SAVANT WANT: DESIGN FLAW

Xat: can you see me?

Ind: i see you, boss.

Xat: i will be in charge today. the screens are unusually crisp.

Ind: the screens make our senses dull. what that my mind was crisp again.

Xat: before we start, legalities. huh, i thought the need for this was obsolete. anyway, the government's paying for this, right?

Ind: fuck you. and by you, i mean the system.

Xat: this is my first time.

Ind: don't say the virgin joke. can i ask you something before we start and i sigh? why are you really here? are you really interested in helping me? who is forcing you to be here? okay i lied, that was somethings.

Xat: i can tell by your worn eyes you've done this before, and for that i am truly sorry. it's not a who, it's a what.

Ind: that's the problem. fuck you. fuck the system.

Xat: my father told me that to be a well-rounded inheritor i would have to get out in the community away from my tower and live amongst the less-fortunate, see what they were all about. it was either this or a game of hoverbasketball with prison inmates.

Ind: you're that baron's son, right? believe it or not, i don't hate you for coming from money, i hate more the system. i never had money problems, i've always been poor. i suppose that contributes along with everything. there's always money problems because you always run out, you never make enough, you never get paid for what you're worth, the hard work you do and don't do is never monetized, there's always the next thing to buy, the next unexpected expense that leaves you tight for three years, the roof that suddenly starts leaking.

Xat: it's what everyone does, that's what my mother used to say, everyone's in the same boat.

Ind: drowning. everything in life is the same, that's the problem, the differences just highlight the sameness. homogenized, listed, spat out and put before the CL who regurgitates it. the more angles, counters, differing opinions the artists, who try to be angels, come up with, rather than make the wave split the ticket and split off to form sand rocks, it somehow just makes the mono-wave bigger until: tsunami.

Xat: what specifically are you grappling with at this moment? what sucks now.

Ind: everything. i dunno, maybe it's just me. all there can be is just me for me. i don't know how to live inside someone else, i can't see life from their perspective, i am only informed of what i see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and jize from my own cyber parts.

Xat: that technology is a few years away still. funny, you'd think by now we'd have the spirit in our power gloves.

Ind: i will like the ghost in the shell anime better when it comes out. i can't wait, it's the end for me, the end because it never really started. what spirit? God left when the Garden's last ancestor seed failed to sprout in the sandy rocks. Jesus Christ is the Screen.

Xat: where are you from? i'm not smarter than you, you can see what i'm doing here. i'm stalling for time, but stalling means more life and more spacetime so i'm doing my job. i thought i would do what Laurence Fishburne used to do, he'd sit down and listen to his mind and before long, two voices would pop into his head, one voice talking about something and the other voice responding with a counterargument and voila, a play scene is born.

Ind: i'm from what used to be ATLANTA, CLICK HERE, RIGHT HERE AT THIS LINK. The Matrix was one of those movies i didn't see. that's not how the future turned out, unfortunately. it did but it's never the clean way it's depicted in the movies.

Xat: that's why lightsabers were banned, the coolness of the alluring hypnotic lights gave way to real death, real slicing in half of folk, blood and guts. though i can get you one on the black market if you'd like, i have connections.

Ind: i have my plan planned out, took my whole life, would be a shame to second-guess it now.

Xat: that was one of my first movies. that explains a lot...to some server...somewhere...getting ready to spam my email with products they think i'd want to buy for Christmas.

Ind: never forget the classics. i remember the poster for that film more than anything else. Keanu and the boys and girl, lookin' all bad-ass with their shades on. i imagine what that photoshoot was like and how the actors felt inside their skin posing for those shots. Laurence inhabiting his character, thinking he is truly a god. Keanu more stern than Sad, with the responsibility of representing the audience, the Everyman who goes along the journey with the crowd. there's a girl in India who sees that poster, she is unfamiliar with the English content, the plot, but it's the visual itself, with that striking pose Human Keanu becomes a superhero, and the girl desperately needs a hero to scoop her out of her hopeless life of abuse. that's the power of movies. the girl dare not look at the woman in the poster...

Xat: used to be. the girl won't look at the bad-ass girl in the poster for fear of religious rebuke from her family, but she does so in her scientific mind and gleefully smiles internally. you can't escape to the mind anymore, the government builds your mind. unfortunately, since the hacker threats, the theater-going experience is all but dead, except virtually. shame how a couple of hackers can so fundamentally change the world forever. limp keystrokes creating such strong fear grips.

Ind: the government solved it easily enough, as they always do, well when the right administration was ushered in by that 1-vote margin, the smallest in recorded politics. computers were changed after that. now all the hackers work for the government, so there's no more infighting, no more nerd-on-nerd crime.

Xat: i understand it's a monolith, but y'know, if the monolith includes everyone, is it really that bad? we all are One after all. why be lonely?

Ind: this technology makes me lonely, it's so cold and lying, it lies down like dead weight, wires, code, numbers, heated by programs rather than human rhythms. i wake up these days and my nose is filled with depression, all of my friends are online, they hold their power over me, when they're too busy to respond cos they're leading other lives and reliving past lives, i have no one to turn to. the silence goes past golden into rust. i am in so much pain, the air is shatteringly quiet, so much so i have to cover my ears, but my ear fluid still rattles on...

Xat: fluid, the last vestige of humanity. thank god for that bill or that would have been digitized, too.

Ind:...i'm as cold as the tech. i don't have the luxury of real friends. i'm socially awkward, or maybe just awkward. i was born to lose. i don't think people realize when they call you a loser casually at a cafe what that entails. think about that concept, the concept of loser. you are being called a name that encompasses your entire life frame, not just a stupid sexual college indiscretion. i am a loser, i lose at life, i fail at life, everything i do is of no value, i cannot rise above my anonymous number.

Xat: few can. it's like drowning. you realize that you are just a number in a sea of billions of billions of numbers, more than our stars, and you get swallowed up. your opinion has already been said, you are not original, you are just another, and you start to disappear into the crowd. but as you lose your limbs and close your eyes and melt into the fabric of human history, you also melt into the fabric of time and space, the universe quilt, and you say to yourself, "it's okay. what can i do anyways? i can't resist this, i was always part of this, individuality is an illusion, the One is the backdrop, the bones, the pilot light."

Ind: my pilot light is extinguished, that's how it's described in the depression pamphlets, right? we need to explore the stars, it's on the backs of the taxpayers but i don't care, the stars are the new, the frontier, the non-human, the breaking out of the mold, it can be the next paradigm shift the way the fucking internet was a thousand years ago. we need a return to dirt, leaves, grass, water, nature of another planet, another realm. we need to drink and swim in the water naked without drowning.

Xat: that is the birth canal. hey, as a post-Southerner, i think you'll enjoy this clip dug out from ancient time capsules:

CLICK HERE, RIGHT HERE AT THIS LINK.

Ind: i remember this as if it were today. always turn to the ancients, they have so much to teach us. 1000 years is no years. blessed southern mama, shooting straight and getting to the heart of the matter, a heart pumping with rich-based blood and gooey veins and not a cyber fitting in sight, imploring silly political factions to fight fight always fight for what's right, which is the care of a loved one. there are factions and then there are facts. politics divide and are an illusion. how can an illusion hurt us? nothing matters but a quiet holiday meal with the family. there are factions and then there are fractures. little did we know back then how autism would help us and hurt us. we were able to communicate with autistics finally with tech and saw their intelligence and strength of character, how they saw things in their tower, it prepared us for life now where everyone is a loner hooked up to tech and seeing the world from their tower, not able to communicate with others, all of us locked in our own worlds.

Xat: the government showed the globe we humans were all a little bit autistic, all a little bit crazy, all a little bit mentally ill. savants fascinate me, and the prospect of alien savants...

Ind: Oh God, it's Mom. Mom Is God. that's how i regarded my mother, she was my everything. i was unable to form a separate female relationship that could ever compete.

Xat: how's the weather?

Ind: weather doesn't exist. anymore. controlled. no more hurricanes. nuclear bombs.

Xat: scratch that, how do you like the five new superinstagram filters? my favorite is supercrema.

Ind: i went on there once, liked a picture of a beautiful woman with big breasts who was holding up a phone case in the shape of the Batman symbol, pointy wings and all. i commented how this was the greatest phone case of all time, to which a fellow commenter rejoindered with "until you put it in your pocket." all i could mutter was "touche", i hadn't thought of that, i wasn't clever enough. when you're not the cleverest, when you don't come up with the best comment, your penis shrinks two sizes too small, you feel worthless, not worthy of love, and you turn off superinstagram. i tried again with this woman, i DM'd her and she replied, "i know you're brilliant, but guys and girls can't be just friends, and i already have a boyfriend."

Xat: the crema kinda makes the picture white in a good way.

Ind: white is never good. white denotes a seeing-through, a sham, a ghost, the world was so white for so long, now it is white because all the tech shines white with the sun, it's the gentry, oppression, monotone, one way, everything, every color, the tower, cum. and this is coming from someone who's white, or used to be.

Xat: we are all cyber now. post-racial. the only way to achieve post-racial was to make us post-human.

Ind: i am post post post. my feelings come from another place, another time, another space that is not here. i was born in the wrong era, isn't that also in the pamphlet? i can put this in a post but no one will read it. i can do something drastic but it will be covered up before i do it. i can drape the flag of my cause in the window of my ballleaper but it will be misinterpreted by the hovermedia. did you hear about the recent terrorist attack?

Xat: i have a couple more hours before my cyberbrain resets on that. horrible. shame.

Ind: his ballleaper was emblazoned with the letters CL, for Current Leader. some statement was trying to be made pro or against. it was graffitied wonkily, the letters were singed after the blast and many saw them as GB. seconds after the attack, the trending hashtag on supertwitter was #gumball

Xat: gumball? why?

Ind: why not. it didn't make any sense, much like the terrorist attack. celebrities starting sending gumballs to strangers in the mail, telling them they were in unison with them, we are all One, and that we needed to do better, humanity! Grand Britain was aghast that the terrorist would attack in their name and vowed to clean up the streets with higher brain chips. the creators of the cartoon Gumball made a pro-humanity, anti-terrorist short that went well with the kids.

Xat: love that show. i'm a kid myself, don't know if i can have kids.

Ind: it all gets forgotten, whether willingly or with the reboot. nothing matters, nothing lasts, statements crash down when the next pop star talks about gumballs. this is the only way i can be a global citizen, the big world is made small with technology, it makes you want to learn about every single beautiful person in the world, everyone, don't miss a one, but you end up learning through clever comments and the touch of a screen, not a chest. the pump of a motor, not a heart. a wire not a vein. the world becomes bigger than before. i was so used to seeing humans paraded doing their thing on screen i became comfortable in that space alone. after awhile i didn't like being touched by my mom on the head or face or hair. i have wild hair. i loved seeing Monty Python on screen, but i could never meet Monty Python in real life, that's not on my screen, they're talking to me in open air, this is real, real life, this is foreign, i can't handle it, get back to the small rectangle and the coconut-clapping.

Xat: don't do it. live. live. live. money isn't everything. more money, more problems. different problems, same outcome. yes it's hopeless, i'm reading off the card now, no more pamphlets, i'm starting to realize this, but you live to feel the hopelessness one more day. see, it's not the hopeless part, it's the alive-to-feel-it part.

Ind: world citizen, joining the world by leaving the world, rejecting that which cannot be rejected, a humanity latent in the cold robots we have all become, acting coldly by our cyber parts, in a cold world, needing another programmer, a foreign one to match the foreign of real life, one alien to us, to light the light, a different pilot. only through escape. but there is no escape. is there? we all return to the one reality, all return to what was there all along, what was there before the beginning, and we go "oh yeah, forgot." perhaps that is the thing, we need this painful separation to make the joining again more exhilarating, to make the "oh yeah, i forgot" more acute and shattering, the celestial backbone, the myth of individuality. coming. cumming together. white streak of light, beautiful white, the seed that is planted, the comet we all rode upon to start things. see? i am clever after all. OH WOW, OH WOW

Xat: OH WOW

Ind: did you have fun? are you glad you did this?

Xat: noyes yesno

Ind: you learned a lot today. you were helped. that is good. i am sorry about that, it means you can't take the easy way out, you know too much, they know where you live, you can't escape. can't escape. can't escape. can't escape.

Xat felt a deep urge at that moment to take it upon himself to cut through this bullshit conversation before it got too rambly and get to the heart of the matter.

Xat: i am your friend. i mean, i like you, in that way. for what it's worth, i feel ya, we communicated for the better, i understand, connection, point/counterpoint, melting together rather than screaming our heads off on tv. i know.

Ind: i wish you hadn't said that. i won't talk to you again, talk to anyone again. i am glad you were helped. i am the next hot misinterpreted number, wanting so desperately to be the right letter. whatever i do, you won't hear about it. monologue to dialogue to monologue, you will never hear from me again.

TO BE CONTINUED...