Yes, it is the Turing test that says if you are human or robot. This didn’t worry me so much. I knew I wasn’t a robot. But was I real? I wanted to know if this was real—if I was. Is it? Are you? I intended to find out.
My fascination didn’t begin with a simple question. It began with an accident. It was December 17th, 2015 when a competent driver lost control on a patch of black ice, sending their Toyota Camry off the road and onto the neighbouring sidewalk. I happened to be walking on that sidewalk and I discovered later that I was not built to halt the advance of a 2500-pound vehicle. I found that out 8 months later.
In that 8 months, I saw many things. I saw my diploma jump out of my mother’s living room window only to devour the mailman; then regain its paper qualities and float to the ground. I felt the wind of a fatal fall fly past me, opening to a wide patch of grass below. When I reached the bottom, I simply stood and walked away.
And I knew things weren’t so. You can only see so many otters enjoying an afternoon espresso before you start realizing this world isn’t right. I am dreaming or I am dead. If I’m dead, when will I stop teleporting between sunny beaches and snowy mountains? If I’m dreaming, why can’t I wake up? These questions passed through my mind along with the wavy abstraction that accompanies such a deep dream state. Perhaps that is why I remember them. Still, you can imagine the relief when I awoke to a fluorescent light bulb overhead and a call on the PA system for a “code white”.
It turned out the “code white” should not have been as relieving as I felt at that time for it hijacked my doctor and nurses for 20 minutes, leaving me entirely alone. In that time, I managed to twist my ankle getting out of bed. So bad in fact, that “[I] may not walk straight for the next 8 months.” My doctor was exaggerating, of course, it would only be 2. The real blessing was, I wouldn’t remember this. I wouldn’t remember any of it if not for my mother’s obsessive recording.
You see, my mother was not so well-versed in English. When she realized she could record conversations instead of re-enacting them later, she began her grand campaign to archive more content than the CIA. As I said, this was the blessing. My memory only extended a day or two at best. Her videos are the only link I have left to the past. They move against my new ambition, telling me, “that’s you. You are real, even if you can’t remember.”
When my mother died, it was a difficult day—the next one wasn’t so bad. Often, I choose not to watch the video from that day. I’ve labeled the recording as, “eternal sadness of a lost mind.” Not the most appealing name for someone that needs to read a letter in the morning just to remember who they are. So most days, I do not know where she is. Out with friends, maybe? I like to think that I think that.
As you can imagine, keeping friends was not something I did very well after my accident. “Hey, you remember that problem I told you about a month ago? You know, that one with so-and-so? The one that did that thing?”
“No,” I would say, “I don’t remember so-and-so or the thing they did.” The only thing I remembered was who this ‘friend’ was. Memories like a poorly run sitcom with a main character who had my eyes, nose, and hair. He played with these people, joked with them, and when they realized I would never change again, they began to leave.
So what finally sparked this dancing monkey to question the very nature of existence? Was it the gigabytes of recording on my computer, which could have been easily planted without my knowledge? Was it the accident that conveniently took away the only tool I had to wake up and realize that time had passed? Did I watch Inception and believe I was stuck somewhere in Limbo? It wasn’t any of this. It was an experiment that alarmed me. A repeat, not in my head but on paper.
For reasons I never bothered to record, I began writing down the times of the bus arrivals outside my apartment window. There is a westbound and eastbound bus scheduled to arrive at 6:10 am for eastbound and 6:14 for westbound. Then, every half hour this would repeat. I usually missed the morning with all the “figuring out what's going on.” But usually, before lunch, I would begin. The result was this:
January 16th, 2018
- Eastbound: 10:11:43 am, 10:40:35 am, 11:10:44 am, 11:56:12 am, 12:24:16 pm…
- Westbound: 10:14:40 am, 10:47:23 am, 11:22:01 am, 11:51:22 am, 12:50:11 pm (car accident up road)...
Do you see it? Did you notice it while you read? If you did, you should see a doctor because there’s nothing in there that’s special. What was special happened on April 26th when the numbers repeated. Yes, even the car accident.
The realization did not come quick. I had no memory of January 16th, 2018, other than a video file stating “nothing unusual”. Which, after my realization became very unusual. It was the car accident that tipped my curiousity.
“How often did cars hit things?” I said on the video on April 26th. “Wasn’t I in one of those?”
It turns out, it takes one hundred days. One hundred days for someone to drive their vehicle into another up James Street. Just bad enough to cause a 36 minute and 11 second delay. Coincidence or a flaw in the final product? If there was going to be any more evidence of this particular anomaly, I was sure it wouldn’t be in plain sight. It would be hidden, behind layers of other uneventful events, playing repeat in the background of our lives. This is when my obsession began.
On Tuesdays, I lost an average of four hairs for every one minute of showering. This number increased when I shampooed. If I shampooed, this number grew to 12 but only on Wednesdays, on Tuesdays, it averaged to 11. The rest of the week was a mess. I decided to forgo counting any other days. It would drive me insane. In the end, the numbers were too erratic, like trying to find a secret pattern in a mosaic.
A few other particularities included: a single strand of spaghetti that would inevitably fly out onto the floor when I cut a bunch above a boiling pot of water; there was always daylight on Fridays between the hours of 11 am and 12 pm; when the neighbour walked her dog, it would pee on the light post outside our apartment building. I ruled out the last one, though, when I remembered the territorial habits of the canine species. It really wasn’t peculiar at all.
If I continued at that pace, I would have recorded of every raindrop, clipped toenail, growth enhancement commercial, muscle spasm, times my alphagetti soup spelled “ooo”, and if the news had any sort of story that wasn’t a bleak reflection of life. Luckily, I had the sense to stop. When the papers began to resemble a pile of 1’s and 0’s and I wasn’t granted unlimited power like Neo, I ditched it all. Time was precious. If I didn’t work on the right problem, I could wake up after twenty years with nothing but a hard drive worth of memories I never remembered. Now, what else could help?
What started me on physics was the basic nature of science. Here, there were people constantly prodding at the edges of reality. Here, they talked in spacetime and hammered at the slabs of all creation. If I saw the colour purple and someone saw grey, was there another fatal flaw in the system? Since bees see differently, could they see past the veil I was trying to breach? Did they fly about their business watching my overlord tug the strings that helped me scuff at the man with the loud music? With so much out there, what was really happening? These questions found themselves on my nightstand, fridge and bathroom mirror. I searched for answers.
I was doomed from the start.
If, in a day, I could not summarize my findings, if I couldn’t put my thoughts into words, there was no chance. They would leave and I would never know I thought them. I could stick, “time is relative, here’s Einstein saying why,” in my notebook or “in the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.” These just didn’t work. They didn’t tell me what I needed to know. They were thoughts and thoughts ran away from me like the girls in elementary school—when I was young, sicko. So, the only advice I gave myself that was actually useful was simple: “talk to people about reality.”
I posted an ad seeking, “an individual looking for the ultimate answer. Is life real?” Among the slew of stoners and philosophers, the one that caught my attention responded simply with, “that’s me.” This brought me to Brodney Luo, a homeopath of all people. She lived on the border of Chinatown and Koreatown in an apartment, home to herself and a nest of cockroaches.
“The rent is cheap and the food is great,” she would say, “if we’re really here.”
She was a small thing, Asian descent with a mix of European somewhere down the line. Her hair was always shoulder-length, black and shimmering. In every recording, her scleras were red and she seemed to always be biting her nails. I asked her once if I made her nervous and she assured me it wasn’t me.
Unlike me, her fascination began in 1999 with the release of The Matrix. The second blow came that same year with Fight Club. It didn’t help that 1999 was the precursor to Y2K, the apocalypse of the 20th century. What better time to instill a teenager that life was but a passing wind smooching with a brick wall. We frequented coffee on Mondays and Fridays and I learned about a wonderful art called meditation.
I tried and tried to push myself beyond the third dimension. I felt my body lift from itself. I felt the weight of the world pushing at my feet. It was romantic, intimate even, to feel my mind expand over the world, like a blanket or a glazed donut. But, of course, it didn’t go beyond that. Perhaps, that’s when I should have stopped.
“If you can sink deep enough, maybe you’ll find a light. You can see our creators,” she said on July 1st. I know that because, for the first time, I recorded her that day instead of myself. She seemed to have a way of speaking like an oracle on the edge of the sea. Yet, I never saw the storm.
After that recording, she began popping up in others. She even began labeling the files: “Rainy Monday”, “Terrific Thursday”, “Sunday Love”. These were far more ambiguous than my usual labels. They didn’t tell me anything I’d want to know. What does a “Sunday Love” say about our conversations? How does that break the line of reality? Does love conquer all? Please. A week later, things were back to normal with a recording labeled, “question, still no answer.”
It must have been a Thursday when she didn’t show. I labeled that day, “Brodney, no show.” This continued for the next few days until another recording was labeled, “Brodney suicide, says coffee clerk.” I couldn’t believe it.
In the recording, I walked up to the barista at the cafe and asked her to repeat what she said. I needed her to say it. I needed to hear it word for word.
“A customer told us yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss,” she said.
For some reason, I asked, “which one?”
It was a miracle that file ever made it onto my computer. The rest of the day was filled with bottomless bottles of vodka. I nearly set my apartment on fire, knocking a scented candle Brodney bought me onto the floor. Ceramic doesn’t burn, thankfully. I passed out sometime after 2 pm, my camera facing the door until it too, died.
Brodney loved me, so a sheet of paper on my lamp said. But my condition must have been torture. Imagine already questioning what was real and waking up to someone screaming, “who are you?!". Then, every day, as if on repeat, you kickstarted this person back into your frame of mind, only to see the same glassed eyes in the morning. It must have broke her.
It would suffice to say that this death hit me harder than my mother’s. In my head, my mother was still alive. She was off on vacation and the memories of her still lingered like living pictures on the wall. Brodney I couldn’t place. She was in my records, yes, her handwriting was different, yes, so she couldn’t be imagined. I even had a note she left me when I visited her old apartment—is it old now that her new home is in the afterlife? But I couldn’t figure out what it meant.
“Reality is pending,” the note said. And every morning I pondered what this could mean. Was there a switch I forgot to flick on? Would a news story flash on the television claiming, “reality seems to have faulted today. We’re waiting for a middle-aged man with short-term memory loss to turn it back on.” Obviously, the news story never came and with each day, August 4th approached. Another chance for the bus schedule to repeat.
August 4th, the day came and went. Again, the times aligned, again the 12:14 pm bus was delayed by 36 minutes and 11 seconds. Reality is pending, huh? Was “reject” an option? I could handle it, I really could.
There was nothing left to look for. I had found a flaw in the fabric of reality but what did it matter? I tried calling out to the sky but nothing changed. Brodney’s gone, my mother’s gone and every hundred days, I’ll awake to find the same peculiarity. One that no one will believe or have the patience to wait for. The answer was there but what difference did it make if I couldn’t use it? In the video yesterday, I explained all this to myself, everything. After watching it today, I reached the same conclusion he did.
If a story can’t continue, it must end.
For kicks, I took the Turing test just to see if I was indeed, human. This would all be easier if I was a robot. A virus-filled box, short-circuited from some God-knowing accident. But I passed. It was worth the shot. As I readied myself, moments from kicking the chair, a letter slipped through my mail slot.
“Probably a bill,” I thought but there was enough doubt to check.
I loosened the rope from my neck and stepped down from the chair. It was a plain white envelope, no return address, not even a stamp. Inside was a sheet of paper, blank except for one word in the center:
“Stop.”
Submitted August 06, 2018 at 03:34AM by It_s_pronounced_gif https://ift.tt/2KvQ10u
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