Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

This wouldn’t be just a dating service, even though, ka-ching, hello! Get paid, hashtag gritty times! They were pretty sure they were onto something. Carl thought that, with enough users shooting their feelings into the cloud, Mayflower would be sitting on a gold mine of data. It was the ultimate privacy grab, better even than a blood sample from every living person on the planet. Which the rumor sites also had Mayflower pursuing.

But management smelled too much choice. The whole thing stank of opt out. Self-knowledge was for the dead, they said. People don’t like themselves enough to have to deal with other people with feelings so similar to their own. It makes them feel less special. A product shouldn’t be trying to tell the truth so aggressively. That was a turnoff. Besides, the feeling sensors weren’t where they should be, technology-wise, and only young people would want to wear the neck collars that Carl was proposing. Management pulled the kill switch. Management being Kipler, Kipler, Kipler, and Kipler, depending on his mood. Depending on his sweater.

Creative staged charrettes. Disruption was the watchword. Carl and his team were pressured to lift their legs and pee-shame the status quo. For a cash-yielding invention to work, for it to leak gold pudding and really destroy the economy, in Mayflower’s favor, maybe even change the meaning of money, Kipler once said, it had to look inevitable, ridiculously obvious in hindsight. They all kept coming back to food. What a problem it was. And not just because there was so little of it left on the planet.

Carl was there when Kipler first brought the life hackers into the charrette. Brutal, loud, beautiful, aspirationally immortal. Just a bunch of ageless kid-looking creatures who were like Version 2.0 people. How old were they, really? Eleven? Kipler called them Mayflower’s future. Early adopters of every health trend, enthusiasts of untested medical protocols. They micro-fasted, binged on superfoods, fussed over their own blood tests, which they posted cockily on the longevity message boards. Carl once saw them tearing down a hallway, something clear and greasy on their upper lips. They seemed deranged. Soon the life hackers were obsessed with a service called Jug. Every morning, a jug was delivered to your cubicle. It was all you needed for the day. Nutritionally bozo. Freakishly optimized, and they could load your meds into it, just to keep all your material input in one receptacle. Sometimes the jug held a thick lotion, more of a cream than a drink. Other times it was slippery and clear, with a foamy head. It depended on your bloodwork. As you graduated through jugs, the color and the quality of the liquid changed, responding to feedback. When you finished a jug, you spat your last sip back into the bottle, to be analyzed before the next day’s potion was brewed. Or supposedly. The life hackers had brought their jugs to the charrette one day and swigged from them, burping a grassy steam.

The legend that developed is that Kipler smashed some jugs that day, swung one against his own head, grinning madly. Carl would love to have seen that. Some of the goo in those bottles looked as if it couldn’t even spill. It would just hang in the air like a cloud. He pictured Kipler cream-soaked, coated in white foam.

What did happen is that Kipler said that the start-up that had invented Jug had missed the whole point. They were drawing your attention to your food, giving you a heavy accessory, isolating you socially, et cetera—he went on for like ten minutes of scathing criticism. Kipler destroyed the premise, the execution, the future of this product, and the life hackers, poor guys, seemed to wither at the table.

“Get rid of the jug,” Kipler finally said. “Get rid of the liquid. Get rid of everything. What’s left?”

No one answered.

Kipler smiled.

“Exactly,” he said. “Nothing. There’s nothing left.”

He gestured into empty space, then pointed at the overhead fixture.

“We’re all sitting here, soaking in light. We could have been eating this whole time.”

Kipler was pretty quiet after that, and everybody was freaked out, looking up into the light, squinting.

Mayflower Systemsregularly bought and destroyed small companies, mostly to crush progress. And maybe also simply to frighten the universe and increase world sadness? One of the patent portfolios that had come online at around that time involved grow lights. Using light as a delivery system for nutrients, not just for plants but for animals. A lightbulb went off, and a UV healing wand for sick animals became, at Mayflower, something utterly else and fucking wonderful. A nutrient-delivery system for the skin, for people skin. A goddamn human grow light, as Kipler put it, though he thought the word “human” sounded too technical. The way skin makes vitamin D from sunlight. Except this would be other vitamins, too, and micronutrients. And then, one day, the three amigos: fat, protein, and carbohydrates, who usually got inside us only through flesh eating and the like. The marketing hook was that meals were obsolete. Meals were a headache and a hassle. Meals were disgusting. Because of sauce. Because of stench. In the future, Kipler would yell, everyone would eat by accident, while doing other things. While working!

Who would volunteer? Who would saddle up and taste the greatness? Who was stupid? Who had nothing to lose? Who lacked a family to mourn him should things, uh, falter? Who wanted to be a hero? Who could withstand tremendous levels of pain without blacking out? Who could abide a chronic, deep itch under the skin that scratching merely exacerbated?

Those, in fact, were not the criteria. None of them. They blood-tested Creative and looked for subjects with gross nutritional deficits. In other words, people who ate like shit and had the blood numbers of a gremlin. The first goal was to see if the grow light could move the needle, boost a dude’s vitamin A or whatnot. Actually satiate. And not, you know, hasten to expire. And then luminous efficacy would be stretched. Light-form carbohydrate spectrum, rays of protein. Yup. Radical color temps and other par value mods to the spectrum. The talk got geeky. If all went well, they’d pilot a dark strobe, something like a noise gate that regulated the feed? Just pulse darkness so as not to turn the poor subject into some kind of demon, twitching under a heat lamp.

Carl’s bloodwork deemed him the most deviant, healthwise, and the applause he got, a king’s greeting, which must have been cheers of relief, sort of decided the thing. It was Carl who’d be going under the light. All you can eat. Everyone hollered to give it up for Carl and then everyone sort of did, vocally. The entire room, as if they’d planned it, yelled, “Bon appétit, Carl!” Flashlights were clicked on, and these flannel-shirted semi-strangers gathered around him, shining their beams in his face, as a kind of joke, Carl guessed, but it was sickening a little.

Mayflower put Carl on a detox. Not Jug. Just some potions cooked up in the cafeteria, sometimes administered to him in the men’s room, when privacy was called for. Bone-broth Jell-O. Quite a lot of citrus. Cold coffee shot into his dark parts. A vitamin lotion smeared onto his newly shaved head, because hairless skin something something, one of the nutrient nurses explained. Your pores just gape open. Oxygen, she explained, was richer when emulsified into a cream.

Carl felt shaky, poisoned in a way he didn’t quite mind, and when the day came he was ready.

The first time he ate the light, sitting at his desk starving his ass off, staring at his laptop screen, it felt like getting slapped. Rapidly. That was the nutrient penetration, they explained. Like shotgun pellets. To Carl, it felt as if someone had pinned him to the floor and was just pimp-slapping him into a puddle. Carl asked for goggles. His eyes hurt. His feet shrank and weakened. By the end of the first week his tongue clogged his mouth. Enough to foul his speech and make him sound like an animal. And he suffered from a bottomless, gnawing hunger. Maybe because he was getting only enough nutrition, at that point, to sustain a cricket.