Tidepool Story: Simeon

Simeon

It would be suicide by Great White, he decided. They didn’t like that word, suicide, but he used it in his mind to see it for what it was. The image would lunge at him from the screen with such voracity and immediate surprise that his adrenalyn levels would immediately sore, sending him into fight or flight. He would be restrained so the impulse would go inward, shutting down first heart then brain just as the devil fish tore into him. He’d had months in his cell to conjure in his mind the razor teeth that would sink into his chest.

He’d chosen this ending over others for nothing came closer to dying a natural death. Only simulations in those days could be characterized as natural. But oh what simualtions were they. Bigger than life, meaner and far more beautiful than the pics and vids we have of the natural world in early times. The world was disigned to knock you out, and when someone had accomplished what this man had, they gave you the works.

But suicide was not what he had in mind. They would restrain him, shoot him up with pshychoactives. After that, he knew they’d give him the Privacy, so when his imagination tore his body limb from limb, spattering blood into every corner of the room, he knew he would be completely alone. The windows would be switched off. The seven minutes would pass and they would come in to wipe up the mess and crate his collective ass to the incinerator. Those minutes were all his, though. For the only time in his life, nothing, no one would be watching his actions.

The titanium cuffs locked around his wrists and ankles were in his mind as real as the shark that would devour him. The drugs shot from the hypo into his veins and mingled with the nutrients in his blood. He understood every synapse that would  be frozen, every one that would be in a spasm of firing. He knew the detoures, the shortcuts in his nervous system. His minders had no idea what he was capable of, but one of them said, “never mind, he won’t need it,” and the other sheathed his long blade. They were his assisins in case the shark failed in the duration of the Privacy to kill him. They would rush into the room, check his pulse, and if he lived, open his carteroid like a pig’s at slaughter.

The door slid shut and chimed the first minute. This too, he would defeat. He pushed the thought into the place it needed to be. 

His mind was pounding now, full of lurking enemies, while the wallscreen came slowly slowly alive. He was impressed with the imperceptibly gradual display of an undersea- scape. Schools of small fish darted and vanished and occasional rays of sunlight pierced the deep. The sound was internal, from within his skull: pinging oxygen and the swishing of small creature clashes. 

He did not wait for the second chime, begining to shrink the muscle tissue beneath his retraints, the cartlidge, the tendons. He accomplished this in the way that he did the thing for which he was being given his Privacy. No one was aware of his ability, only the Power, and he pretended, as all other good Citizens of the Power, to evaluate himself in no way more or less powerful than another. All of his adult evals, in fact show adherence to this principle of self knowledge. But now, as he defied both himself and the Power, the cuffs and anklets began to loosen.

You may recall the Wallscreen from your history tabs: ancestor technology, a forerunner to our exquiste and beloved InSense experience. But even before the Wallscreen there were virtual reality programs that were quite fashionable among the elite of the day. One would simply zip on a sensory suit and don a pair of goggles to experience the simulation of their fancy. Of course these were very crude sims, primitive 3D, and usually premised from the basest elements of human nature. This is what turned people on then. Life, after all, was short.

The develpment of the Wallscreen, however, presented an entirely new, far less cumbersome interface. As the screen powered up, the very air between the screen and viewer became supercharged with pixelated atoms, the cutting edge interface of that century. Primitive, yes indeed, but what was factual at the time had long been discredited by physics, setting the stage for the consciousness altering Pixal Mist. As prime time entertainment, it became the new common sense, a virtual life that offered full participation apriori; that is, the virtual experience was a projection of the imagination comingling with light particles immitted by the screen. Looking back, we poo poo this technology its quaint approach to reality design. In it’s time, though, especially for its time, the Wallsceen represented what would become the harbinger of the sociotech revolution we now eat, drink, breathe.

Our man, none other than Simeon Horugato, was watching with his bare eyes the now expanding submarine stage in which he was about to be martyred. He had proven himself more powerful than his fellows and becoming shark bait was to be his self-directed fate. Most of the fish scattered, clearing hastily from the air (now green seawater) and Horugato paused his concentration to watch what he knew his mind, if he allowed it, would happily co-create with the Wallscreen. Restless masses moved in the darkest reach, beyond the waving seaweed, and the door chimed another minute.

Several seconds passed. Horugato’s hands, scraped and bloodied, but free. The heels of his feet were proving a challenge, though. Reducing bone mass was an exercise he had performed only once, risky and necessitating an hour of restorative meditation. He would have less than three minutes. 

We know from Horugato’s entries in the Log of the Power that Horugato was a dreamer, not one of those drones perpetually escaping into some forced future or retrospective past; he was one who dreamed of the literal now, of the alternate realities which we take for granted today. This was a man who grasped the principles of transcient grounding long before the theory was mainstreamed and became the basis of our revoulution. This is why he is our father, our saint, the very personage of our destiny; for it is you see that by exercising that skill, which he knew only as a dangerous strength, treacherous even, he released into the world a 

By the time the anklets dropped to the ball of his heel, one massive shark had angled into the room and was darting in its graceful manner around his chair, charging him  menacingly. We can imagine that he was terrified, but perhaps he was also of the mind that he only needed to will his escape, for as we know, this is what we have inherited.