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Orpheus can never look back at the real woman trailing behind him out of hell, the woman that anybody could see with ordinary eyes. Orpheus must keep his eyes firmly fixed on the imaginal Eurydice before him, towards whom he has struggled all his life. She is not imaginary, not at all, but realer than any mere apparency, than any momentary act of seeing. He must move always towards that perfect image of his wife, and so sustain himself and his song. If ever he turns back, that is, regresses into seeing his wife as an ordinary woman, she is lost. And he is lost.

– Robert Kelly, 1935

 

 

You. You running across the field.
A hissing second, not a word,
And there it was, our underworld:
behind your face another, and another
and I
away.
– And you alive: staring,
almost smiling;
hearing them come down, tearing
air from air.
“This dark is everywhere”
we said, and called it light,
coming to ourselves.
Fear
has at me, dearest. Even this night
drags down. The moon’s gone. Someone
shakes and old camera-cloth
in front of our eyes.
Yours glint like a snowman’s eyes.
We just look on, at each other.
What we had, we have.

– “Orpheus and Eurydice”, Jean Valentine, 1967

 

Unraveling

“That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” ― Jess C. Scott, The Other Side of Life

 

He woke up with a voice in his mind. It was a woman’s voice, and he was pretty sure he had never heard it before. It stayed in his ears even after he opened his eyes: it was sultry, low, slightly husky. The sound was distinct but intangible, and he tried to cling to it because the power of suggestion in itself was one of the things that made his job more manageable. Better than having to make up something from scratch every single day. He was imaginative, yes, but not all the time. Especially not when he woke up with a thundering headache rattling his brain from the inside. Maracas time!

The rest of his body utterly still, he just moved his head to the side and glanced outside the huge glass wall at the city below and around. All grey. The sky. The buildings. All grey except for the signs flashing both on horizontal and vertical surfaces. Colored neon. Flashing, blinking, making his eyes hurt. Advertisements everywhere. Propaganda, nothing else. Telling you what to wear, what to eat, what to drink, what to think, how to fuck.

His crucified position, on the bed, his body naked over the crumpled white sheets, was involuntary but highly symbolic. He tried to keep his breathing even because he knew that Echo would soon realize that he was no longer asleep, and then…

“Good morning, Mike.”

Right on cue.

He closed his eyes and pressed the palm of his hand over his forehead.

“Good morning, Echo.”

“It’s March 21, 2287. Monday. The weather in New York City is mostly cloudy…”

“Of course it is.”

“…With winds from the North, 10 km/h. Humidity is 34%. Visibility is 16 km.”

“OK. I’m getting up, Echo. Shut up for a moment, you’re already making my ears bleed.”

The A.I. – such an evolved, obnoxious home automation system with a quirky voice – obeyed and the apartment was flooded with silence, once again. Perfect silence. He would have desired absolute darkness, too, at the moment. Complete darkness, perfect silence. Some more sleep – such an ideal environment for a dreamer like him. He hated Mondays, and even more so when he had barely slept the night before – because he had been occupied in some interesting holosex with a girl he had met at one of the clubs on level 2, the Chiba Industrial Area. Cute girl. Horny. Easy.

Forgettable.

Those vintage porn magazines he had stashed at home seemed way more real than what he had done the previous night. Of course he knew those pictures on the rags were probably staged, but still… at least there was something physical going on. Skin on skin. A little action. Something more than wearing a touch-sensitive sex-suit and having virtual sex by exchanging IP codes. Yes, there had been haptic sex toys controlled from a distance involved – and some kinky shit, too, but he still felt that something was amiss. What they called “Immersive Entertainment” didn’t really make him feel all that immersed or entertained, to be honest. And now he felt prostrated but substantially unfulfilled, and couldn’t even take a day off from work.

Finally, he brought himself to move and got up, not bothering to wear any clothes, not for now. One thing at a time. Shower, first.

“Echo… Take care of the bed and get the shower ready.”

“Yes, Mike.”

The bed disappeared into the wall, and he heard the water running. Echo was a bit punctilious and intrusive at times, but at least it always obeyed. Never a glitch, never a problem. That was why he had chosen it among the trillions of domotic systems available on the market.

He took his shower, and his headache eased up a bit. But he was hungry, and his throat felt a bit dry. He felt slightly dehydrated. How could such a trivial little thing manage to make his mood even more rotten than it already was?

He knew why. He wanted a different life. He was tired of the one he was living. Wash, rinse and repeat. Every single day felt the same.

Since he was a kid, he had always suspected he belonged to the wrong era. He was a freedom lover and didn’t like the authoritarian rules of the society he was forced in. He loved nature and instead lived in a layered metropolis, holed up into an apartment that more often than not felt way too small, oppressive. But alas, space was precious stuff nowadays, and Mike was one of the lucky ones. He didn’t live in a cubicle on level 0 or 1, after all. And not even on level 2, for that matter. His salary allowed him to rent a nice little apartment in one of the best condos on level 3, and he could go wherever he wanted. Level 4, where he worked, level 5 – sometimes. For some special occasions. He could even go down and have some fun if he wanted to. His AA Pass worked just fine.

Yeah. He knew a little bit about the lowest level of New York, or the Black City, how he called it. He had been at 1 and 2, but never at level 0. That scared him, a little bit. The information about the “basement” was not reassuring, and he was not the type of guy who wanted to end up in a fight just because he had been carefree. Nor he liked to be forced to walk around armed. But if you went down, to the slums, you had to be aware of what you might find – from gangs of teenagers to drug dealers, from rampant crime to illegal blood sports. And in those cases, when you would find yourself at the edges of what was commonly called the “respectable society”, you had to remember that personal security was on you, and you alone. Police didn’t really exist down there.

So, almost like anyone else, he did own a weapon. But he couldn’t even remember the last time he had touched it. A Beretta U22 Neos, which was actually a pretty old gun. Coming from the old world – the one he so often dreamed about. Probably a useless weapon, too. He didn’t care. His life was so dull that he would likely never need to use a gun anyway.

Level 0 was gritty and depressing. But Mike often wondered if life on the higher levels of the social scale was any better.

“Echo… coffee?” he scratched his head.

“Yes, Mike. Ready in 5 seconds. 4, 3…”

He sighed and walked over to the kitchen counter just in time for the small computerized door to open and his vintage mug to appear. He took it and smelled the content. It didn’t really have any smell, but it was somehow coffee. Well, not the real one, of course. But at least the dark liquid had been created using a pretty similar molecular structure. It was caffeine, and that was just what he needed. He munched on a couple of high-protein bars, too, all the while staring at the city outside, still wearing his robe.

“Mike. You are running late. Your schedule today includes a private meeting with Miss Bankmann at 10 AM. May I suggest formal attire?”

“Why, Echo? She knows me. She has known me my entire life. She doesn’t care.”

Echo didn’t reply. The A.I. could only keep the conversation going for a little while, but abstract and existentialist questions, or even rhetorical ones, weren’t really its thing. Mike smirked to himself, finishing his sorta-coffee, then brushed his teeth and got dressed for the day. Nothing different than usual: militech-style pants and jacket, boots, a trench coat. He was good to go. He had never really cared about formality. Never did Miss Bankmann – at least when it came to him.

 

 

The arcology of the city never failed to amaze him, and not necessarily in the best possible way. He remembered his father telling him about a time when New York was not a massive vertical structure, or at least not only that. A time when humankind was just starting to experience the combination of architecture and ecology because it was becoming evident that the ever-decreasing natural environment needed to be preserved.

Mike was thirty and the layered metropolis concept was the only one he had ever known. So many streets, so many buildings extending above the city, and the final result, in his eyes, was nothing but a post-modern version of Dante’s Divine Comedy: the rich were on top, the lower classes at the bottom. Heaven and Hell. Urban segregation at its finest, where any neighborhood slowly but surely became overshadowed by another level – and so on. But at the same time, he was no architect or engineer, so he had no idea if or how the ever-increasing overpopulation problem could be solved differently.

He knew of other cities that were in even worse conditions than NYC was: more levels, an even higher population density, and therefore more buildings, more requirements in terms of self-contained energy and waste reclamation. New York only had five levels, each divided by an entire floor dedicated to the inner workings of the level above it: it was called the deck. That was where all the power lines, plumbing mains and anything else that needed to be worked and maintained for life to be livable at the level was housed.

In a way, New York City was even a virtuous model of self-sufficient city, whose base now covered the ground area of the original settlement and whose structure developed toward the sky. Everything happened inside the hive: from food production to waste recycling, from environmental refinement to the connection of all the different arcoplexes to create a unified ecosystem where residential, commercial and industrial places coexisted. So basically, although you could come and go pretty much as you pleased – if you had the right pass to move from level to level, obviously – you really didn’t need to.

Mike reached the Electron Enterprises headquarters in about twenty minutes, and the retina scanning at the front entrance took about two seconds. When he was in, he walked straight to his area – where he had been working as a lab technician for about five years now. Creating voices from scratch. Because that was what they did at Electron Enterprises.

They cloned organisms. And human body parts.

 

 

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