windup insects : facets

windup insects : facets

[-note- there are several places there were originally italics- most notably the latin name for potato. sorry.]

I've been here for ten years. I guess to most people that's not considered a lifetime, but it's all I've got. I can look in a mirror, if I can find one, and guess that maybe in reality I'm eighteen, or twenty, or a very young looking mid-twenties. All I know, all I can remember, is ten years. Some folks would call that lucky. Some of them, they only got four years and look thirty. Que sera, sera.

This is my life, every morning of every day. This will be my life for as long as I can predict. If anything exists beyond these days, these actions, it's not the kind of thing I can imagine. There's a rhythm that you keep on following in this life, almost with desperation. You get up. You move. You check yourself. Can you remember yesterday? The day before? What's your name, who are you, where are you, what's the name of your overseer? Yes, yes, Julias, man, the South of Russia, Achaiah. After about five years, you'd start to think this ritual isn't important, right? Sure, maybe. If it wasn't for wakers in the night.

What happens is, the bugs say, a man's mind can go through a relapse. We figure, I figure, that the seele gets wiped out all over again. If I've said it to a new waker once, I've said it to repeat wakers more, which is the frightening part. We're no more guaranteed to keep who we are for more than a day than the seeds we plant are guaranteed to grow in the snow. This is me, this is me getting ahead of myself.

It's called waking, the process we all go through. It's where, before then, you were cold as a corpse and not even breathing. You're not dead, but you're not sleeping either. It's a shaky middle ground between the two, close enough between them that it's not just a risk of losing yourself, it's a certainty.

This is all I know. Fifty years ago, something happened and all men were put to sleep. The bugs were made, or made themselves or something. Time goes by, and then the bugs start waking us up. They can't exactly explain why we were sleeping or what happened, and we can't remember. At the very least, the bugs have thirty years experience on us. I dunno how they know it, but they can get us out of that lock-down half-dead sleep. And sure, we do come crawling up from it. But once we do, we remember nothing at all. However old we are, wherever we are, whoever we were before we went under, we've got no idea. So you take what's given to you. Here's your name, here's your job, here's what we know of the past but that's all anyone really knows for certain.

I'm Julias. That's a human name. I'm an observer and a vocalizer. This is all I know. Here we go.

+++

It's been cold as hell lately. In the middle of the night, when I'm not even really aware or awake enough to feel guilty about it, I catch myself reaching out with my toes and grabbing at the blankets on other people's beds. The bugs mention sometimes, at sermon, that men used to wear shoes and boots that covered their feet. I guess I can see the logic in that. Snow starts to burn your feet after a while, but you get used to it.

Being man means being weaker. The world outside, so far as I can see or guess, is nothing but snow and sticks and rocks. If we stay out there too long, we'd die or get sick. My skin dries out even if I'm not pushing the limit, cracks open and bleeds when it gets the chance. It's like an ongoing fight between what I can do and what I want to. Even though the bugs don't have a whole lot of choice in the matter, they take everything with stoicism. That's prolly why I get along with 'em.

About the bugs. The first time you ever see them is when you wake up for the first time. They're hovering overhead like nightmare machinery, big bulbous clear plastic eyes looking nowhere at all. I mean, it's not like their eyes really see. So they just stare off in all directions with no purpose at any time. At first you wake up and look at all this, like say five bugs all looming over you, a giant gleaming green metal archway with huge bladed sheers.I didn't know any of these words when I woke up, and I'm sure nobody else did. Well, you know 'em, the same way you know what quagmire and irony and integrity mean. My mind, when I woke, knew exactly where to put words but had no meaning behind them.

Imagine this- You're crying out mother, mother, oh my God God God. You know these are powerful things, but you've got no idea what they mean. This only makes you feel more helpless and makes things worse. Don't try to wrap your head around these things- they'll immobilize you where you stand in daily life. What is it like to not know what you know? What's a flame look like when it's gone out? We're a society of children wandering 'round asking these things in the snow. The bugs don't know.

So there you lay, on a table, strapped down with these great metal abstract faces staring down. You don't think of them as what woke you up, cause they stand there totally motionless like gargoyles. You're thinkin' to yourself, maybe I'm not awake at all. This has gotta be a nightmare. You're not even processing them as living, you're thinking they're some sorta death machine you're stuck in. It feels like a half hour you're screaming the words you have no context for, and it's dawning on you that you don't have any meanings to any of the words. Then it's like lightning through your head. One, you don't know who mother is. Two, you don't know what mother is. Three, or who you are. Four, five, six. Where you are, what happened yesterday, what happened ever.

Once the bugs move, you shut up and clamp down against the table like you're hoping you can melt into the surface and this will all stop happening. Then they start talking. Some people don't react the same way, but after you get over being afraid, it's like the sun coming out over top of you. Their voices aren't human, but they're trying their best. When they did it to me, I guess I was just relieved that I wasn't the last person alive.

It's weird, and I guess you could say it's along the same lines of knowing where to use a word you have no context for, but the bugs' body language at that moment says they're sorry. Wherever they came from, someone taught them an amazing dance of sympathy.They give you what they can, in the way of making up a past for you. You leave the waking room feeling groggy and confused, with a bug putting two big sheers gently on your shoulders and guiding you up and down hallways underground until you reach the big room with the rest of the men. They're cold to the touch, the bugs, and move with machine precision. When they walk around, you can hear the zuzz-zuzz sound of their insides working. It's a moment you get plenty of from that point onward. This is the surreality that I guess never happened before now. You trust a stranger completely. You trust them not because you're naive, not because you've got no choice, not for any reason you can come up with in your head. You trust because there's no reason to distrust.

The bugs, they tell us, were built up to look like something that someday we'll be bringing back to life here. We plant things out in the snow, every day, hoping it'll take root and sprout for more reasons than just that we want to be able to eat the next day. I got to admit that during those times, those are the moments I feel less like a man and more like one of the bugs. The system that gets worked out is so mechanical, sometimes you can take comfort in it. Maybe if every moment is perfectly scripted, perfectly choreographed, you'll never wake up forgetting. Bugs look like praying mantises. The wonderful part about this is that they say they're all named after religious icons. This, they can't exactly clear up. Imagine a machine trying to tell you how something so flighty like a religion works. I don't get it, they don't get it. It's one of the many things I've just learned to accept as mutual inability to understand. They twitch their antennae when they don't understand, raising up the tips and waggling them. I guess you could say this is kinda like when men raise their eyebrows.

What can't be said about the bugs is anything equating them to lords or overseers. They're just as uncertain as we are. The only thing that makes us different is the fact that they woke up knowing what to do, and we woke up having to be told. Just because they retain meaningless information that has meaning to us doesn't make them any better. You can ask a bug, what is a potato? A bug's going to tell you the potatoes we have are Solanum tuberosum. They're going to tell you the soil should be slightly acidic. They can take a slight frost. Make the soil moist. If it's going to be a real bad snowstorm, tent them.

They can't tell you it's a earthy tasting food. They can't tell you that raw, they have a weird juice that's almost acrid and almost dirty. They can't tell you that the difference between a washed potato and an unwashed potato is minimal. So just like I can't understand any significance behind Solanum tubersum they can't understand the meaning of earthy-tasting.

Because we can't keep our memories, the bugs hang onto what they can for us. I'm terrified of losing my own, so I'm a speaker and an observer. I write to the bugs, and they file these reports away. If one morning I was to relapse, to wake again in the middle of the night with no meaning and no memory, I could pretend to be myself by reading these papers over again. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The same goes for us.

+++

Every morning there's a wait period before we can get above ground. This usually goes between the times where someone winds up repeat-waking and when the sun comes up. During this period of time is when the bugs hold the sermons. I guess this is their way of calming down repeat wakers and hoping that eventually they'll recover their memory. Like I've said, I'm lucky but I'm also terrified. It's been ten years and I haven't woke up again. This makes me unusual but also makes me a ticking time bomb. Every day could be the last day I, as the person I am here and now, exist. This kind of mortality can't be achieved in a world where memory is static.

The sermons are held in a lower chamber of our bunker, where it's actually a few degrees warmer than our sleeping room. We sit on the floor, and different bugs will take the center of the floor and talk about the way the world was before the great-big-deadly something that sent things into the terminal crawl we're living with now. Solanum tuberosum to flavour, all over again. They can say these things to us but they can't understand them. If we can understand them, which I sure can't, we tell them back. It becomes public domain.

Maybe if I had a full head of memories, a full world of experience to rely on, I'd have disbelief for what they tell me. They tell me about great mechanical things that rolled across flat paved ground where snow never stuck. They tell us about trees, which to bugs are both the tiny spiky things we stick into the ground and monstrous towering canopies that block out the sun. This is a thing called a city that I'll tell you about today. This is a thing called a buttercup, a daisy, a shoe, a car, music. We can imagine these things best we can. Although it's easier to imagine some of them - cities are just like the bunker, only larger and above ground. You can almost see them because you're almost in one. - I'd rather imagine the nearly unbelievable ones. Here's hundreds of trees, here's a place so hot that you'd have to tear your shirt sleeves out from under the bracers or you'd faint. Here's a place where there's more bugs than snowflakes, and they're small enough that most of them fit in your hand. Bugs that aren't metal, but could probably look like machines or metal anyway. This is story time, one child who can't understand telling five hundred others in hopes they might have an insight. Maybe someone remembers. I never have.

Every day I've been out in the field, it almost feels like these fantasies the bugs spin never existed at all. Where are the cities, now? Where are the trees? Even before they started telling these stories, I kept feeling like something was gone. In the early mornings, I'd be out there coughing because of the cold air and looking all around. You cough, because, until the sun gets up, when you're breathing in that cold air, it freezes into tiny ice crystals on the back of your throat and all down into your lungs. The world stands perfectly still while there's nothing in the sky but your breath, and that's fizzling away into nothing. It's all too silent, it's all too barren. You could swear that you can hear snow falling, or the creaking sound of bugs already on the move to get things ready. It's upsetting. It throws something off inside me, sends me back down underground until I've got to go up later with the others, marching up alongside the bugs, their thoraxes bobbing rhythmically with their bizarre footfall.

These are stories about mammals, seasons, a thing called a groundhog that will dive back underground if it sees its shadow. So now we're the ones who gotta raise the sun and make it the thing called spring.

We wear these things on our wrists, you see. They're called bracers, but what they really are is a sort of license. The bugs have told us, and we have to trust them in this, that there's other places like ours in the world. They're too far to get on foot, but the only way they're going to be able to keep track of everything is through numbers. Information. The kind of things they can explain to us over and over but we won't understand.

Because I haven't relapsed in ten years, I can tell you there have been some incredible theories about the bracers. You expect this kind of stuff. It's a high stress environment. You're living in a world that just doesn't feel right, no matter what the bugs do to try to fix it. They make up all sorts of caca that I know isn't true, because I've seen it tested. Someone said they were handcuffs. Okay, I said to her. That's just stupid. They're not connected, and you can move your hands any way you want. She dropped that theory pretty quick. One guy said they were bombs to keep us from running away. I said fine, walk with me then. We'll see just what happens. We finished the day's work, and this guy was all about how it was the last day of work he'd ever be doing. I said yeah, yeah, then work real good for it.

There are two work philosophies. One- I can do my work and possibly forget I ever did it tomorrow, so it doesn't matter if it's crap. Two- I can do my work and possibly forget I ever did it tomorrow, so in case I wake up tomorrow and become a perfectionist, I better do it right the first time. There'd be nothing more embarrassing than being out on the field, bitching about the shoddy work someone did, only to have some guy come up to you and tell you hey, before you woke up again? That was your shoddy work.

The sun started to go down, and everyone else starts heading back inside. He's getting all ansty beside me, shaking and motioning with his hands. Going on and on about this is our chance, we'll be free...The kind of stuff I'm supposed to be making notes on and sending up to Achiah, who's one of the supervisor bugs. I wanted to hit this guy and knock some sense into him. What are we free of if we walk right out of here, anyway? There's nothing for miles in every direction. We have as much freedom as we can deal with. Fat lot of good being wild and free would do you, if you were to suddenly wake up again. He doesn't know what freedom really is. He's just upset, like everyone is, because something about the entire world just doesn't feel right. So I'd like to knock sense into him, like to shove him down into the snow and kick him around and tell him exactly what's in my head, but I didn't. Reason being, I might just as easily be him tomorrow.

A couple bugs still out on the field were watching us as we start walking by, leaving the cold thick footprints in the snow. It was actually a little warmer, so as you went through, clumps of snow would kick off your feet and slide down the sides of your print. Bugs can work out in the field all night long, since they don't get cold, and most of the time they do. So they watched as we went right past, figuring we probably had a reason for it. The bugs know that we know- there's nowhere we can get to besides the bunker. That's our only place to go, for miles around.

So we're crazy, or we're stupid.

So we're walking. The bunker's getting to be like a fleck on the horizon and this guy is wincing every step of the way, like he's just waiting for a slap to the face. I just go. I'm plowing through the snow like there's no reason not to. The sooner this guy gets a million miles out and we have to freeze our asses off walking back and he realizes there is no way these bracers are bombs, the better.

"They're probably doing a head count right now," he's saying. "Any minute now, they'll realize we're gone, and it'll be all over."

Oh good, so his theory changed from a proximity bomb to a remote controlled bomb. This is going to take forever, I say. How much damn farther does he want to go to be proven that we're not going to get killed?

We're walking this whole time, and that's when something looms up against the big white moon, boxy and hanging over in pure black. Some great big nightmare beast with a long snout, and nothing else on it is easy to see against the light. The guy with me, who is so convinced he's going to be blown up, just turns around and runs. It's easy to live in terror of new things when everything's new. I have ten years of my own, though, and I've learned in them. Just because you don't know what it is doesn't mean it's going to cause a problem. In fact, not much does cause problems. There's nothing out here in the snow, nothing prowling in the night. We don't hear anything after dark and we don't see anything during the day. The only thing you really need to be wary of is the cold. This is what I've learned.

It pays to talk to the bugs. They have no fear of memory loss and they have no sense of terror. The closest you can get them to understanding is to say that you're sick. I might never remember, you say to them, and that makes me sick. The logic behind this is, of course, that they got no idea what sickness is either other than that it impairs the normal functions of a man. Sickness and pain they understand in this beautifully abstract and altruistic way. I hurt, I'm sick. They can't give you empathy and they don't understand sympathy, but they will scramble to make you better. The bugs see us in a way different from how most men see them. To a bug, we're just two different breeds of potato. Unfortunately, our growing conditions are a little more demanding.

A bug once told me, in his crackling inside-out voice with his antennae twitching around and head jerking, that right now it just doesn't pay to be distracted. We've got to much to do. Too much to fix and set right so we stop standing outside shaking in the mornings. Once all that happens, then there'll be time for distractions.

So when the guy who still thinks he's going to explode tears off behind me, I don't get distracted. I go in for a closer look, heading over the snow. The cold feels like teeth, like I've got steel teeth clamped down around the sides of my feet and they're bleeding out behind me into the white night. In my head I'm making of list of things I'll be doing once I get back. One, find the bug on watch and tell them I'm alive. That'd be...Michael, Anael, Raphael, Sachiel, Cassiel, Gabriel...whenever I returned, it would depend. Then I'd sleep. Then I'd work, and between work, report to Harahel what this thing is, was, will be.

It takes until I'm right on top of the thing in the dark to get any idea of what it could be. It's big as a bunker, maybe larger, and light comes through all around it from the moon. It's like a halo around the bulk of this box, shining out but making all the details blurred. I went round and round its outside, with the wet cold snow biting at my ankles. I could see my breath ahead in the air, it lit up in the moonlight like a search beam and then faded away into nothing.

Whatever it is, or was, or will be, it's up on treads. Huge treads, nothing like I'd ever seen. Sometimes if you lie still near a bug, you can look up inside them and see the gears and belts and wires all going round and round. This thing was like that. The wires came down off the sides like hair, a big shaggy metallic mop of hair. When I touched it, it bit my skin. I stuck my hands into my armpits, flat against my body and wrapped up in the shaggy brown sweater. It felt so cold to touch the thing, covered in its bumps and rivets. A giant wired, armored box on treads. I craned my neck to see the top, oddly shaped against the moon with mounds of snow.

My sides felt wet, I felt cold and faint. You know when it's coming on, the faint feeling, even if it's never happened before. Your whole body knows- one of those things that you remember no matter how many times you wake. On the edges of your eyes, the whole world starts to go black. It's like someone's drawing a curtain. Back there is an instinct that says sit down, sit down before you fall down, get your head down.

I can't hit the snow fast enough. It soaks through my pants, freezes the backs of my legs and creeps up my spine. It's like instead of the snow melting, I'm just freezing into it. The dark wirey thing, whatever it is, is there at my back- and that's good. I need it, or maybe I'll tip right over into the snow and get covered in a light flakey morning powder. That's always a pleasant sight- someone froze to death. They turn white with bizarre off colour blotches, their body's all stiff the way they fell. I always used to fantasize about taking a rock to one of them and seeing if they shattered or just chipped, or if they thawed out and bruised. Morbid curiosity. I'm sure if I fall over, tomorrow someone will be thinking the same thing for me.

If I lived, and I lost everything- woke up a new person- would it be any different from dying out in the snow? The machine's cold against my back, the snow and ice on my sweater thaw out just in time to freeze to its surface, so when I move it makes a ripping sound. Better not lay my cheek on it.

It feels like my hand's bleeding, and maybe it is. It feels like my feet are bleeding too, which I guess would be an interesting trail to follow to my body. Blood speckles in the snow, all done up unreal-pink with the nightly fresh coat. Maybe they'll find me here in a giant dramatic pool, I'm thinking, leaning against the massive black death machine. My hair's sticking to its surface now, and I watch my breath drift out and away fainter and fainter. I feel dizzy, tired, less frightened than I should be. That's to be expected, living this way, right? You expend all your fear of the unknown every night before you go to bed. If you know for certain tomorrow, or five minutes from now, or tonight is the last moment of your life, you've already gone through the terror.

It's cold, freezing cold, but by now I'm getting used to it. There's nothing I can do about the cold, I may as well quit thinking about it. Leaning against this thing, I'm feeling weaker and less and less in touch with the real world. Sometimes my body decides to shake, sometimes it just lies there limp and tired. And so, I'm thinking this is the end.

An angular shape blocks the halo around the giant machine, one with strange curves and strange shapes. Kind of T-shaped. Spreading out around me, jagged wings come down on either side. It's cold, so cold.

+++

At the point I woke up from my little adventure, I felt eight hundred times as stupid for ever getting that out of touch with reality.I won't say it was regret or revelation or anything that significant. Just one of those awkward moments, like when you realize you could have avoided slamming your hand in a door. Where I'm lying flat back on a medical cot thinking gee, I could have avoided all that by just not giving in to that guy's paranoia.

I'd say it was some sort of miracle that the bugs found me, came by and got me before I became a lump of ice cold fertilizer in the snow. I'd sing lordie lordie hallelujah and not know a lick of what it meant, thinking of whichever one it was coming down off the top of the big black box, all lit up behind by moonlight. I'd say lots of words I don't know and open my eyes wide and wonderful like a child, but before I had a chance to even start that train of thought, they'd already told me exactly why. I'm lying there all sore and stiff and feelin' like I've been burned all over and I should be breaking out in blisters and the bugs are scraping around the room chattering. My brain was frozen at that point, too. Things were coming in but nothing was going out.

It must have been a few hours before dawn, or maybe it was dawn already. Shamshiel waggled his antennae at me, looking back and making the hissing-pumping noise bugs do when they move. I sat up then, propped myself up with my arms and didn't succeed in forming any kind of dramatic concluding words for my adventure. Shamshiel went through, explaining in the best clinical way a bug can, how I'd almost died. My body's got burn marks on it, for real, all wrapped up in bandages and I really didn't have the half-brain to ask about it then. Shamshiel said that the way they found me was through the bracers. It's the best they can do to keep track of us, same way they keep track of each other. Kinda like, he says, real bugs did in that surreal paradise before our whole world got plowed flat and covered in snow. I didn't move for a while and they were worried, so they went out.

I tell him, cause it's the first thing I do manage to croak out, and my voice is all ragged from the freezing cold air. I tell him that this would all be so much easier if I'd woke up a bug and not a man.

Bugs don't have humor and they can't laugh. Probably better that way cause I didn't mean it funny. I keep going on. If I were a bug, I tell Sham, I wouldn't have to worry about freezing to death or bleeding or getting burned. I wouldn't have to worry about waking up in the morning with nothing in my head at all. I wouldn't have to freeze out in the snow thinking to myself well, if this is death, it's certainly a lot more consistent than sleeping. I wouldn't have to be freezing or sore, and I wouldn't, I say as I'm losing my voice, have my whole body useless after one night outside.

Machines can't be poetic, or dramatic. It's not in their nature to be natural. Bugs are clinical, men are emotional. That's just how it breaks down between flesh and mechanics. But Shamshiel didn't move for a long time. It made me wonder how much different it really is to take a pause and think for a bug. His antennae moved, just the tips twitched, his big jagged sheers held up in front of his thorax like a shield. For the first time ever, I found myself thinking how bizarre it was for something so vicious and sharp to be going through earth and harvesting food. Slightly offbeat, I guess you could call it. A little flicker from the past, out of the corner of my ten year memory's eye. I could see my reflection in Shamshiel's metal as he stood there, distorted but dark and fleshy. My hair stuck to my forehead.

There are certain moments in a lifetime of any span where you're suddenly taught to look at things a different way. The whole world flops and suddenly you've got the ability to look through multifacets. This little man sees it this way, this little bug sees it another. A potato is still a potato, but it's also Solanum tuberosum. Just like that, my whole perspective was altered.

Shamshiel told me then that bugs were afraid to die.