kaleidotrope

On Friday, I had an appointment with the dermatologist that turned out to be more waiting than appointment. This wasn’t a bad thing, really, since it meant that what I was there for turned out to be nothing. (My primary recommended I have some spots on my back looked at.) I mean, I’d rather have a doctor surprised to see me — I almost felt like I was wasting his time — than shocked and dismayed that he hasn’t seen me much sooner. But it did kind of eat into my Friday afternoon.

I spent most of Saturday putting together the Summer issue of Kaleidotrope. And actually a fair bit of today, when I finished the advice column and horoscopes. (Yes, the zine regularly has both.) That didn’t leave me much time for anything else — I still haven’t done the Sunday crossword puzzle, and that’s an itch I simply can’t not scratch — but I’m really happy with this issue. (Well, it’s one story lighter than I expected, but I’m still hopeful that author will get back to me in time for the Autumn issue.)

I did manage to watch a movie last night, the strange and terrifying and sad and beautiful Upstream Color. The film, from the same writer/director as the intellectual time travel movie Primer, is almost impossible to really describe. The IMDB tries its best with:

A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.

Although even that might be saying too much, and certainly doesn’t say half enough. The film is complicated and odd, but I liked it a whole lot.

And then today, I had my weekly writing group. I wasn’t expecting to, but apparently this week’s postponement was postponed. So I wrote this:

They had enough money to keep him in quarrantine indefinitely, the resources necessary to lie to anyone who came asking, to keep up the false pretense that the man himself had never existed. Not that they expected much trouble; he had been an unpopular man, and though well-embedded in the news coverage of the time, he was disliked enough by his peers and his constituents that it was hardly difficult to expunge him from the record. It had been twenty-five years since the man had been President, and a quarter century goes a long way towards erasing collective memory. They only had to resort to physical erasure — the special blend of chemical and cortical manipulation the boys in the lab would have patented if that had been an option — on a handful of occasions, and with the prisoner himself only once. That was when he’d nearly escaped, although the warden would have refused to use either — “escaped” or “nearly” — and would have instead referred to it only as the incident. It was an incident that had itself happened over three years ago now, and as there seemed to be little chance of a recurrence — the man was, in his way, now a model prisoner — there was little reason for anyone to call the warden on his euphemisms. Let him call it an incident, and let him downplay just how far out of hand events had actually spun, just so long as they kept Daniel Chambers locked in his ten-by-ten square cell and forgotten by the world. Let Chambers rot, make sure any investigations withered on the vine, and the warden could call what had happened three years ago anything he wanted. Moreover, they would continue to supply him any new funds he requested, anything that kept the prison and their plans humming along. The prison’s continued success would forgive its momentary failure.

Of course, it probably wasn’t Chambers who was sitting in that cell. Had it been the man himself, the prison almost certainly would have seen additional escape attempts. Chambers had not been a model prisoner, and they kept him on too few drugs to explain how docile he had become in the three years since. The warden knew this, and certainly the boys in the lab knew this, but it was a truth you didn’t want to go poking at too much. Had Chambers actually escaped three years ago? Was this was this some kind of simulacrum, what the lab techs had even money on as being a robot? Or a hologram? There was a theory floating around downstairs that the prisoner was actually a coherent assortment of photons, given physical form through…well, some kind of process. This, obviously, where the theory tended to break down. How would Chambers have managed such a thing? The robot theory at least had legs; it didn’t require any great scientific prowess, none of which Chambers was known to possess, just the right components smuggled in from the outside. It was true, every theory floating around suggested the involvement of someone else — an inside job — which was another reason why the theories never floated very far. The Chambers in the cell was almost certainly a robot — he did everything but clank when he walked — but nobody wanted to be the first to test such a theory.

You might very well be asking yourself a number of questions at this point. What about bloodwork, for instance? Surely in the three years since the “incident” the prisoner must have undergone a routine physical. The powers that be that owned the prison, that tossed the necessary (and even arguably unnecessary) money at it, would have certainly inisisted. But there are ways for a crafty robot to deceive such tests, especially when they are conducted by those with a vested interest in keeping its secret.

Where, then, you might also be wondering, had Daniel Chambers gone? He could have escaped into the world at large, a world in which he was largely forgotten, and he likely could have done so quite easily. You forget that while his name had been expunged from that world’s history, he would have still retained a wealth of knowledge, leverage, and contacts. One did not rise to become the leader of the free world without making a few friends, however wealthy or cunnning one’s enemies. Chambers could have escaped, with the aid of a little inside help and on-the-spot robotics, and no onewould have been the wiser. By the time anyone at the prison began to suspect, he could have been long gone.

The warden and the lab boys, they knew this too, and it was all the more reason not to look too closely at the incident. If Chambers was out there, he was keeping quiet; he was not going public or causing trouble; if he was in here, still, they had nothing at all to worry about. They’d keep cashing their checks and assume, robot or no robot, that the man they held was still the man they’d been paid so handsomely to keep. And they’d just refuse to look too closely at that assumption in case he wasn’t. Maybe the robot could have an “accident” happen to it, if that became necessary.

Fewer people came asking about the man every year.

I can’t claim to be really happy with it, above and beyond the fact that I just wrote for the forty minutes. There’s some crafting here — it’s not quite stream of consciousness — but there was less staring off into space and thinking than tapping away at the keys. (I write these on my iPad.)

Anyway, that was the weekend, more or less.