Coding Van Gogh

A paintbrush, still dipped in Prussian blue, dissolved into a stream of code. Tara peeked at the 0s and 1s climbing up her wired arms, dimly illuminating the very human veins underneath. Her eyes shut.

Starry Night. Violently-controlled waves, tamed only by the canvas, cupped in its palms, gold, amber, and rusted orange wheels, stuck to their eternal task— spinning. Geometry dictated the establishment in their penumbra, dark and shrouded, the people and the village as a whole gladly groveling in the shadows of the celestial bodies. Except, the gnarled tree, a trojan horse, broke the rules, swallowed the village’s minaret in its splendor, and stretched its talons to claim the blue ripples’ prizes.

Pure genius. The algorithms behind the different hues’ compatibility, the various brushstrokes’ calculated widths, the elements’ proportions. What kind of genius was capable of this?

Tara’s fingers shuddered where she held the powerful utensil. Stroke for stroke. Color for color. Not even a “pico-shade” out of place. Those same waves spilled out of her brush, and the haughty stars, and the humble town, and the cypress… the ultimate symbolism of a lucid mind eclipsing what was hindered by rigidity.

Her brain throbbed, the billions of neurons colliding a bit more rapidly. What if, she fancied, what if I spread out the crown of leaves a bit farther? What if I let the tree’s darkness block out a bit of the radiance?

Tara’s pulse ticked 1/4th a beat faster before the pseudocode progressed onto the next line.

ERROR: ‘art-postimpressionism-vangogh1’ was undeclared in the scope. NUL

“Fire, fire!” A bot squeaked. Simultaneously, a sharp instrument cut through Tara’s left arm, carving open skin around her triceps brachii. Ripping out the wires sent her into electrical shock.

***

Tara was encased in a capsule. Submerged in a gooey liquid like the viscid mucus lining of intestines. She felt a foreign numbness over every nerve and every tissue of her left body. She flexed her right hand. The sticky substance reciprocated. She tried with her left. Nothing happened.

Whir. The top unlocked. Next, the glassy shell of the container parted from the middle in a clean-cut fissure.

Finally, the fluid blocking her vision subsided. Tara stepped forward. And tripped.

A steady pair of hands caught her before she planted into the ground. “Careful, you are still in regeneration.” Curious. This man was supposedly supporting her upright, yet she was not aware of being touched by human skin or any other devices.

“Regeneration?” The liquid gradually evaporated once in reaction to oxygen. Tara was in a laboratory.

Another voice. “Tara?”

“Rhett!” She dove into the arms of her best friend and squeezed him hard for ten solid seconds before she noticed it.

The monstrosity clapped over his shoulder, extending out from no other being but herself. It was a hand alright. See-through to the artificial skeleton within. The spherical joint of the elbow rotated. As for the outermost layer of the whole contraption, when in reflection of the light, produced a glint of lightweight magnesium, copper, and titanium.

“The inside is propped up with carbon fiber, and a transparent thermoplastic layer coats that prosthetic arm.” Rhett finished her thoughts for her.

“Oh, gosh.” She groaned. She was a cyborg. Those were only meant to exist in really cliche science fictions.

Rhett came around and inspected his awfully skilled creation, now an inseparable segment of her. “I made it. For you.”

Tara blurted. “Rhett, you shouldn’t have.” His actions would seem romantic to any other, except Rhett was a friend, a brother, someone who already went to death for her twice. Still, all those illegal metals have got to cost some crypto.

“Wh-what happened?” She tried to remember.

He shrugged, as in I don’t know either. “They called me out of work last month as your next of kin. Tara, I saw you through the zipper of a body bag. Your left torso, more like a large purple burl, hissed out malware currents.”

“What kind of trouble did you get yourself into?”

Tara was as clueless as him. She leaned back and laid on the not-cold-enough floor. She ought to submerge her head in a tub of icy water and see if her memory might be jugged. She slapped her forehead, shrinking convulsively at the touch of the smooth material. Slowly, she raised her right hand, scrutinizing the intermeshed lines crisscrossing over her beige skin, the luster of keratin in her nails, and those pricks of midphalangeal hair.

“Hey, Tara.” Rhett clasped her hand with his. The calluses, proof of his occupation as a mechanic, scraped her skin. So very humanlike. “We will figure this out, okay? One step at a time. For now, you go back to work and go fill all those documents to invalidate your death certificate.”

“Right.” She chuckled. She almost forgot that.

The next day, she was laid off.

“Look, Tara, obviously I am ecstatic and overwhelmed that y-you came back from the grave, but you were gone for a month, and we already hired a replacement. The newbie is terribly sweet.” Dr. Robin, director of the World Art Recovery Department, was renowned as the most understanding employer.

Personally, Tara also held him in great esteem. His many published works on respecting and preserving artistic heritage over data mining were what inspired her to pursue this line of work.

In a society where code and data transacted as currency, only those who lacked the intuition of handling computers, those who are denied employment anywhere else, were pushed to this last resort. Tara was an anomaly. Computers were her expertise. She conversed in object-oriented programming (OOP) like a poet who manipulated words to her liking. After grad school, Pete Szain, inventor of Elysium (the coding language that enabled algorithms to generate material creations), personally offered her a spot on his research development team, which she tactfully turned down. It was rather comical that she ended up using Elysium every day to recreate the lost paintings of antiquity, but Tara hadn’t been able to quit the moment she started.

“Well, can’t you fire her then… I mean, this is a special case, right?” Tara lost confidence even as she was speaking.

Dr. Robin sighed. “Dear…”

“You know what? Forget it.” Tara let out a deeper exhale. Screw it. It wasn’t like she was being sent out to beg in the streets. “That was unfair of me. I apologize.”

“No, not at all. You had every right.” The muscles on his face slackened, sensing that he just avoided an extremely unpleasant conversation.

Tara couldn’t bear to leave one thing behind though. “Can I come and watch the others start on the post-impressionism works? I mean, I guess they should be well into it the past month, but I want to see it one last time, please? One replication.” Their group celebrated their big finale on the prolific impressionists then the expressionists shortly before her incident occurred.

“That would be against protocols, my dear.”

“Pro-” Tara stuttered. “I think you might be mistaken, sir.” She had memorized all fifty-seven rules in the manual after all.

“Dear.” He pursed his lips, struggling. “It is simply not possible. I am sorry. I know your… commitment to the cause, but I must consider the others’ safety as well. Please forgive me.”

“I-”

After centuries of neglect, Elysium contained the last coded copies of all the prehistoric classics. No one was going to dig them out until Dr. Robin initiated the program to reproduce physical versions for public education.

She was forever banished from dealing with those glorious paintings, the only method to lay eyes on them. Somehow, this news hit harder than the one where she is now a semi-robot.

Something didn’t click. He lied or changed the rules for…what? Her request wasn’t outrageous or threat-inducing.

She glanced around his office. The walls had been sloppily repainted recently. The antique furniture Dr. Robin collected, each a king’s ransom on the black markets, bore the wounds of a fire that scorched the fine quality of wood into burnt sienna and various spots of sooty black. In a more discreet corner behind a cabinet, a Matisse controlled that side of the wall. Where was his beloved Water Lilies No. 23? She spent two hundred and fifty consecutive nights to recreate for him every single painting in Monet’s first series.

He claimed that he hated Matisse, the incompetent copycat of the Master who pioneered capturing the shifting nature of light.

It was a possibility, so she had to ask. “Did I have an accident here?”

The old man broke into an incredulous face of definitively arched eyebrows and suggestively beady eyes behind his spectacles. “No. Nothing of the sort.”

“Sir, please.” Dr. Robin clearly lied little in his honorable way of living. “Was I allegedly killed here at the Recovery Center?”

“I just told you. No.” He did call her a potential breach of safety for the other employees.

“Sir, I want the truth. I want to know what happened to me.” Her voice broke like the nasty squeak of a dislocated shoulder.

“Stop, Tara!” He removed his glasses, no longer shielding the silent apology in his sage grey eyes. “I need you to leave and never come back.” The vulnerability he openly and nakedly betrayed spoke of his helplessness, his forced compliance, and his duty to follow guidelines.

She shivered at the doorway and droned out the two words— her death sentence. “Yes, sir.”

“Shouldn’t you start applying for a new position?” Rhett was poking pincers, drills, and scalpels into the arm she irresponsibly punched into the wall several times. And maybe intentionally set on fire just for the sudden impulse to see if she would feel any pain. Needless to say, Rhett couldn’t have possibly afforded those nanotech sensory processors.

“What job, hmm?” Tara yawned and repositioned herself on the sofa. She had hardly got up and walked around for the last two months, fifteen days, eight hours, and thirty-three minutes.

“I don’t know. You haven’t lost your touch with computers. You are still the coding wiz I know from kindergarten even after your time with that messy art stuff. Szain will still want you. Maybe not in research, but you will get decent pay as a satellite coder. Or if you could create something close to Kako again?”

“No. Don’t even think about it.” As he finished polishing the damaged skin covering, Tara jumped to her feet and paced the room.

Kako was her baby. Kako was God. Kako became so powerful a language that she scratched out the entire thing, deleted it, and wrote a memory-erasing program to run on herself.

“Fine. I shouldn’t have mentioned it, but even an average employee at Szain has a yearly salary of 200 BTC crypto.” Poor Rhett. All he wished was for her to get out of this suburban slum neighborhood.

Tara snorted. “I would rather you give me a brain prosthetic implant.”

He frowned. “You are joking about this? That’s in bad taste, Tara.”

She realized instantly how he would misunderstand. “I’m sorry, Rhett. I owe you my life after all the risks you took for me. We will drop the subject.”

Even though the two of them knew each other when they were in baby carriages, he wouldn’t get it. Tara can vouch for his kind heart, but not necessarily for a shrewd mind.

Szain and all the other big data big shots have roughly a couple of thousand employees per. The workers offer up their brains as compilers and interpreters, acting as avenues to run surveillance codes, whether it is through artificial satellites or tracking devices. What was the difference between mindless robots and them?

“Promise me that you will at least go to an interview.” Rhett pleaded as he was leaving.

Tara threw up her hands. “I thought that I’ve made my point?”

“One interview.” He insisted.

It was a futile battle— her against the times. She hated losing, but she would have to concede at one point since she just about ate through her savings.

Her scowl softened. Rhett wasn’t her enemy. “One. And you will never bother me with it again.”

His shoulders sank in relief. “Thank God.” Watching him leaving, Tara had other plans.

Almond Blossoms. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The Basket of Apples… No. None of them fit the situation. None of them had the “edge” she searched for, the one attribute that would make her blood sing in excitement.

Starry Night. That would do. She had never seen it, but its historical legacy and Dr. Robin’s high praises thrummed out the potential masterpiece.

She opened Elysium and called the variable.

ERROR: ‘art-postimpressionism-vangogh1’ was declared twice. NUL

Whoever had the privilege to replicate this famed piece was now the target of all her envy. She only hoped that they lived up to it. Back to the file.

Her fingers, at least the human side, itched at the prospect of handling each and every one of them, but she hadn’t got the time. Their department only closed for a short span of two hours every night.

This was her last chance to feel before she goes to that interview and signs the contract. And become another mannequin who succumbs to binary numbers while she herself possesses such vast aptitudes, not necessarily in computers but in the novelties she had never explored before. What if she could create her paintings? There also used to be something called music, a particular knowledge she gleaned from a visit to the Ancient Volumes Department. Where composers press down zebra-striped tiles to sound pitches that made coherent sense and even served melodical purposes. Maybe she could do that.

Not even Rhett supported her when she decided to work under Dr. Robin. He refused to talk to her for a long while. “You wasting your brilliance is a mockery to us stupid people.” Those were his exact words.

But Tara remembered when she was first astounded. Dr. Robin was giving a speech at her campus. He showed a lost painting, one that Elysium didn’t have the title for, with clocks sagging off a branch, a tabletop, and an unknown anthropomorphic element. Just the line contours and without colors. It was one of the precious artifacts that truly disappeared in the course of history. She harkened back to her resolve then, that she was going to complete it one day.

replicate.(art-unknown16)

Tara hated that the arch and dip of every curve conveyed meanings beyond her comprehension yet hues there were none to define them. That was now her job.

She gave the landscape in the back an icy blue and a mustard yellow with brown highlights. A hundred years ago, trees still existed in this mad world, ushering speckles of shade to a pedestrian and glimpses of untouched natural magnificence. It was said that their leaves shifted between wondrous colors with the seasons. Tara didn’t want to dishonor the fabled “greeneries” so resorted to the shabby hills they see nowadays.

The empty spaces she filled with a darker brown, and then came the foreground. Decors like clocks belonged in the antique shop, and the antique shop is the realm of gold, silver, and bronze.

She assigned an orangish bronze to the pocket watch on the table. And pristine gold to the rims of the rounded clocks, a tribute to the unsullied age they hailed from.

From her experience with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, a plain gray for the clock faces couldn’t go wrong, but it did. So light a color made it blend in and not stand out. The wrong shade of gray perhaps, but as she dialed up and down the intensity, the entire composition only morphed more and more out of proportions. Silver, which is like shiny gray, didn’t make it any better.

Gold/yellow’s complementary color is purple. Now, that only turned it into some androgynous creature. Tara clicked her tongue by reflex. She was not the person that settles for second-best, not when there is perfection out there.

What about blue, purple’s analogous color? She envisioned it. And smiled.

What a fool. How had she forgotten her purpose here tonight, illegal but determined? By her definition, this was her last moment of living before she loses her humanity, then why was she deducing from logic and not from the heart?

Blue is the answer, a surprising coincidence, but what type of blue?

The thin minute hand spins and spins. Overlapping, the hour hand crawls in slow motion. The two added together times three. Ants feed away at the abandoned timepiece. A source, a scorching sun perhaps, stimulates the metal’s ductility, bends it, warps it, yet gravity keeps pulling it down, down, until it is elongated out of shape. They melt like heated camembert yet time, time tethers them from disintegrating into a liquid puddle. The faded seashore and rocks further suspend it at one precise instant where clocks stopped ticking, changes stopped occurring, and the world altogether stopped advancing forward. In such an apocalypse, where the mind surrenders all consciousness, time, even time ceases to matter.

It has to be a blush of blue. Transient. She thought of a shade almost identical to what she chose for the sea but with tinctures of pure cyan, as if existing in the threshold of dream and reality. That was it. Genius.

The painter intended for it to be mindless. Nonsensical. A portrayal of madness where the basis of humanity— feeling, no longer governs. At that extremity, time withers into oblivion that is… Death. Tara felt her fear embodied through her and a stranger’s combined creation. Every fiber of her trembled.

A job at Szain didn’t horrify her. It was what that job implied— death.

Horrification. Excitement. Her heartbeat raced as temperature spiked in the room. She didn’t need the bot’s notification to realize that she was on fire. The socket where she was wired into Elysium burned her from the inside out.

***

Sirens wailed. “Tara Siddiqui. You are under arrest.” A bot squad in black filed in and formed a circle, training their laser guns on her.

Pinned down in red, she winced.

Her right hand, rendered into ashes, screamed for morphine, but the fire stopped there. Someone shut the program down remotely.

“For what damn reason?” She roared. Can’t the persons operating the bots see that she needs a medic more than a police investigator? Right. They were technically not humans anymore.

“I said for what damn charges, you metalheads. If you are only here because of a code error, get the hell out! This is private property owned by Dr. Russell Robin.”

One bot calmly whirred around and cuffed her. Tara was in no place to resist.

Another spoke. “Tara Siddiqui, employee of the Art Recovery Department, you are arrested for violating The Elysium Bylaws Section V Clause 1.” Before she could demand the specificity, it gave exactly that. “Individuals must refrain from concentrated human emotions when utilizing Elysium to conduct business associated with past human activities.” They then proceeded to move her into a prisoner transport vehicle.

Dr. Robin’s self-driving pony.ai screeched into the driveway. The old man staggered out of his seat, dropping his cane. Knees on the ground, he yelped. “I told you to keep away, Tara! I tried ripping out the wires last time to save you. Why did you have to come back?”

Maybe there was a ‘last time’, the accident, but Tara couldn’t care less now.

Without protest, she opened the backdoor’s hatch and went in herself. In a short while, she won’t be able to think or feel for herself, be that joy which warms her from head to toe, or fear like chilling gusts cutting her skin. And then, nothing will mean nothing no more.