Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

“As far as duration, this one might be pretty long term. We’re working on something sustained, and, uh.”

“Sustained?”

“Pretty much. That’s how we refer to it. It’s one of the words we’re comfortable with. But I’m not going to get too involved with language right now. The language for this experience will come last.” For some reason Dr. Nelson gestured out the window, as if that was where the language would be coming from. I looked in that direction, right into the sun, and for a moment forgot myself, who I was, where I was, what I was doing. Jesus it felt good.

“So this will last a full day? Two?”

Nelson just stared at me. I was playing cat and mouse with a dead man. Both of us were dead, maybe. Which explained the lack of repartee.

“Or what, like, a week? I should have probably asked you that. I have things to do at home. Stuff I have to take care of.”

There was, really, nothing of the sort. There was simply a man named Richard at home, my betrothed, and then the two children we had fashioned out of wedlock, using techniques we’d long since forgotten. These days I bent over a chair to receive his anxiety, but this happened merely monthly, and was marked by a great fatigue. The children walked the rooms of our home collecting food. Sometimes they left for long periods of time and returned home, silent and unchanged. They still called it school but Jesus Christ. When the kids slept I thought of examining them, but for what? From time to time I grabbed them and held them and sometimes they grabbed me and held me. I felt very little when I did this, so I did it more, and the children grew quieter and more remote, hanging from my arms like ornaments on a tree. You could almost hear a bell go off when we hugged, as if we were all good little subjects in the great experiment that was our family. You didn’t need special glasses to see where it was all going. You could watch a movie in which people like us were burned alive. We had just slightly more agency than stuffed animals. I’m sure there was more to it, but I didn’t know what it was.

Dr. Nelson touched my face. “Lucy, sweetheart.” He was one of those men who talked this way, applying human touch that felt both deeply inappropriate and entirely welcome. I allowed it, however cold his hand felt, however much I shivered. Maybe he could undress me. Maybe he could cut into me with a knife and it would seem like chivalry. I think I am only half kidding. There was a funny way that human law seemed kind of arbitrary when it came to the doctors on our wing. Human law, in the end, would have a short half-life—human law could seem so overwhelmingly polite sometimes. He was always kind enough, but in an overcompensated way, as if he’d just come from the killing floor somewhere up north, freshly showered, blood free for the first time in months. Whatever nice thing he did for you was out of guilt for something especially heinous he’d done literally seconds before. Sometimes in the break room we discussed the various doctors, and we had silent ways of singling out the creeps and corpses among them. The ones who were so recently dead that they twitched just enough to seem functional in the world, tripping and stumbling through rooms on their way to the burial pyre.

“It’s a moon shot,” Dr. Nelson said. “But we’re going really more sort of long term with this one. ‘Indefinitely’ is one of the words we might use. Maybe. We don’t know. I mean, we do know, but we also are not saying that we know.”

“So the dose of nonsense you just gave me, with mysterious effects that you won’t reveal, you’re hoping it will last, maybe, forever? That wasn’t worth mentioning, as a courtesy?”

Dr. Nelson smiled. “You’re welcome,” he said.

What we were doingthat year in St. Louis—it sounds odd to call it that—was tagging the major feelings, sub-tagging the minor ones. This was the mandate at Thompson Lord, the company where we died a little bit every day. Even on the weekends, when we didn’t go to work. Because it taunted us on the horizon, brown and long and suspiciously moist. More of an animal reared up on its hind legs than an office building, even though up close it resolved into brick and glass and was just another future pile of rubble for the end-times.

We were giving order to the interior weather system, and whatnot. Telling a story about our moods. The thousand shades of disquiet, was what we called it in the pale halls of Thompson. A system of classification for all the ways to feel. But because the names of feelings are just so unpleasant, destroyed forever by poets and shameless emoters, we swapped in animal names. Bear and wolf and whatever. It was easier. A Noah’s ark of the possible tantrums, freak-outs, and moods. With such an approach, we wouldn’t box ourselves into some classification corner, or get lost in a subjective hell farm, and anyway it was better to be on the same page with Dr. Nelson and his team, and the middle geeks at the chem lab who had to conjure hormone equivalents of these feelings, using the ass glands of snakes and whatever.

It sounds a bit highbrow, but it was just an intellectual property land grab on the part of Thompson. They were boiling over with money, and as such were obliged to own what could be thought or felt, even if it could not yet be, well, done, by which I mean: sold. Because usually that was just a matter of time.

So, own the moods. Break all possible emotions down into chemical states, and simulate those states with drugs. Pretty simple. Then, curate the hell out of people’s days. Feed them their feelings second by second, like a DJ. The drugs would have names like Tuesday, Thanksgiving, First Day of School. We’d lose the animal branding and tag the chemical helpers with super-obvious monikers. Then we’d get into blends. Then we’d get into mods and hacks. The word “smoothie” would not be inappropriate. The horizon on all of this was pretty and it was filled with cake.

Except, of course, the tech sucked balls, and there was no agreement whatsoever in the so-called scientific community—“community” is the wrong word for what happened when these cretins got together in an auditorium—over what even constituted a particular emotional state. You wrote a protein poem for this shit, and you sidecarred a timeline of hormones, but the result too often wobbled when you squirted it into a live human body and eventually everything fell out of focus. People bled, they wept, they shat. Human ignorance turns out to be pretty durable, and it played a starring role in our work. The moods, in the end, were like ghosts. Not even. Less credibility.

And if 2014 really was the year of the sensor, as they kept saying on NPR, it had turned into a pretty long and terrible one, approaching one thousand days now. Maybe more. Who was counting? I was, along with lots of people I knew. Sensors in the trees, on the roads, slapped onto buildings, drinking from our necks, sucking up data on us. Sensors on our bodies, in our clothing. Sensors in our face cream. Sensors, yeah, in the water, finally, because water, really, has the broadest access in the world, inside our bodies and out, and how dopey we all were not to see it sooner. Water as the ultimate delivery system for that final frontier of surveillance—the inside of the human body. The data that came back was mountainous. It was crushing. Did the sensors work? Was the data sound, or even remotely reliable? Yeah, no. I mean, no one knew for sure. Or of course we did, and the answer wasn’t good.

It sounds pretty high tech, maybe, and it might have been, if it worked. These were the 2010s, after all, a time of hypotheticals and wish enterprises, when people still needed to eat, and the sun still behaved itself.