Children of the New World: Stories (12 page)

“Can you believe it’s over?” Sunny says and sparks the bowl. “No more boarding, no more nights like this. Should’ve gone to Dubai when we had the chance, snagged some lift jobs. You know how long those lists are?”

I do. It was the first jobsite I went to after we got the news we were closing.
Ski Dubai is no longer taking applications—all positions filled for the foreseeable future.
I take the bowl from him. “What are you planning to do for work?” I ask.

“Going to teach surf lessons in Kaua‘i.”

“Isn’t that your summer job?”

“Full-time now.”

“Wish I’d learned to surf.”

“Never too late—come with me. My friend runs a dispensary; I’ll talk to him, get you hooked up with a job selling bud.”

I imagine myself on a beach somewhere, high every day, trying to learn a sport I’m no good at. It’s an option, I guess. Probably better than trying to get a job bartending down in the valley where the list of applications is as long as Dubai. “Angie was talking about Brazil.”

“You guys still a couple?”

“No. She just said she was heading down there to help build houses for people who lost it all. I was thinking I might go with her.”

“You serious? I mean that’s respectable of you, but you’re telling me you’d be stoked doing that
instead
of surfing and smoking top-shelf bud?”

“I don’t know,” I admit, and decide not to say anything more about Brazil. I’m not even sure Angie would want me along. But I keep thinking if she’ll take me with her, maybe something good could come out of it, for both of us.

A couple thick flakes land on our snowmobiles and against our parkas. “Shit, is that snow?” Sunny asks. We look up at the sky, and sure enough the clouds have moved in, the stars completely gone, and big flakes are coming down. “Sure is,” I say in awe. I cover the bowl with my glove and spark the lighter. Besides the sound of crackling buds, there’s nothing but the quiet of the mountains and the snowflakes falling against the slopes.

“It’s going to be crowded tomorrow if this keeps up.”

“Don’t worry,” I say, “by dawn it’ll turn into chowder.”

But by the time Sunny drops me off at the apartments, it’s still snowing heavy, the streetlights a wild whir of slanted snow. The drifts are piling up on my porch when I brush my teeth, and come the alarm at seven, there’s over two feet of fresh powder, our parking lot transformed into igloos where cars once were. “Holy shit,” I say and have to go digging in my closet to find thermals.

It’s all anyone can talk about on the radio. Mostly just hoots coming through.
Woo-hoo!
Sunny yells.
Powder, man, fucking powder!
And it doesn’t let up, the snow keeps falling. It turns out most of the crew is AWOL. Zeke’s abandoned the ski shop and Sunny’s already shredding the slopes. Even Rick is nowhere to be found. For a moment I think about setting up the bar, then say fuck it, and abandon post as well. Let the fools who want free drinks steal what they can.

The mountain is speckled with skiers, the parking lot filling with new arrivals, and I can sense the itch to hike back country again, see the cliffs, feel my adrenaline spike. I take the quad over to Powder Ridge, and when I get off at the top, I decide to hitch my skis over my shoulder and hike over the mountain, out of bounds. It’s rough going, powder past my knees, my legs moaning as I climb.

On those nights when I wouldn’t fast-forward, I’d sit watching my biography, studying the last moments of my mistake. In the video, the copter takes off and I see myself heading toward the cliff, my skis carving a big arc before I sail off the edge. You can already see how I’m falling the wrong way, my body too close to the mountain. Usually I could feel an imbalance in the dismount, had time to correct for the mistake, but when I hit that cliff I thought I knew exactly where I was landing. I remember those split seconds before my hip smashed against the rocks, my neck buckled back and my screens went blank. My followers were cheering in my feed.
We love you Hawks!
Emoji after emoji giving a thumbs-up and then, suddenly, screaming emojis, a skull and crossbones, all the OMGs. The last thing I saw was rock, like the mountain had hooked into my side and was corkscrewing me down its granite face, the sun twisting as I rode the mountain the whole way, my body rag-dolling down the fall line.

It’s all coming back to me now as I cross onto the other side of the peak. Everyone’s gone, there’s just the white expanse of uncut powder and the quiet of falling snow. I can feel the old rush of conquering the mountain and what it was like to hit the bottom of the run unscathed. Down below me is nothing but pines and cliffs. Even if it’s a suicide run, at least I’ll be watched again.

I can feel my heart pounding, my breath short and ragged, the adrenaline filling me, and I understand that I’m not just taking one run and heading back to the bar to set up for lunch, and I sure as hell won’t be asking Angie if I can go with her to South America; I’m going to make the greatest comeback video anyone has ever seen. I reach into my pocket and take out my contacts case, duck my head away from the snow, and put my tacts back in. “Hey there,” I say to the world of potential followers, “You’re all going to want to see this.” Then I lower my goggles, letting my skis slide into unbroken snow, and lean into the fall line opening beneath me.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FAILED REVOLUTION

WHILE KROTSKY WASN’T
the first to propose that the work at the Consciousness Institute was political rather than scientific, he was the most outspoken of the critics. In his essay
The Global Interface as Political Machine,
he argues, “If we see consciousness as belonging to an individual, in much the same way that we consider personality, free will, or even the notion of soul as his/her own possession, then we must concede that any technological intrusion, cybernetic or electronic, is a forcible one. As such, the individual should have a right to reject it.”
¹

That private ownership of consciousness was Krotsky’s main objection to the Global BrainWeb Interface certainly weakened his argument. For as Dksvoskny pointed out, if consciousness is claimed as private ownership, then “soon enough perfume, music, even the wind will be up for debate, for are not all of these
consciousness-intruding
elements?”
²
Dksvoskny was thus the first to formally question what constituted proper objection to technological intrusion outside of the subjective like/dislike standards proposed by anti-interfacers. Ethics, he stated, was hardly the basis to reject a leap in human/computer intelligence, conceding that if, and only if, such an intrusion were dangerous (i.e., a stench so foul, it caused vomiting; a noise so loud, it produced deafness), then, indeed, prohibition would be up for debate.

The BrainWeb Interface, however, increased brain/computer function without any such violent intrusions. And while the initial test models complicated this due to their primitive designs (SkullCartridges, Internal DSL, VeinWiring, etc.) these prototypes were quickly replaced by the nonintrusive, marketplace models available from the construction of the Towers. The technology that allowed the web to function directly off bioenergetics rather than internal hardwiring, in short, its nonphysicality, invalidated the anti-interface objections.

Wittger, who separates behavior into internal-drive and external-drive behavior, sees the crux of the debate as residing in the misconception of consciousness as being purely word/thought based rather than word/thought/html based.

Who exactly gave anti-interfacers divine right to hold neural function under lock and key still remains a mystery to me. An antiquated notion of sovereign control of brain function is, in part, at fault. Religious dogma is probably more culpable (with its notions of spirit, reincarnation, ad infinitum). When religion established the intangible soul as a safe haven for consciousness, it compromised technological evolution by creating a mind eternally hidden and impossible to access. The advance of Global Interface Technology has proven that the neuroscience of the early twenty-first century provided only a limited understanding of brain function. Human internal drive has had cybernetic interface at its disposal all along.
³

Wittger proved that, in the same way electricity or gravity was present before its discovery, human cybernetic capability preexisted the technology, and to deny this was to prove universal imbecility. Indeed, the short-lived attempts of anti-interfacers to remove themselves from the Global Streaming Network (ostriching, metal helmets, the Spelunk Architectural Movement) gave merit to the imbecility Wittger prophesied. None of the gloom and doom that anti-interfacers warned about occurred, and while Smith attributes a rise in IDFD (Internal Drive Focus Disorder) and the proliferation of Interface Psychosis to the emergence of interfacing,
⁴
Bausch & Cartz Pharmaceuticals has shown that these diseases were latent in the individual pre-Interface.
⁵

Perhaps the more interesting argument posed by the anti-interface movement is Professor Schisberg’s discussion of the collective unconscious. He suggests, “The intra-psychic phenomena noted by many since the advent of interfacing cannot simply be examined as conventional psychic phenomena. Current cases of Interface-synchronicity point to corporately chosen subject matter. The question this raises is whether the Interface is rewiring our collective unconscious to become corporate.”
⁶
Insofar as this is an interesting philosophical argument, Schisberg’s claims have held some sway. However, as Dunning observes, “The collective unconscious remains as much a mystery as life and death itself. Suggesting that the nature of mind is corporately controlled is as ridiculous as claiming the afterlife is politically influenced.”
⁷

The anti-interface movement, which initially rose in outward physical protest, has been quelled over the past decade, becoming decidedly academic in nature.
⁸
Krotsky himself, originally the most vocally supportive of the resistance, conceded that physical rebellion (i.e., Tower Terrorism, Interface scramblers, brain pirating) was ultimately pointless.

Regardless of our consent, the Interface has reorganized the mental landscape and firmly established consciousness as public property. Through violence, defeat, and default, the resistance has been forced to create a final stronghold via the intellect itself. The emergence of university-level Interface Studies is the only fortuitous outcome of the failed revolution. Intelligence should henceforth be seen as a type of capital. Ideas, hypotheses, and arguments are the only assurance the individual still has of buying power in the marketplace of consciousness.
⁹

MIGRATION

SHE’S WEARING KNEE-HIGH
boots and a skirt short enough to expose her thighs. She waits for the few lagging students to exit, then closes the door and crosses the room toward my desk. Something is different about her eyes today. At first I mistake it for the purple eyeliner until I notice flecks of green superimposed on her brown irises. Her nose is small and her lips are large, deep red, and enhanced. “Hi, Professor,” she says, leaning against the edge of the table. “You were checking me out again, weren’t you?”

“You caught me,” I say.

“You want to do something about it?”

Through the small pane of glass, I see students filing past the classroom. “Here?” I ask.

She puts her lips by my ear and whispers, “Yes, Dad, right here. Don’t you want this?” She stretches her bronzed hand in front of me and shows me the vagina on her palm. “I’ve got two other ones for you, Dad.” Her lips are by my earlobe where I’ve created a very small penis to resemble an earring. “Why don’t you try to find them all, Dad,” she says. “Dad?”

“Dad!”

I take off my goggles. Max is in the doorway, wearing the white hockey mask he never removes. “Dad, I’ve been calling you for, like, five minutes.”

Beneath my desk, the black rubber of my bodysuit is bulging, revealing the early stages of an erection. I peel off my headgear, place it by the computer, and turn awkwardly, keeping my legs hidden under the desk. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m teaching.”

“Your class ended ten minutes ago.”

“
Six
minutes ago. Either way, wait till my door opens, and take off that mask when I’m talking to you.”

My son grunts and drops his shoulders, a kind of inverse shrug. There was a time when the sound of my office door opening would bring the excited patter of his feet. Now I can hardly get him to stand near me. He lifts the hockey mask so it juts over his eyes like a visor, casting shadows onto his face. “There,” he says. “Do we have a bike pump?”

“A what?”

“A bike pump.”

He’s sweating, his left hand is shaking, and his pupils are all over the place. The kids call it spinning, a misnomer. His eyes aren’t spinning, they just keep flicking from side to side like televisions once did when their antennae were crooked. This isn’t the time to start a fight with him, not while I’m still sitting in my bodysuit with a partial erection. “What in the world do you need a bike pump for?”

“I can’t bike online, our connection’s too slow.”

“And?”

“I could use the bike I have.”

“No. It’s dangerous out there.”

“Come on.”

“I said no. End of discussion.”

“
Fine!
I’ll just be in my room killing zombies like I always am!” He flips down his hockey mask and slams the door behind him. Slasher-punk music starts up and the house is filled with guitars that sound like chain saws. Then the guitars give way to a drum solo from a programmed kit, which makes erratic and purposefully ill-timed beats.
Bapbapbap. Bapbapbap. Bapbapbap
. This isn’t music.