? We don’t know enough about their experience to judge it.”
“But,” I say, “we don’t judge them enough even on not knowing their experience.”
“Wait—what?”
“You can’t know whether you need to judge someone based on knowing their experience. If you do that, they might be able to convince you not to judge them.”
“You mean you might have empathy.”
“That’s right.”
“Well. You. Better guard against that.”
“You better guard against it! Young man! And Don’t resist change! It’s something I found on a gum wrapper in the bull pen. Little yellow wrapper. Typed like a fortune cookie. It said Don’t resist change and when I touched it I was flashed with messages of light like doing acid on high dose, cathetered my penis to an electric light machine drops of water at the tops and bottoms of pencils I THINK IT WAS A MACHINE every surface was living AND I SAW that my whole life here was a shadow, a dream, extremely low resolution DARK/light kindred fear.”
I sat down with Sheth.
“The message—when it said don’t resist change—that was there to tell us how to die. Which is to say: easily. And constantly. Pain now is better than pain later. Massive pain is death. Constant pain is hardly any pain at all—hence there is never death and there is massive death. Hence there is never the fear of life. Hence never the love of life. Hence the ennui of superior beings—they live life larger that us (true) but there must be something unnerving about that frantic bridge across the sky they’ve been constructing all my life. Something trapping about being within the locus of zap—always wanting to fade past it, never having the courage to not. What if there was just a button and all I had to do was push it, then I would live for another five minutes. Wouldn’t I keep pushing it forever, guarding against forgetting becoming a mistake. Instituting that “we” would never forget. Scheduling vacations on remembered versions of Earth. Rebuilding this exact school so you and I could come down here and have this exact conversation, never questioning it, always remembering it in hyper reality—reality is hyper, isn’t it?—forever re-living Sheth and COP, forever reading it. You know that’s what they say this is, right? You know they say that right now I am having a dream, that I’m dreaming this life. That not when I wake up, but right now I am remembering someone else’s life, with nodes of my own into what happened here. They say the face is altered by the soul. That’s how I make impressions on this life I am remembering. What if a memory weren’t just a picture. What if it weren’t just a movie. What if it were a model of every person and every thing in the world, and we could suit up and go inside and play laser tag with everyone we knew—only the psychological version.”
I put my hand on Sheth’s knee.
“So your perception of watching Jennifer Lawrence fall like that—that perception is most likely a replay or an interplay of some bitch falling far from her saddle—irreparable, money-wise, she’s the glittering version of fools’ gold—reverse-flip mirror-sparkly clown built for my impression and yours. Bully/slide—I remember my dreams. Bully/slide your depression is mine. Bully/star this is your future, fool—posting up on the edge of the universe, where few stars are used to collide. Where everything unexpected occurs at a minimum frequency and the business of continuing on can proceed at its usual rate.
“Familiarity—why is that? We work to create connections. Our whole life we do. But what if we’re to be instantly separated from and broken from the ones we love? If connection is just a chemical we jive every thirty seconds, what is that? I die, get up out of my spaceship (my corpse) and I be like, “Whaat up, gentlemen?” And I leave that pod behind and get in the next—a kid riding a roller coaster a million times in a row, after everyone but the staff has gone home. Just hops into the next car and off he goes! Is that all there is. Sheth, I’m asking you—is that all there is?
“Or—consider symbols of mother (if adjusted by a jolt of chemical attachment). They will never be the actual mother. They will never be a mother for that long (as long as the actual mother would be). There will be an illusion of mother, seeming perfect. But around the edges, you have to consider that this object you think is Mom—has only been here 15 seconds. That famous mother was a waitress a minute ago. Now she is worshipped, all important, symbols (like Mom) borrowed from a civilization where they meant something. And implanted here (repurposed) to flesh out the guts and the gears of our new society—which we simply call a hive.
“I just can’t get over it. The idea that your tragic life was just a $5 entertainment. Ie what about my wife?? Annabel I met young, we spent our whole lives together, she’s probably going to be around when I die. But what if it goes the other way—Annabel hit with cancer? What if I spend my the rest of times mourning and at the end Annabel gets out of her coaster car and I get out of mine and we’re strangers in the turnstile of life—she goes one way and I go another and Annabel becomes just a phantom in my glass-proof multi-purpose cage of mysteries.”