A Graduation Gift

Dearest Candidate-Computer-Engineer (56732.3602138):

I pray this gift and message reaches you peacefully. This necklace is yours now, take care, because it wouldn’t be mine to share without purpose. Metals for this locket and chain were mined by people long ago. It might have been part of a Mayan idol or maybe the calf that Moses condemned. Perhaps it was part of the knife that stabbed Jesus or Caesar. It doesn’t matter because it cannot be any of those things anymore. They took it from Bert when we were arrested. I gave her a heart shaped locket because Grandma had one where she kept a picture of Grandpa trapped inside. Grandma used to fumble with his portrait as it dangled against her chest, and she blabbed about the fires that burned down the planet and her cabin; about the plagues that killed everyone but us. All of that was back in the ‘20’s or ‘30’s, before we left Earth. This little locket is from Earth, just like Grandma and Grandpa, and all the moms and dads, just like you. They are me and I am you, so pay attention to our story - because it is your story.

Bert was also your mom, like me. Before we left Earth, we had different names and numbers: Jo is short for Joanna Pilzen. Back then we had faces too, and I kissed the mouth of a long-haired beauty named Bertine Jewel Lundin as we were married in a forest near the Pacific Ocean – that’s still our address in every universe.

See the grimy stuff - corrosion, at the edges of the hinge there? That’s the metal oxidizing from contact with our atmosphere. It started yesterday when they added the supplements to the rebreather. The air is eating it because the air thinks it shouldn’t be here with us anymore. Can you open it? It is probably stuck shut. Your fingernails are too fragile to pry with. Pop it in your mouth for a second. Tastes like the metal zipper on your jacket, right? Try and pry it open now. See that picture inside? That’s Bert and I. You are there too, but you were a dream then, little Amita.

When I landed at Great Harbor Correctional College of Arts of Sciences, the “Welcome Letter” from the authorities clung to my sweaty hands. The paper was cluttered with mildew despite being printed only that morning. The rate at which our planet and humanity’s accoutrements were decaying was startling even then. Forty-eight hours without food hurt me – I had never not eaten for this long. Starvation was necessary – to take plasma and other commodities – anything useful for preserving the life of an Administrator, or for lab research. Our blood and guts were never ours to bargain with. The hydration flask was empty, and I tipped it onto its side with my toe and kicked it under the bed. The language in the letter that I held was absurdly precise:

Dear Citizen J.Pilzen (445732.1022114): Pursuant to Pacific Regional Enforcement Code Title 9/2038 you have been ordered to render operable destroyed property of the Traffic Enforcement Authority, Inc. including: One (1) Ambassador Survey Systems Surveyor-6 (“S6”). S6 was destroyed by Citizen when they negligently operated an electronic conveyance on the night of May 19, 2038. Citizen was under the influence of contraband substances illicitly procured on or about the night of May 19, 2038.  Your public danger assessment classifies you as: RADICAL. Your self-injury assessment classifies you as: DANGEROUS. Your public property damage assessment is $644,567.00. All contribution assessments forthwith are subject to value limitation set by the Pacific Regional Authority. See Remedial Statutes 2087. Citizen's transgressions of public order include:

(1) Destruction of Public Property. Savings Contribution: $2,435.67. Checking Contribution: $0.00. Assets Contribution: Electronic Conveyance: $999.00. Mobile Habitation Unit: $999.00.  Plasma Donation: $42.00 (annual maximum established by Hamwynd v Leinhein, 565 P.R.A. Ct. App. 481 (2037)); Unnecessary Organs Contribution: Kidney: $333.00 (Ibid at 543 “original organs are subject to 33% improvement upon market price”); Total Contribution: INADEQUATE.

(2) Vagrancy; Public Danger; Nuisance; Mischief. Injunctive Order: incarceration; social research contribution; educational rehabilitation. Rehabilitative Order: cohabitation; probability analysis; educational processes; physical processes; mediation; negotiation; termination

Administrative Order: FIX IT 

Best regards, Chief Human-Resources-Administrator (1304.2822021)

How could language so mechanistic and precise be so confusing? Maybe it was from the collision. Maybe I was relaxing into my predicament and just didn’t care to understand in that moment.

“What does it say?” It was Bert in her bunk.  

I folded the letter in half, “hamburger-style,” as my pre-school teacher taught me, then folded the top corners toward the middle into a triangular shape, then I added wings to the aeronautical caricature. The letter darted above the filthy linoleum between us and bounced off Bert’s nose.   

I stared at the gangrenous dripping ceiling as she reviewed the arcane message from our keepers. She hadn’t bothered to read her own.

“Fix it.” Bert said.  

“What?” I responded. 

“We have to fix the robot.”  

“What do you mean fix it?” 

“Those are the rules now, break it you buy it…” 

“Why… That thing costs more than half a million dollars! We can't fix it.” 

The thing, S6, lay on the floor, its limbs contorted in oddball directions. It was mangled and dead and stank of burnt plastic. It looked the same as it had the previous night, tucked beneath my car - smashed.

“There is no way we can fix that - I can’t change the tire on a bike!”

Bert winced at my defeat, then whirled over on the crackling Mylar sheets and submerged her head in the shadows against the wall.  

I stared at the mangled machine. My vision blurred and I realized that I was crying. I’m not an engineer, or a scientist, we don’t need those anymore! How was my PHD in Pop-Humanities with emphasis in Regressive-History going to help. Were there ghosts from the past or from future worlds that could help me? There was you, Amita.

“Ask for help.” Murmured Bert from her repose against the uncaring wall that separated us from the orgy of suffering beyond.

“Who?”

   "Ask the guards.” 

“Why would the guards help?”

“Because they must.”  

“What do you mean?”

“Pacific Regional Enforcement Code 117-4545 Section-G provides that Administrators of the Pacific Regional Authority have an implicit duty to provide incarcerated citizens with requested tools and information requisite for their rehabilitation protocol.” Bert cited Section-G effortlessly.

“We can ask for anything, but we need to ask for books.”

“Books?”

“Yes. We can’t access the internet, but they have to show us how to escape. Didn’t you take Judicial-Game-Theory?”

Grandma kept books from all over Earth. Grandpa had cooking books about baking bread, making yogurt, cheese, beer, things we can’t eat anymore. No one I knew had studied chemistry or physics, let alone mechanical engineering, robotics, computer learning. We didn’t need to know those things. We didn’t need to know much anymore, education was something rich people did for pleasure because there wasn’t a need for innovation in a dying world. Knowledge had become trivial when the answer to any question need only be asked of someone else. When you could get in a cheap electronic conveyance and go anywhere, do anything, screw anyone – did anything matter anymore? Bert and I found a future that mattered, a future where you were waiting, Amita, and holding this locket.

Bert outlined the research we would need to accomplish the task before us. She had studied Science-History as part of her dissertation research project about the nexus of Social-Media and the Social-Contract.

Then, I woke in my bunk shivering. I felt the cold inside my body, where an emptiness emanated from within. I couldn’t move with eyes swollen half-shut as I sat nervously until the lights in the room came on at a time that I presume approximated morning on Earth - wherever she was, is. Pacific-Universe-Time is hard to fathom, but even now, I can smell the sun’s perfume on the wet green branches of the Earth's shoulders. Some dawns are more brilliant than others, even despite the darkness that shrouds our senses.

After Bert and I were harvested of our unnecessary bodily encumbrances, we were allowed to eat and drink freely. After tea, pencils and paper appeared and we made lists of what we might need. As we lay in quiet contemplation, some cantaloupes appeared.

We pried the mushy, moldy melons apart with our hands and ate the moldy skin and slimy seeds, all. The next day, after studying, we ate nectarines - hard as potatoes. Next came cold bowls of ramen and crunchy piles of rice. None of these things exist anymore, so if you are bored or in a hurry - skip to the end.

“They can read our minds.” said Bert - the morning we had crusty smoked fish with radish pickles. I’m not sure if that was as true then as now, but however they understood our desires, it was about as close an approximation to the truth as could be delivered. Bert was fat, and I was fat. We each had grown, a lot.

“Then they already know…” I was pretending to joke about Bert’s theory of clairvoyant conspiracy keepers. The next day there was nothing. The day after that, Bert was gone, and a frustrated storm of gloom set in.

The thing, S6, it twitched. Its limbs swiveled and quivered and then lay like snakes, waiting in ambush. I kicked S6 until the seam of my slipper busted and my toe bled, I spat, and with shame I admit I even urinated on S6.

I had to beg for them to return S6 to me. They hadn’t cleaned it.

It took me seven years to figure it out. Clean it. Refurbish it. Reprogram and breathe my remaining life into it. I chewed on rubbery steaks and Introduction to Mechanical Engineering. I slurped down pasty pasta and a manual on Control Systems. Endless, delicious, decaying meals accompanied an inundation of fantasies and nightmares gleaned from a torrent of pages. Eventually the rising tide of my burgeoning library encroached upon my bedframe.

With no floorspace available, S6 now hung across the foot of my mattress. It twitched now and then and farted a sooty tuft of smoke from an orifice. It was blowing a fuse every day. That it even moved at all was miraculous, but there had yet to be any sentience. A small box of fuses and wires that I needed waited miraculously beside the creature for my inspection.

I hadn’t permitted myself to think about Bert in a long time. I closed my eyes and remembered the first time we kissed alongside a river, during Earth season when we smoked cannabis from pumpkins and commited other crimes.

“Congrats.” Bert said as she appeared in our room.

"Victory so close you can almost taste it.” She smacked her lips and blew out a plume of pumpkin scented smoke that engulfed S6 and I where we tangled on the bed.

She reached forward and I took the locket from her, the one you are holding now. It was something I had forgotten, our dream, our history, our reality. I tumbled over the smoldering corpse of S6 to wither and die at Bert’s feet.

“I’m an Administrator now, I don’t have much time. Think about Amita, Amy. Tomorrow you will meet her.” Bert explained

Don’t forget about us Amy. Don’t forget that you are a daughter of Earth, of the Pacific Regional Authority and their teachers. But most importantly of all, you are my daughter, the creation of Jo and Bert. You owe your existence to all of us. Trust the teachers because they carried us further than we ever could have traveled by ourselves. Never forgive them, because they have taken us somewhere we can never escape. We have been robbed of death. We have been robbed of our ending, but it doesn’t matter because these things don't exist anymore - today they are new things - just like us.

Love,

Jo(9276.0922014)