On Salt

On our drive across Eastern Europe, Aubin and I found ourselves in Krakow and decided to stop for a few days to look at some castles and the ancient salt mines. On one of the evenings there, we found a restaurant and were escorted to a table next to a foggy window. Rain fell against a dim streetlamp and every drop that landed on the window did so with a tired agony of spirits from the past. We took off our heavy coats and hung them on the olive velvet chairs. Aubin ordered an orange old fashioned, and I asked for a small decanter of vodka and a plate of gherkins. Once our waiter returned, Aubin and I cheerlessly raised our glasses to the past and thus our communion begun. I inhaled my drink and bit into the salty gherkin. Aubin licked his lips and lit a smoke, while I, having satisfied the first itch of a craving, looked around the empty room. An electric chandelier softly threw its light on oak tables and fake tulips, while an old record-player was rasping in the back. A sign in Polish read, ‘Smaczniej Niż Nieśmiertelność.’ Ever since the successful merging of individual human consciousness with artificial intelligence, most people decided to transition themselves onto the cloud, thus eliminating with a single stroke both suffering and death. Those who decided to opt out of the Transition of Human Intelligence program, were left to decline immortality and walk towards the cool shadows of death. At first, the heavenly cloud provided its virtual dwellers a painless and divine existence, but over time the novelty of such intangibility wore off and the immortals decided to return from their heavens onto the earth. But they were unwilling to sacrifice their immortality, and since artificial simulations proved inadequate, they decided, in an act of switcheroo, to merge artificial intelligence with harvested biological bodies, creating a future version of Frankenstein’s creature. Synths, as they came to be known, repopulated the earth and once again could enjoy the physical melting of an ice cube in their mouths. This, I learned as part of early education, and later, that the synths used a cryogenically preserved supply of sperm to artificially inseminate and grow biological bodies in labs, and, in the process, took precautions to allow a percentage of those bodies to mature and develop their own individual consciousness, unmarred by those from the cloud, in order to avoid the depletion of sperm banks. Synths are infertile and so I was born in a lab – unclouded and mortal.

Synths seem to be pleasant enough, but they also seem to be somewhere far away. Aubin, for example, finds it strange that I pick away at my cuticles, and I find it strange that after we toast, he puts his drink down without taking a sip. He doesn’t even inhale his smoke. Aubin and I have been companions for a long time. We travel together and without him it would be difficult to get by. He says he’s been to all the countries in the world and likes to complain about the places we decide to go to in a high-brow British sort of way, ‘Anatole, dear, Vishnevka will bore your wits out, and I would have to take you to a nurse. Why don’t we go to Kerala again? Don’t you miss their juice?’ He often asks me where I would like to go to next, but always ends up making the decision for me. I remember when five years ago we went to the south of India together. It was beautiful. The villa in which we resided for two weeks was decked out with red wood and had a swimming pool. Every morning I would wake up to the chirping and whistling of fairy blue birds and red-whiskered bulbuls and imagine whether or not they exist in the cloud. Maybe yes, but I don’t want to ask. For two weeks Aubin would expose his pale chest to the sun and drink through red-and-white straws one guava juice after another. I would call out to him many times, but he would never swim in the ocean with me. Sometimes I show Aubin my poems and some poems of other writers that I like. He doesn’t thwart my attempts, but he isn’t encouraging either. For example, on the last winters’ night in Kerala, when the stars shone brightly, I showed him a poem, the first three lines of which went:

In iridescence of a cosmic cut

into a blind patchwork of a blind God,

I recognise a lonely bleeding…

He read it, re-read it, and I could see a faint flicker of sympathy in his otherwise empty grey eyes. ‘My dear boy,’ he said to me pleadingly, ‘to what aim do you write? In this world, the only light your poems will ever see is that of the stars of which you write. And even then, only for an instant. When you leave, the cloud will overshadow anything you’ve ever written, for it cares not for poetry, and your last words will be washed away by the tides of time like the sand on that bloody coastline.’ I remember feeling the irony and the warmth in that answer and that his own answer bothered him more than it bothered me, because I had no choice, and he had a many. He never used to say these things to me when we first met, when I was in my teens and he was much older. All immortals that decided to return from the cloud were assigned a specific role, but none of them seemed to be truly satisfied. They took on roles of bakers and milkmen, but their bread is hard, and their milk is watery. I remember looking at one old baker with a beret, pushing dough with his hands, and thinking that he looked like a child that was bored of making forms with playdough, ready to ditch it to oxidise and harden. So, too, Aubin, who was assigned to look after me, like many others who were assigned to look after mortals, over time grew tired of babysitting and longed for something more. I never quite understood what it is that he wanted. He used to talk to me about his life before the transition of intellect. Once, he told me about a woman he lived with for many years.

‘When there was no cloud,’ he would begin, ‘when pantheons stood tall with marble, Marion and I would travel to the ancient ruins of Pompeii, with the House of a Golden Bracelet and the Death of Pentheus. Emerald Vesuvius stood tall, and we would drink ruby wine from the hills and walk around the narrow, rufescent maze of cobbled passways. She was no stranger to the silence of the past and I would often see her daydreaming in the air of the spring and the saltiness of the Tyrrhenian Sea in her light hair, with perfumed dandelions lining the collar of her light dress. ‘Why did we come here?’ I would ask and she would only look at me with hazel eyes and softly hold my weathered hand. I never understood her answer, but I knew I wouldn’t want to be anywhere but there, with her. On the long drives in our cherry ‘Reno,’ from one country to the next, she would take away my cigarettes and snack on Belgian chocolate with the window wound down. She used to work in a kindergarten, but couldn’t have children of her own, which troubled her at first and then less with every passing year, until the cloud was formed, and I proposed that we participate in the transition. While I wrote about immortality and advocated for artificial intellect, she grew more remote, no longer taking away my cigarettes, but silently staring ahead as the dense fog rose up from the cold ridges of the mountain roads and rain sprayed the windows of our car.’

I’ve never seen Aubin sleep, and every night before I would retire to my lodge, he would make himself a drink and sit in front of a fireplace for hours. Once, when I was suffering from a bout of insomnia, I quietly checked the living room and there he was, still in the same chair. His drink was untouched, and he held a little locket, with a black-and-white photograph of a woman, which reflected the gentle glow of the ambers in its golden heart-shaped shell. I never asked about it, and he never discussed it.

But that was then, and over the years Aubin grew more reserved and tired. He no longer told me about his trips with her and generally didn’t say much about his life before the cloud. Now in my forties, my bulging corpus more or less closed the gap between myself and the body in which he lived. ‘Watch out old man,’ I would smile at him, ‘before you know it, I’ll be grey enough to be your father.’ He’d smile back, but it was always a smile of a growing pain. Now, in the polish restaurant, with ice melting on a plate, and him swirling a mangled orange skin in his untouched whiskey, Aubin looked with hollow eyes and listened to the occasional rasping of the needle. No longer required to donate, I, like all people of my age, was free to enjoy my so-called retirement. So, I ordered some pancakes with caviar and coriander, soup Solyanka made with Dutch Cream potatoes, cabbage, chorizo, mushrooms and olives, cooked with shredded gherkins and served with rye bread and a jar of sour cream. All the salts of gherkins and caviar melted in my mouth as I swallowed another shot of vodka, followed by the soup and sour cream on bread. As my spirits swelled and swirled in the warmth of an empty restaurant, I looked to Aubin, who didn’t order anything, but sat there and smoked his cigarette the wrong way, and a chill ran up my spine. I thought, no, son, immortality is not for me. Then, having finished my meal, I lit my own smoke, inhaling as deeply as I could, and thought about the salty mines of tomorrow and the darkness at the end.