NO WAKE ZONE

Civilization is a race between education and disaster
—H. G. Wells

“Want to know the craziest conception of the future? From people on the real cutting edge of this stuff?”

“You think my geezer brain can handle it?”

“I think you’ve proven yourself.”

“Then go.”

“Our minds will meld with a massive supercomputer, with endless storage and reproducibility. And we’ll all be the same VR space. And it’ll be all about experiences. We’ll trade in experiences because they’ll be completely sharable. And the boring ones, the boring memories, will never be used, so the OS just cuts them out over time because they haven’t been accessed in years and are just a waste of space. And those best experiences will be shared and shared and become our own memories, and over time, we’ll all generally share the same memories and we’ll all essentially be one. Isn’t that wild?”

“It makes my brain hurt.”

“When I was a kid I used to lie awake trying to think of what it was that made me me, and not someone else. And were we all maybe ultimately the same, because thinking of everyone actually being different and separate made my brain hurt. I wondered if we weren’t just all crumbs split off a grand consciousness, some Humpty Dumpty God. And now I wonder, as we increasingly connect and share and overlap, maybe we’re putting that grand single consciousness back together again, all joining up and reassembling, losing ourselves but becoming all.”

“…Must you?”

0.

I never said, and am not saying here, that I’m the greatest writer in the world. But you’re going to be clamouring to know this sort of stuff, this story, and I guess I kind of want you to know it, so here goes. And there is that short story I wrote for that world peace essay contest in grade ten, which of course you all know about and have already read, that almost won the contest but ended up getting me suspended instead. Gave me a month or two of fame, in my school anyway. That was my first fifteen minutes, but you want to know how it became an eternity, and so here you are.

1.

Seeing’s how I’m all hell-bent on bending the trajectory of my life into such a different shape, you probably think I’d start by quitting smoking. At the very least switch to vaping like every other hipster and his equally annoying dog, but nope, no way no how. I love smoking and I refuse to carry that stupid box around. Like it’s the same thing. And I’m not going to have to worry about cancer for long anyway. The money, fine, that’s an issue, but that’s another boring life’s-too-short annoyance that’ll happily sort itself in time too. Just got to bridge my now to your then. And tell me, what the hell-all else am I going to do with my fifteen-minute breaks?

So I’m up on C Deck and there he is again. He-who-can’t-be-gotten-rid-of-lately, again. Him. Geezer’s leaning over the railing and tell me if he isn’t thinking of jumping. I mean, aren’t we all, ultimately? Hoping to make a splash at least, at last? For him it would be a late one. But better than no splash at all? It’s super calm and he’s come up here what for, air? The great beyond? The beyond beyond that?

I sit near the rear of the area so he can’t see me, and I light my smoke and watch him. He doesn’t move. Stiff and still as the steel rail he is. His grey and black hairs sit on his head as if disappointed with the lack of wind, unimaginative dancers ensconced in silence and wishing for music but lacking the ability to imagine their own.

Wow. Look at me go. Not that that’s really that good. Wind is not music, and my coding has to be more precise than that. But tell me, because I do want to know, if I can manufacture a perfect metaphor, will I be a writer? But whatever, the only writer I care about being is the useful kind—never mind saying something is like something, I want to make something be something. And then I’m going to make a lot of things be something. And what that something is is content and happy, and what those lots of things are is people. Psychopaths perhaps, probably, but happy’s happy, and like mom and people like her are so fond of saying, let he who’s without sin take me and wed me and bed me.

He’s still just standing there staring out. Yes, fine, it’s not odd for someone to stand at a ship’s railing and stare out at an ocean, stare into the ocean of themselves, especially when the sun’s summoning twinkling scallops that glisten in your squinting eyes as if there’s nothing but sweet twinkly niceness in the wide world. Like someone said, land is the secure ground of home, the sea is the outside, the unknown, possibility and adventure. But the way he’s standing is odd. Almost like he’s in a crowd, pushed up against a fence with nowhere to escape to. But there’s not even me as far as he knows. Again a sense that he’s going to jump, like he’s being forced over. If he does jump it’s not like I’ll have to jump into the cold water to save him, because he’ll just be lying there moaning with a broken old-man bone or seventeen on B deck like a dumb old idiot who can’t judge a trajectory. But still. These days suicide’s on the rise. I know this because it’s another thing I’ve looked up. Why would he be one of the few that isn’t at least tossing it over now and then?

“Want to know the craziest conception of the future? From people on the real cutting edge of this stuff?”

“You think my geezer brain can handle it?”

“I think you’ve proven yourself.”

“Then go.”

“Our minds will meld with a massive supercomputer, with endless storage and reproducibility. And we’ll