LIVEWIRE
A Flash Fiction Story by Mickey Fisher
Ava exhaled the high end stratus toward the ceiling, the thick cloud changing color with the lights over the nearby dance floor. She put her lips next to my ear to make herself heard over the music and picked up where she left off, saying, “What I mean is, human beings are hard-wired to seek out transcendent experiences. At least we used to be.”
I was having trouble following, reduced to simple questions that gave the bare minimum appearance of comprehension. It wasn’t just the drug or the alcohol. It was the silver nail polish that matched the color of her hair, the LED tattoo on her neck, perpetually morphing in slow motion. Her presence was hypnotic. I managed to say, “You think we’ve lost it?”
“We’ve mapped the human genome, we’ve got people on Mars, we’ve got direct-neural-interfaces that connect us to the entire history of human knowledge in a literal blink of an eye and nobody’s talking about how fucking cool that is. We’ve become desensitized to miracles. As an artist, it’s getting harder and harder to give modern human beings a genuinely transcendent experience.”
That part I understood. I’d been struggling with the same problem in my own work. I said, “Please let me know when you figure it out.”
“I think I already did.”
Half an hour later we were back in her apartment in Pod City, one of the skyscrapers that had been repurposed into micro-spaces to ease the pressure valve of the housing crisis. She made good use of the square footage, everything functional and doubling as storage. A Magic Mirror took up one whole wall, letting her cycle through any number of virtual views. Tonight, it was the Pacific coastline, with bio-luminescent waves rolling in, a digital recreation of a natural phenomenon that disappeared over a decade ago.
At 200 square feet it may as well have been the Taj Mahal compared to the cargo container I was living in near San Pedro. I was coding for ArCana and putting all of my money toward making original Helikon installations on the side. My side work hadn’t taken off yet but I kept telling myself that all it takes is one hit.
Maybe a year or two from now a couple million people would be tuning into my augmented reality channel to watch the virtual life cycle of birth, death, decay, and rebirth I’d been mapping across the skyline, sprawling over into Hollywood and up into the hills of Griffith Park. I wanted to give people a visceral sense of the genuine miracle of their existence, to see how lucky they were to be here for even a blink of an eye in the face of eternity.
It was gonna take another three hundred grand to upgrade my gear and so far my crowdfunding site was sitting at a cool six hundred and fifty dollars. (Thanks, grandma.)
Ava said, “This is it.” She was holding up a circular piece of silicon tech with a cluster of wires soldered into it. A duplicate on a nearby table.
“Futuristic frisbee?”
“Brain-to-brain communication. If you’ve got a direct-neural-interface it lets the person on the other end see what you see. Feel what you feel.”
“Like an empathy generator.”
“Sure. But I built it for sex.” I stopped myself short of doing an involuntary spit take with my wine. She was serious. “Poets talk about it like two bodies becoming one. With this, your consciousness merges with your partner. It becomes impossible to tell where you end and they begin. You shed your insecurities, your self-consciousness. All that’s left is pleasure.”
“You’ve done it?”
“Someone had to beta test it.”
I swallowed and stared at the ring in her hands. “How, how does it work?”
She grinned, handed it over. She knew I would ask and she knew I would take it.
She took the other. “Put it on like this and close your eyes. When our DNI’s are connected, we’ll hear two soft chimes.”
A couple of seconds later, I heard the chimes inside my head and found myself in a void.
Ava said, “Just relax. Find the connection.”
Seeking connection is all I’ve been doing. In art, between disparate ideas, trying to turn two pieces of familiar junk into something new, or at least something that feels new. Seeking connection with other human beings, on the street, in people movers, in cafes, in clubs.
It’s the whole reason I went to Obsidia in the first place. She bought me a drink, we shared a valve of stratus, talked art and creativity. Finding transcendence in a time of miracles.
I felt her in the void, her hand reaching out, fingers extended. Our bodies connecting in that shared space, skin to skin. Lips to lips, then lips to skin. Then —
It was exactly as she said. Pure energy. Formless. Without guilt or shame, without the weight of our insecurities. Our true selves. Past the parts that are just an illusion, past the things we tell ourselves to mask the darker interior. Past the things hiding in those shadows.
Until there was no self.
There was only transcendence and —
When I came to, I was laying face down in the alley behind the crypto exchange shop, in handcuffs. The Independent Constable showed me footage from the CCTV inside. It was me, which is to say it was my body. My hand holding the gun to the teller’s head, my voice telling him to make the exchange, three million dollars disappearing into the ether.
The IC told me, “There have been a number of livewire hijackings lately. Just be glad it wasn’t murder, gets a whole lot trickier. We’ll take you in, run an EEG and do a quick sweep of the interface. If you’re telling the truth, we’ll find traces of her incursion and send you home.”
The apartment in Pod City was a rental by-the-hour. There wasn’t a single clear image of her on the CCTV’s in the area thanks to the LED tattoo that kept her face washed out. She had every angle covered, down to picking the perfect sad sack at the end of the bar. In retrospect I realized her riff about “transcendence” was taken from my crowd funding campaign.
I was back in my cargo container by morning, just in time to log on for my shift at ArCana. It was hard to concentrate. My mind kept replaying the events from the night before. Was any part of our connection genuine or was it all one big set up? I had to find her.
Not because I wanted answers.
Or because I wanted to get even.
Three million dollars for one night of work?
I wanted in.
