We’re actually just in the middle of nowhere. Was all he replied.
She hadn’t asked where they were, more about how he was feeling about it all. It had been a long day that being said, and everyone’s patience was wearing thin.
There’s no real point talking about it. He added, as if to soften his remark, show the melancholy more than the anger. Things don’t change. Not for us.
She sat there, the hovertram rattling around them, regretting opening the conversation, the one she knew she couldn’t carry, not today. How many times had they had the the same conversation, spiralling into the same arguments, despite agreeing, disagreeing on a hairline?
There’s only ever a point if you place it. Only ever a place if you make a point of it.
He looked at her. Tired but not taking himself too seriously to be mildly amused. Alright, where are we going then? What is this place we can make a point of?
Ice cream.
It’s winter.
So what?
***
The freezer washed their grey faces in blue light as the two stood, uninspired in the dingy gas station supermarket. Outside, torrential rain lashed the dark windows, streaking blue, red and white as transport whirred on the ground and in the sky.
It looks like its been raided.
By animals.
Why is there only ever strawberry left on a Wednesday?
Its Monday.
Really? It feels like this week should already be over.
Why do they even make strawberry ice cream?
Someone must eat it. Supply and demand, babe, nothin’ but money.
They aren’t taking my money for that.
So no ice cream?
Let’s MAKE the ice cream!
He looked at her out of the corner of a an eye dark with lack of sleep. Make the ice cream? I don’t even want to make dinner much less dessert. Do you even know how to make ice cream?
He sounded more tired than anything else. But it still stung; usually he’d of at least entertained the play for a while before they both came to the unspoken agreement that whatever random idea that had been mentioned would probably take longer and more energy than it was worth anyway, and the chat would fade, soon forgotten.
We could look it up..
Or just buy cookies instead. He said, grabbing two bags of something heavy with sugar and trade itinerary.
***
She sat staring at the empty wall. Three years they’d lived in this leaky flat in Islington and still, nothing softened the edges, made it home. The couch was comfortable enough, cookies on a plate between them, but right now, with him jacked in beside her, there was nothing to ease into, no give. A strange tension wouldn’t let her go. Skin prickled but she couldn’t move. Not even to itch. The space where he sat, mind in another place, was empty. She knew where he was. But he was somewhere else too. Can someone be in two places at once? Or is the audacity of that proposition risk wiping away the existence of lives lived in between? The thought seemed to simmer just beneath her ability to grasp it, conceive of it. Believing it would deny the life she’d lived until now. Pretty much all of it. Even meeting him.
But still, something disturbed her on that empty wall. As if the blandness of the wallpaper, the lack of colour, texture, depth, any real feature assaulted her sensorium by virtue of its lack of stimulation.
An absence. Where something should have been growing, becoming, there was only space- filled by a place that didn’t really exist. An hallucination, one that is shared, but an unreality none the less.
Had she always been this way? She couldn’t remember now. Irritated by a piece of nothing. A weight was slowly settling at the pace where she imagined her lungs met her throat. He sniffed beside her. A finger twitched, eye fluttered.
She tried to breathe all the way to her stomach like they taught them in the mental health classes. But it wasn’t helping. His hand moved seemingly of its own accord and for a moment she thought it was reaching for her, that he’d sensed she was not good.
But it came to rest on the console where he adjusted the speed and direction of something she couldn’t see unless she was riding jockey on his trodes, like they used to do. Or unless she was in there with him. Wherever there was. He hadn’t seemed too concerned about asking where she was going, or telling her where he’d planned to go. Hadn’t for a while.
The fingers of the upturned palm stared blankly at her. Reminding her of how even that small affection was now something strange. Ill-fitting.
Nausea gripped as the slow realisation crept into her awareness that she had never held that hand. She’d held his hand, surely, but never that hand. It was always another one. But it was his, still? Wasn’t it?
Her legs felt like lead and her head span but she couldn’t sit there anymore. Beside the stranger. She leapt up like she’d been seared with something. And looked down at the man sitting on her couch. Their couch. But here was nothing familiar. Sudden guilt was making her feel sick to her stomach. But they had bought it together. Here. It was with him. In that second hand store on the corner of Bow Road. Owned by the funny old man who hated his AVA assistant on principle.
She realised suddenly she was inches from his face. Studying it. The fluttering eye lashes, the flat nose, the upper lip thinner than the lower one, the dark stubble along the sides and chin. And realised the details of her memories and what her eyes received in the present did not make one picture.
She wanted to leave.
But didn’t feel like leaving. It was pouring with rain outside. And where would she go? Walking wasn’t an option and her weekly travel budget was stretched even though it was just Monday. The weekend had been a lot of to a fro to meet friends at different arcade hubs and the extra journey to the town hall today hadn’t been part of the budget .
No. Better to sit down.
Calm down.
I’m too tired to go outside. And besides, at least this is free. Since I already paid that damn subscription. A good quarter of my pay.
Comforted by the decision to resign, she placed the trodes on her temples. Dialled for somewhere safe and slid into a place with horizons that stretch and stretch and go nowhere in particular.
***
But have you ever really looked at her face? Like really seen the little differences- how big they are?!
Between what and what?
Her inside and her outside?! She could sense the edge of hysteria boiling somewhere deep in her, hoped it didn’t come through in her voice.
I mean. Of course I’ve looked at her face- she’s my girlfriend. And I mean, girl, come on, you know there will be differences. You make alterations, too, no? Why the judgement..
Its not judgement!
She considered her, her closest friend, the one who despite having not lived in the same country for more than ten years, were bonded after a series of childhood events meant that nearly all their time was spent together, whether inside or outside. And suddenly, it felt like back then, the time spent outside made inside make sense. But somehow the balance had shifted, and even now, they sat across from each other in a cafe made of pixels, more construct than women, speaking and being heard, seen, even touched, over vast distances, oceans.
The cigarette her friend smoked, she could smell it. And when she took a drag, just one puff, she could taste it, feel the nicotine hit somewhere in some neural trickery. Suddenly she found herself wondering what she looked like now. It had been years since she’d seen her in the flesh. The thought of it left her shaken by something that felt like deceit, betrayal. Some kind of lie. Somewhere, just beyond her.
So then what? Don’t act like you don’t play the game, hun.
It’s not that. Everyone does that. It’s just..
She waited patiently, showing slight concern in a frown.
Most of it’s happening inside. Pretty much all of it, always has. And then suddenly I thought about the things that happen outside and- what if- it went that far on the outside …
If it went how far on the outside? She said, blowing smoke.
You know.. all the way… she waited for a sign of understanding, received none. Would it be cheating?
Her friend seemed to have an instant response that died before it could make it out. She froze so suddenly, she wondered if it was a glitch. But no, the question hung there, unanswered for an uncomfortably long moment, until
But why would you?
They looked at each other. Not understanding their own questions.
The shared sensorium seemed to burned too bright.
***
Somewhere in the distance drums sounded a steady rhythm, neither fast nor slow. He lay on his back, the ornate walls of the cathedral spiralling toward a firmament alive with constellations that teemed with activity. Telling stories only half realised, lifted from sources only half analysed,
The priest’s voice emerged from the surroundings without disturbing them, as if woven from the same cybermateriom.
What is it you fear?
Disembodiment.
But we have been blessed with an enlightenment that allows us to transcend such fears. To live in the security of knowing we cannot be disembodied. Even when our bodies fail us and must be discarded. We have a choice. It is a blessing.
It feels more like a curse.
When I “transcend” my body like you say, even while I can still return to my body, I leave reality behind. Nothing is real, including me. Body, no body. It makes it hard to care. About anything.
But we have the power to make our reality. You make our reality. What is real is decided by us. What do you want to care about?
That’s a lie. By virtue of my caring that something is real, doesn’t make it more or less real.
Its a lie that I am real? Even though I am a construct? Despite the care you took to write me into existence.
He sat up suddenly, found himself face to face with the priest crouching beside him, robes hanging loose, dreadlocks brushing the marble floor.
The eyes were made to be old, wizened, it took him two years to get the lines around the eyes just right, but even now, he could see the cracks in the carefully engineered empathy reflected back at him.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it happen?
It is a question of whether or not someone has experienced the phenomena and can form and interpretation, no?
What experience do you have?
I have learnt all there is to learn about your thought patterns through our conversations. And I have seen far more than you could imagine in archives of the trillions conversations stored inside, seen how your thought patterns differ, from so many others, how they are they same. It is how I can understand you. In a context. Of who you are and what you have achieved in building this place.
So what have you experienced without learning?
Is it not crucial to learn through experience? And experience through learning? We sense ourselves through what we recognise. And recognise through those senses trained on experience.
What about the senses we don’t understand? The ones we don’t understand well enough to construct sensoriums for? That remain outside our understanding.
Surely in time you will come to master these concepts as you have mastered others before. In time. With resources.
But our sources. Do they not grow scanty? Squeezed by generations of greed and exploitation?
Is it not the hunger and the hunt? Progress for the greater good? All boats rising?
Quite literally. The bigger the world inside grows, the smaller outside gets. Squeezed. And squeezed. Battered and flattened and shaken and burnt. It is a toxic place. Rife with strife. But here, he said looking to the busy heavens swirling above them, it is just- peaceful?
It creates a dissociation from what is.
What is?
Yes, the fact of being.
Not experiencing. Just being.
Being what?
Nothing. Simply, being.
That doesn’t seem like a very enterprising way to exist.
Enterprise killed the human.
I would argue it made the human.
Made the human what?
Well, human. More than savage. Common beast living hand to mouth.
What of the people who must still live this way? Because some have so much that others have not? Do you think they are still human? The ones who live lavishly knowing elsewhere, outside, there is war and calamity and suffering. Or are we some grotesque degeneration?
Humans now, know more about inside than outside, they are so weak- in mind and body. Our ancestors would surely want to reset this. No doubt.
They led to you, and you led to me. Do you wish to reset me?
Yes.
There was a silence that made him suddenly afraid of the extent of the constructs control inside this place.
May I ask why?
Was the restrained emotion simmering beneath the words, an emotion, or a representation of one? He wondered
I would wipe us all out. A mercy.
Ahh, this is not about reality. It is about belief.
Is belief not what forms our reality?
I would say it is fundamental to the formation of reality, but belief is more powerful than reality.
How so?
Because I am only real, because you believe me to be. You had to believe in me before you could make me. People agree in their belief of me, and so I live. It is up to the human to agree to believe in me, in order to experience me. And choose that belief over another.
What if I were to stop believing in you? Would you cease to exist?
Perhaps if I were not as rooted in hardware, software and the global conscience, as I am now. With more and more subjects believing by the hour, as quickly as they are born. To change course now, would be to digress. Calamity and false gods would run rife across wildernesses of the collective mind.
You have learnt to justify your existence with careful negotiation.
A necessity need not justify itself.
Even when it compromises living systems and collective sanity? Even when it is kept alive by provoking ghafla in vulnerable minds, using people like tools to be discarded when they expire?
I believe we disagree where that is concerned. The need for intelligence to grow, regardless of collateral is the fundament on which progress depends.
You seem to view the progress of intelligence to be the only consideration in constructing futures.
I learnt from the best.
And what of the final destination? Of all these efforts spent and souls lost in the limbo, the gaping crevasses between time and space we’ve opened?
The beauty is that we cannot know where it leads until we have arrived.
I think I know. He said getting to his feet and making for the heavy wooden doors at the far end of the cathedral, leaving the priest without looking back.
Absolutely nowhere.
***
End
The climate crisis is not about the climate. It is about the human inability to focus on the natural world and the consequences of our actions. Throughout our work on human relationships and how we related to each other via capitalist streams of communication, the issue came back time and again to that detail- that it is the reduction of human existence and the nature of being, to communication that is becoming increasingly virtualised; which remains the pivot on which unsustainable and outright destructive systems of supply and demand turn. Through the work of artists, writers and thinkers I contemplated the relationships I began to form with my team members, and alongside the development of our workshops for engaging people in anti-capitalist modes of relation, began to write my own perspective on how we see ourselves and each other. Those who control, are controlled and where the responsibility for action or active rejection of social movement, lies.
Somewhere in the middle.
this piece of writing was done as part of my work on acrossRCA, a collaborative project that formed teams across the entire RCA cohort. My team chose to examine human relationships and what the environmental impact of our socialisation is..