The homunculus was a thin, flat, disproportionate thing that was too smooth, too round, and seemingly forever dissatisfied with its own ludicrous appearance. The first time I ever laid eyes on it, I had just arrived at my tech job, fresh from a stay of extended medical leave, mind already ablaze with the problems of yesterday’s virtual meetings. A semicircle of young and middle-aged colleagues surrounded and watched in hushed excitement as the thing changed. What I initially recognised as an absent man sporting a brownish complexion was moments later a shaved white girl. Then someone considerably older. Then someone else. It showed no signs of stopping.
Blurry, smeared features sank and melted apart, continuously forming anew. Faces were perceivable, but indiscriminate, as if they weren’t meant to be looked at quite so closely. Its glossy skin stretched over a pair of arms and legs at least twice as wide as the head that accompanied them, contorted towards a boxy torso which itself supplemented a naked, sexless groin. The blank box it had come in was splayed out beneath it, an instruction manual nowhere to be seen. Layers of plastic were mostly pulled loose, save for remaining piled shreds, almost leaving the impression of a nest.
After failing to locate signs of an alien spacecraft, I moved to Alan, a senior staff member. He too was spectating from a few cubicles away.
“One of the higher-ups’ latest projects,” he spoke before me. “Got dropped off this morning.”
“…Is it supposed to be doing that?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
He was stone-still, with a rigid hand on his chin. His lip twitched as if he was barely stopping a word spilling.
“Are there more of these?”
I was met with a pensive expression that had trouble finding me and not the floor.
“Fascinating…and kinda cute.” The janitor had shown up and was now knelt beside the thing, mop in hand. “What is it? Fancy art project or…?”
“A reward, I imagine,” Janette, our boss, replied. She stood closest, like she thought it might try to get up and run off. “They’ve slipped us a secret. We have had a good quarterly performance.”
“What do we do with it?” Another person asked.
We kept it between the plant and the water cooler and told people it was a cutting-edge, experimental sculpture. An ornament. To be admired – from a safe distance. A velvet rope wasn’t in the budget, though. I was okay with that for a little bit, being all the way across our workspace, mostly well out of sight. I only had to walk by it to reach the lunch hall whenever I wanted to go in there. No big deal.
Except on one muggy afternoon, it turned to look at me during a trip to the vending machine. Its neck swung in a heavy motion as I rounded the corner, swiveling from the flapping door at the end of the room where somebody exited. The formerly inanimate stare had been replaced by eye contact, tracking me the entire way past. That day, I departed early and wrote a slip into the anonymous suggestion box saying we should take the ‘sculpture’ out back and put it down.
The ensuing HR meeting stung with fluorescent light and made my collar itchy. I can imagine I might’ve appeared suspect, sneaking glances at the thing. Obviously, Janette had placed it in the corner to make a point. She was treating it like a bullied child, vaguely sticking up for it on the pulpit, as well as rattling off the other daily grievances. I hadn’t seen it straight away, but it was breathing. Or attempting to. Or pretending to; the movement was subtle. Inconsistent. Too quick? It was hard to tell. When I passed by after the gathering had finished a lifetime later, it didn’t seem to be doing it. That was my first real close-up in a while. The sporadic renewal with which it had commenced was no longer occurring. It had a newfound appreciation, savouring each body it cycled through, pieces falling less rapidly from its grasp. Once again, its eyes were what unnerved me the most. Somewhere beyond their fogged exterior was starting to clear. I was sure of it.
A few months passed. I didn’t openly voice my concern – most of the workforce was remote, but those in as often as me appreciated the ‘statue’, as it had come to be known. Everyone else didn’t care. I might as well have suggested to euthanise the class hamster. Plus, I’d noticed it picking an increasingly attractive veneer. Less random feelers, halfway-approximates of humanity, and better symmetry. No more infrequent revolting errors: eye placement, mouth shape… giant sores. Were there real people out there that might look like this thing, every now and again?
Could most people look like this thing?
On a boring mid-week lunch break, I brought it up in a conversation with Rob, a colleague.
“The amount you talk, I think you just wanna fuck it, to be honest.” I smiled as he laughed at his own joke. “If I catch you in here alone again, I’ll give you a minute. But we’re not trading spaces.”
“I can’t believe you can sit in front of it all day,” I told him. The homunculus was around ten feet behind where Rob was eating a baguette at his desk, in plain view. “Don’t you ever feel its eyes in the back of your head? Or… hear it?”
“It’s not haunted!” He snorted. “No, I don’t hear it – it doesn’t just make noise. I mean, it is kinda weird we don’t know what it is but that’s probably the point.”
“You don’t mind being a test subject?”
He shrugged. “We’re getting paid, aren’t we? I’ve had worse jobs. As long as I’m not assembling these bots or whatever they are, I’m happy. And personally, I think it’s pretty cool. Gotta be some new shit. Maybe marketing is pulling a trick, and they’re putting us on social media. So act normal, ha.”
We were both staring at it staring at us.
“At least if we killed it, we could see what was happening under the hood.”
“Well…”
Rob suddenly broke into a fit of coughing. He took a series of short, unsteady breaths and produced an inhaler, actions I had overheard from afar many times in my years working with him.
“Fucking allergies are killing me, amount of dust in this place.”
I looked at his rounded chest as it rose and fell rapidly, slightly straining the buttons. The movement was inconsistent…and familiar.
That week saw one of my least favourite yearly rituals: Bring-Your-Kid-to-Work Day. Essentially a glorified school trip for the children of my middle-aged colleagues, and an excuse to get them off their devices. NeuroWorks was rich, amongst the biggest companies in the world in a pure business sense, but our venue was nowhere near as good as that sounds. Being bitterly locked into a refurbishment planning war for the better part of four years doesn’t exactly scream “modernity”. Or maybe it does.
I didn’t have much to do with the occasion, only involved in the helpline division, the breadth of my knowledge occupied mostly by memorised error codes. From what I saw, the old troublemakers had matured – sneaking into forbidden places or swiping an expensive souvenir were no longer habits. But a child there was absent previously, the son of a new employee. Eleven-year-old named Kai. I didn’t remember the kid’s face, because the sole image in my mind was him pulling it at me in a weird way.
The night saw my desire to spend the evening at home by myself come to an end by a particularly bothersome client, whose broken message swapping kept me up late. As the darkening skies loomed above my long journey home, a new message popped into the dimmed office space, pulling me out of the call.
“Is Kai in there? Can’t find him down here.
Sent from my iPhone”
Cheryl had laboured as the day’s main tour-giver. She’d conveniently ignored my previous message on our work-enforced communication app: “Do u know where Alan is ?” Tired, I scrolled on my phone for another minute, eventually taking my earbuds out and trying hard not to hear a peep. Annoyingly, distant chatter was overlapping the static humming of computers. I listened and determined it was coming from around the break room.
My shoes squeaked against the linoleum floor as they halted halfway along. Two voices were exchanging, one a clear preteen’s and the other undiscernible. I crept nearer, then suddenly stepped out so I was in full view of the scene. In hindsight, I wish I’d eavesdropped longer, but I was motivated by the imperative of proving something that could not possibly be true.
Kai was sat on the floor in front of the homunculus. He noticed me quickly and jumped, frozen for a second until he stood up.
“S-sorry,” he mumbled. “I was-
“There you are!” Cheryl appeared from the staircase doorway, red in complexion. “Your mother’s very upset with you.”
She gave me a subdued, appreciatory face, took Kai by the wrist, and left. The kid seemed ill-at-ease. He gawped back at me as if he was in want of an explanation before he was gone. Meanwhile, the homunculus’ boyish looks were neutral. The dimness gave it the air of a disused mannequin, a dormant piece of equipment waiting to be put together. Except its legs peeled inwards no longer; now they creased into a polite storyteller cross.
As the elevator escorted the kid out of the building, I too escaped, scooping up my stuff and ignoring the ringing desk. I was fast-walking to the stairs at the opposite end of the floor when a coated figure in clearly as much of a hurry cut out ahead of me. Attempting to turn suddenly caused me to stumble and sort of half-tackle him by the briefcase. Mid-fall, I realised it was Alan.
“Watch where you’re fucking going.”
He gathered up a few items he’d dropped. Though his enunciation lacked real venom, the swearing caught me off-guard. You wouldn’t have known the man was usually quite boring.
I wiped off my shirt. “Can you tell me anything else about the-
“Working on it.”
He’d composed himself rapidly and covered the flight of next-door steps as I was thinking of a response. I wasn’t tempted to chase after one of my bosses. I was curious enough to try his personal office, but it was locked. Probably for the better.
A piece of paper slipped underneath my shoe in the hall, almost making me fall again. I managed to redeem my clumsiness by catching it as it floated into my reach. The image printed on the other side was baffling. What crossed my mind first was a modern rendition, an imitation, of the Vitruvian Man. The format was sleek and scientific, riddled with diagrams apparently relevant to the subject in question, but the writing was all cryptic nonsense, encoded in mostly numbers. The outline of the document had its own tiny strip of the company’s logo, except on the leftmost side. If that had led to another piece of the display, it was missing.
I recalled the briefcase. Letting the paper drift onto the ground, I realised its blank side blended in perfectly with the vinyl, apart from the small brown imprint my shoe had left.
I crammed it in my jacket and headed for the exit. If there was any sense to be made, it would come following a well-deserved rest at home. The after-hours atmosphere was unnerving in an empty sort of way – it was playing on my imagination. The only workers left sat in the final studio on the way out; a group of coders staying late to get an important snag fixed. I nodded goodbye and opened the glass door, then was pushed past. I’d assumed he was already outside based on the time difference, but my best guess was that it was Alan. Those who’d noticed looked sympathetic and almost concerned. They were too absorbed in their discussion to really pay attention.
Snow dusted the ground, hardly very thick, but enough to outline a pair of scuffed footsteps leading to the corner. Whoever this person was, they were in such a hurry that I’d scarcely caught a glimpse of them. I felt the need to call out, knowing they couldn’t be far.
“I think I have your-
I was interrupted by a crash loud enough to distort the direction from which it came, being that it echoed across the open courtyard. The noise was marked by a loud impact – I expected to hear the embarrassed whine of an engine, but there was nothing except the solitary whoosh of a passing car on the public road. In fact, the following stillness gave me goosebumps. The want to stay and ask questions had left me, so I hurried to my car instead.
The little hours of sleep I received at home were eventful. I dreamt I was staring out of my window, scanning the city from the top floor of a skyscraper. A hole in the clouds parted to reveal an enormous zeppelin, and many ropes and wires spang forth, hidden in its intricate surface. It pulsated in waves, bleeding grey into the walls. The unlucky ones got caught on the street; the cords, ending in darkened orifices, scattered like rats and flailed accordingly as they forced their way through windows, around ankles, into throats. Ever-present was an earthy, static buzz that tickled your ribs and ears. I locked myself in the tiny bathroom of my flat and listened to the muffled screams of neighbours experiencing god-knows-what, until there was a thump at my own door.
I woke up that morning less-than-eager to go to work. The conditions were icy, but mild in the sun, which had made a rare appearance. I spent the commute brainstorming, wondering whether I should’ve rang someone and reported the development, however they’d reacted, even if they thought what I’d said was “cool”.
Blocking my way to the homunculus once I’d reached the building was Janette, filling out paperwork. I prepared to scoot past her.
“It’s gone.”
She said it just as I arrived at the lighter patch of carpet it had been sitting on.
“W-what do you mean?” I couldn’t hide the panic in my disposition. “Where?”
“Oh my God…it’s right… behind…” The grin was poking out of her face.
“Seriously, what’s going on?” I had to turn for good measure before she responded.
“Relax, Jesus.” She laughed. “Corporate took it off the market, I reckon. Or it was only ever meant to be a trial run.”
“Or it was malfunctioning...or they needed it for…for…”
“Product recalls happen off and on. What are you saying, exactly?”
“Jan, I swear I heard it talk to Kai.”
“Who’s Kai?”
“Kid from yesterday. Kinda bratty one?”
“Keep your voice down! That’s Melissa’s son.”
“Sorry, but… at the end of the night, I got up, and I heard them talking.”
“About…?”
“I didn’t hear what about, but he-
“Was he not on his phone? You know the kids are always trying to go on their phones during-
“No, he wasn’t on his fucking phone, okay? He was communicating with that…that…
I lost my words and realised the office had become very quiet. My shoulders curled inwards in embarrassment as I sat wordlessly at my desk.
“You need to get over this issue. Would it help if I pointed out you’re half an hour late again? It’s not here anymore, so I don’t want to hear any more, got it? You should be happy; maybe an executive read your suggestion.”
She walked away, leaving me concealed behind a stack of files. The silence lasted a few beats, until the phone started ringing. I hadn’t even turned on my computer yet.
The rest of my shift was so mundane, I felt it dribbling out of my ears as I drove home. It was late enough that the roads were desolate, but the frigid weather ensured the trip was slow-going. My heavy arms indicated I’d be too tired to make food when I got in, so I decided to stop for a Friday McDonald’s. Someplace out of the way would be less busy, so I allowed the thought of a warm burger to carry me the extra miles.
The ordering post at the end of the gritted path was bent at an angle. Patches of speaker had rusted and been scratched across. I strained to hear, preparing for the worst in terms of audio quality.
“Hello. Please may I take your order?”
Freezing air soared past the open window, chilling me completely. The voice had a local tint, but the inflections were entirely off, the emphasis put in the wrong places. The timbre was both jovial in that simple, disarming way and utterly monotone – corporate. Its overall pitch never shifted. It didn’t sound like an impediment. It didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard from another person.
A good thirty seconds of nothing must’ve passed. I was waiting for further words, to be asked if I was still there.
“Are you real?” I finally blurted out. Sweat was forming on my brow despite the temperature.
“May I take your order, sir?”
I slammed on the gas and sped to the payment booth. The light inside was dim, narrowly outlining messy counters strewn with discarded paper bags and other food debris. I didn’t see him, or anyone. I don’t know what I was expecting as I sat there, trying to control my breathing. An automated messaging system wasn’t an impossibility, but I swallowed it down. This place didn’t even have a sign with all the letters on it.
The man who showed up was completely ordinary-looking; young and clean-shaven, wearing a cap and collared shirt.
“Sir, you need to go ba-
“Tell me if you’re a real person.” My appetite plunged with the rest of my stomach. It was the same voice. I couldn’t believe a mouth was really forming those words – it felt like a mime, a trick.
“Sir, please-
“Is this a prank? Are you mentally handicapped? Why can’t you answer my question?”
“Sir-
In a flash of anger, I reached and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. Half of his torso bared the cold as I brought him to my window, inches away. He didn’t flail, only letting out a terrified yelp and whipping his temple into the wall, making his hat fall and the withered frame bang upwards in its hinges. His face was red instantly, eyes wet, fixed on the group of people about to cross the road. I was so surprised, I just held him there for a moment longer, then shoved him back into the building and put my foot down, sliding, going so quickly that I skimmed the curb long enough for sparks to form.
My heart was racing too fast for me to move as I got to my apartment complex. I stayed in the car for hours, staring at my door on the third floor until I passed out. When I woke up with the indentation of a seatbelt on my forehead, it was time to go to work.
Little changed in the office now the homunculus had gone. I picked up some reclusive habits, dropping hobbies, tuning in to online spheres. An immense amount of news was suddenly arising, most notably a series of incidents affecting the rest of the world. Oil spills. Fires. Train derailments. Factory failures. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost and even more missing or injured. Heartbroken tributes and international respects paid. It was a lot to take in, so much info flying around. So many situations to monitor. It must’ve been weighing on my performance, because I was demoted from solving issues via phone calls to the texting system exclusively. That meant an influx of trolls, scammers, and generally unsavoury individuals.
Night came miraculously soon on the last day before Christmas break, after I skipped lunch to continue monologuing an array of answers to strangers. As I was closing apps, I noticed an unseen email:
“BEHIND SCREEN
MY OWN DESIGN
SEE THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
-ALAN”
Pulling out the monitor caused a sleek, black, rounded device to dislodge. Despite the signature, the email sender column was completely blank, which raised my suspicions. I pocketed the gadget, got up, and surveyed the room; no-one about my desk, as per usual. A short walk to the main area revealed a napping Rob, however. With the amount of medication he was on, staying conscious into the evening on top of a bad sleep was a rare occurrence.
He had fallen asleep to The Thing on his computer, being an amateur horror junkie. A stringy pair of headphones led his ears to the speakers. I took the opportunity to tab out of whatever streaming service he had installed – on the way, I encountered a messaging app. From what I could glean, he was in several detailed conversations with chatbots represented by varying female characters. I tried not to ponder the ramifications of that as I accessed his most recently sent emails. Nothing in our history.
He began to stir, so I tabbed back into the movie.
“Can you turn that off? I’m going home.” He yawned and pulled his hands down his face, streaky red lines marking the undersides of his eyeballs.
I showed him what I’d found. “Any idea?”
He turned it a few times and gave it a shake. Sliding the groove against his palm had no result.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Off Alan.”
“Who?”
“One of my bosses. Or one of Janette’s bosses. Senior guy.”
He tossed it to me and started gathering his things. “Decoration. Some idiot designer’s idea of a bauble. Or you gotta crack into it, like a puzzle, or an ARG! Hey, that’d be cool, right?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Alan left me a note. Said he made it, said I should, ‘see the forest for the trees’.”
“Figures. I mean, you’re always worrying about the tiny stuff.”
“Is that what he meant, though?”
Rob pulled on a jacket and began walking to the elevator. Quickly, I felt my side for the document. Not there.
“Shit…I…Alan must have been here.”
“What?”
“I had a file of his in my pocket and it’s gone and-
“Most of the senior staff put out their leave a week ago. He’ll be on an island in the Bahamas. Not in this shithole.”
“Did he go on my computer?”
“Are you listening to yourself?” Rob’s voice had travelled higher. “You need to lay off the juice, man. Nobody’s going on your computer or fishing through your pockets. You wanna know what happened? You got a Christmas gift, okay? Enjoy it. Stop looking for grinches around every corner. If you’ll excuse me, I need to leave. I have a stream to be watching.”
The elevator doors closed between us. I sighed and walked to the device. Its two-toned, seamless design reminded me of the products I was paid to shill all day. Thankfully, that day had turned to night. My main new concern was bumping into Janette; based off an overheard conversation, I knew she was waiting to ask me my next available date for a personal meeting. Summarily, I devised an alternative exit route which involved hugging the outermost edge of the building. It led me to another encounter with the janitor, as well as his apprentice, positioning a sheath of metal to patch up a hole in the fence.
“Some drunk biker dickhead crashed, I think,” he said to me. “Got a replacement coming in. What you doing out here, anyway? You lost something?”
“My car.” I laughed weakly but neither of the pair reciprocated.
“Alright, well, stay safe.”
He turned and barked an order to his younger assistant. The boy was slack-jawed and dopey-looking, in need of a smaller high-vis and a tissue. Once I’d passed them, I was greeted by the sight of a flurry of driverless vehicles attempting to leave by the road out of the office. They were stuck in a cycle of inching closer and further, frustratingly wary of one another. The line slithered like a pulsating row of Roombas. In the distance, a cacophony of horns could be heard, so faint and ongoing, they practically blended in with the ambience. Knowing this was a glitch that’d occurred in earlier months, I sat in my motionless car and killed the time by going on Tinder.
Spending Christmas alone, I deduced, had noticeably affected my mood. Rather than put myself on television, venture into a bar, or join the church, I decided to try online dating to brush off the rust. A few new-ish photos and a week of swiping had finally resulted in progress: a date with a girl named Cynthia. She immediately stuck out to me when I recognised her main profile photo – it had been taken at a park I lived next to. We started with that, and just went on and on. She was witty, and as interested in the humanities as myself, knowledgeable on a whole load of topics. There was some debate on the destination because she wanted to “stretch her legs” and do an outdoorsy activity. I was hesitant, what with the smog that’d descended upon the city. The weather reporters were struggling to pinpoint which foreign crisis it had blown in from, and a lot of countries blamed each other. Wherever it may have originated, I wouldn’t be driving an hour out into the country like a serial killer to avoid it.
I agreed to her resulting proposal of visiting an art gallery in the city centre, followed by a well-received restaurant. Not since my adolescence had I frequented the place, even though I’d always meant to. Cynthia mentioned that her work was featured there as a child, but she’d given up the hobby in favour of learning history at university. Guiltily, I did spend slightly too much time looking up information relevant to her favourite ‘pre-enlightenment’ eras. My nerves were on fire; I’d shaved, got my hair cut, and dressed sharply. Still, the flat was such a mess, I left knowing I’d have to crash at hers if the option became available.
Arriving a minute early, I waited patiently at the tall entrance gates. My phone was buzzing with notifications regarding a trivial internet feud, vibrating like it hated the confines of my jacket. Shambling homeless people occupied the nearby bus station. One was unconscious, slumped over several seats while his arms drooped to the ground at either side. I pictured how he’d appear were the support invisible – transcendental, I supposed, as if he was being raptured. A stomach full of butterflies had me considering lighting a smoke, a recently picked-up habit. Then I received a tap and zap to my shoulder, making me flinch.
“Oh, sorry, did I shock you? It’s these metal banisters they have around here, they’re so static-y.”
Behind me, she was bundled in a padded coat with a flap hiding her mouth. Errant whirlwinds of dust were hovering, providing a tickling cough if you got caught.
“Ah, nothing wrong with keeping me on my toes. Just avoid the face.”
Cynthia snickered as we went inside the building. I disapproved of the place’s brutalist arrangements, its flat concrete corners flanked by towering support beams whichever way you looked. She was all about that kind of thing. It was straight to the modern exhibit to ponder stuff made by the trendy artists, which I could not hide my bafflement or amusement of. The randomicity of the material had me believing they were coasting on a wave of irony I had no desire to investigate. “You said you weren’t one of those people who thought art had to be old or beautiful,” she mused to me. She was right, but the fact was undercut by her proximity to the carcass of a rotting watermelon stuck to the ceiling by a congealed string of chewed-up gum. “My Lunch”, the piece was called.
Then came a trip through the annals of time. Together, a few intricate portraits and events impressed. The rooms felt cold and stoic with only the odd masked wanderer for company. Me and Cynthia discussed our ideas at a decent volume when we came to a section dedicated to the industrial revolution. In front of us was a painting from 1812 – a man in a hat and blue gown, armed with a dagger, stood victoriously before a burning building. “The Leader of the Luddites,” Cynthia read aloud. “You know these guys, right?”
“I think so. They were the original ragers against the machine.”
She snickered. “If they got their way, we’d all still be living on farms. Imagine that.”
“You ever visited a farm?”
“Once, a long while ago. Don’t remember it.”
“My grandpa had one. Could be the genes, but I understand where this man was coming from, y’know.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, well, it would’ve been hard to comprehend the scale at which these inventions changed lives. A shock to the system like that will always end up leaving folks behind. Maybe these people saw a day where humans would never be employed. A simple life of labour doesn’t sound too bad in comparison.”
“Okay, but having everybody do that? If they were hellbent on the survivalist stuff, they should’ve gone off into the woods on their own. Start a religion, or a cult.”
I exhaled sharply from my nose. “What about Ned Ludd? You have to respect him at some basic level. The man smashed something so passionately that we remember it centuries later.”
She laughed, the first I’d heard her properly do it. It was thin, punctuated by a long wheeze at its apex.
“Next time we should go to one of those rage rooms. Then you can show me how a Ludder does it.”
Posing like Ludd, I put on a comically serious expression. She laughed again, louder, and leant forwards into my arm. The touch of her skin was cool and delicate, matching its pale hue. I grinned and turned to accommodate it, facing the rest of the exhibit. As soon as my eyes were cast to the far wall, a figure darted around the corner. The inhuman speed had induced a blur; it wasn’t possible to build up so much velocity from a standing position, enough to only linger on the edge of my vision. I gasped, so Cynthia stood up straight and looked at me uncertainly.
“What?”
“It’s, uh…that painting is so striking.”
It was a wide angle of five people sat in cages atop varying plinths. Truthfully, I hadn’t gotten to viewing it until then, and her coy face suggested she knew. Unease washed over me as we walked to the main lobby, but I was trying desperately to shrug it off, wary of bursting her bubbly exterior.
She pulled me into the moment by examining a sign above an archway. It went on to a recently constructed part of the building. The text printed on the wall in Arial read “FLATTERY: BY OLLIE AINKINS”.
“Oh, no way! I didn’t know this would be here!”
“So, this exhibit is special because…”
“It’s by this cool animal trainer guy who’s on tour. His work is put together by what he raises.”
The corridor ceiling sloped upwards into a square room with an open skylight. I started to realise the amount of time that had passed as I gazed at its starless, unmoving grey. She had led us fully into the space now, where a plethora of landscapes were depicted.
“This is really all done by animals?” I was willing to look past the sloppy aspects of the paintwork if so – without context, the level on show seemed university-grade. Better than my own, though, and admirable to an extent.
“Yes.”
“Then why aren’t they credited?”
I pointed at a label attached to one frame, which bordered the view from a mountain overlook brushed in oils. It gave a brief description of the artwork, then proclaimed, “by Ollie Ainkins”, stamped with a minuscule line drawing of whichever animal was responsible.
“Well, he’s the guy that dedicated his life to bringing up and instructing these creatures. They’re not exactly gonna do much with the credit.”
“If you didn’t know, you might assume otherwise.”
“I’m sure it’s written down somewhere.” She nodded at a work at least ten feet in height. “Look, a monkey did that one!”
Fuelled by Cynthia’s giddy satisfaction, we painstakingly acknowledged each piece. I feigned reverence, none very distinguishable from whatever the last contained, no doubt an aerial view incorporating the same pattern of strokes. When she finally tired, she suggested we stop and rest at the adjourning gallery café rather than trek to the restaurant, only for us to discover that all available locations had closed and we were being kicked out. The chill in the air told me they’d switched the heating off early. She shivered and clung onto me as we passed through the gates again, out into the night where it was now too dark to see any tramps in the vicinity.
“Time flies…” she said.
“Yeah.” Idiotically, I was distracted by fitful bursts of tires squealing in the city, echoing in alleys, and the overlapping din of sirens. Stingers of anxiety.
“Can I ask you a stupid question?”
She cocked her head as if she was greatly amused, anticipating.
“Does it ever feel like the world is ending?”
It felt so dumb coming out of my mouth that I wouldn’t have blamed her for writing me off right there and then. But her face didn’t screw up as she seemed to genuinely chew on my words. It ended up on a sly corner smile.
“Can I ask you a stupid question?”
“Go ahead.”
“What’s that cologne you’ve got on?”
She pulled me in and pressed her lips around mine. It was warm, tender, and fleeting – we were inches apart once she ended it.
“I’ll get a cab,” she whispered.
“To yours?”
The hesitation registered. “Y-yeah,” was all she came out with. She must've had the app ready, because a driverless car skidded out of an empty parking garage and zoomed towards us. She led me inside and we began to kiss again, not ceasing for the entire five-minute ride.
“Still feel like the world’s ending?” she asked me as she unlocked her apartment. Letting the crisp air cool my flushed cheeks, I couldn’t deny her. We had delved into a building overlooking terraced rows of homes in suburbia – not a bad neighbourhood, but not exactly characterful. New builds, if I remember correctly.
Cynthia’s hall was filled with a welcoming heat. “Just gonna get changed,” she said, then slipped into her bedroom. I slouched and gathered myself. The décor was minimal, as if she was preserving the elegance of the pristine, powder-white walls that made up the place. Brown wooden furnishings held appropriately distanced vases, glassware, and books in the lounge/dining area. It was cosy enough to be mistaken for a fancy hotel suite, and smelled like fresh clothes, too. Only the doorway alcove had broken free from the restrictive aesthetic, featuring several ornaments. The theme was Ancient Greek; even without the name ‘Hephaestus’ carved into the bottom of a miniature statue, a hanging collage of Mount Olympus leaning against the window jogged my memory. Candles in trays on either side almost gave it the look of a shrine.
Part of me felt admonishment for being nosey and turning my attention to the surrounding bookshelves, but it was overpowered by that same disquietude rearing its head. I wanted to let go, except my eyes were telling me something was very wrong. My brain just hadn’t caught up yet.
Was it the picture frames?
I selected one at random and brought it into the light of the indented ceiling bulb. It was a large, grey-haired woman and a girl who had a passing resemblance to Cynthia. A cousin with polydactyly, by the look of the gnarled end of her arm, which bore extra fingers. Without meaning to sound rude, the older lady wasn’t much better off, her grimaced face inset by prominent wrinkles and liver spots. The lower portion of the image showed an odd-legged chair supporting her body.
The realisation hit me like a freight train. It’d been creeping up on me, but I think the square and round legs of the seat were what tipped me off for good.
Both of these people were fake.
Chipped glass broke in the frame. It hit the shelf and I grabbed another. A woman with Cynthia’s red bob, and the cheekbones of a plastic surgery addict. The border between her left arm and the smooth curve of her dress was a gradient. On the shelf below, two children (whom she had never brought up) posed as though they were in a school yearbook, but their melted glasses and mismatched uniform logos betrayed them. Every sentimental cliché copied, captured. Digital rendering was my best guess, a form of it, anyway. I wanted to scream. I picked up a book and yelped in terrified disappointment when I saw the pages, every one blank.
Somehow, I perceived the light filtering underneath her bedroom door before I saw it. Its touch was corrosive, dazzling in the way it illuminated but stowing an invisible pain, like each tiny ray was a needle of internal damage. Exotic colours spilled my eyesight in spots, my hands shielding my face. There came a droning whir as I smashed the front door open and fled outside.
The light poured out of the upstairs windows, growing in brightness, invading the sky. I sprinted down as many side-streets as I could take before my lungs gave out and I nearly went to the ground. Although she wasn’t following me, I didn’t feel comfortable enough to stop walking, choking on spit while wrapping a sweaty hand over my phone to uninstall Tinder, and every other social media. I weighed the pros and cons of dropping it into the canal. With how slow the water moved nowadays, anyone committed would be able to fish it back out. What was the end result here? I used to laugh at those people obsessed with stalkers, convinced they were ‘targeted individuals’, but out in the open, I was checking my shoulders like a junkie every chance I got. It was a long walk home past gurgling sewer grates spitting up mist; the weather report was wrong, because now was the time that the smog was beginning to roll in, and I was forced to pull my shirt up over my mouth to keep it out.
My body cried out for rest as I got home. However, the spent remains of my adrenaline spiked again once I witnessed my busted door, the hinges dangling and the cheap wood bent inward. I crouched and envisioned the place devoid of belongings, just the waste remnants of my laziness left, then contemplated throwing myself from the outdoor balcony. Three floors won’t do it, I thought. I’m better than three floors. Instead, I clenched my fists and tiptoed inside, keeping a keen ear.
Jabbering. Low, ceaseless. Voices fought and overlapped. Something was stood in the kitchen, using the dark as cover. In the reflection of a wall-mounted mirror shone that same light, less intense. Its saturation gave it a brilliant twinkle, like sunbeams in a nostalgic childhood memory. The source was a figure taller than my unsuccessful hookup.
A burglary wouldn’t have been this complicated.
I flicked the main wall switch. The first thing I noticed was the chunk of metal fence lodged within its skull, pus and blood dripping from the inflamed wound. Flesh had swollen to a tumour-bulge as it changed constantly, facing away. Now, it simulated bodies and an infinite wardrobe, an all-encompassing cloak that transformed like a fashionista’s fantasy. The process had come close to perfection, but in intervals, it shook fiercely and a burst of defects appeared, skin rippling over clothing.
The light trickled from a slot in the homunculus’ forehead, at its most vibrant where the impact had cracked it open. I snuck closer; one of my hands firmly gripped the bat I kept hung upon the lounge wall, a memento of my high school baseball days. As I lifted it, I heard that same low whirring. Though I’d initially planned to rush the thing, it was anticipating my attack.
“C’mon, you son of a bitch…”
In a single fluid move, its body thrusted forth, and with a crunch, snapped the other way, pushing through itself until it was back to front while the head remained stationary. I was so horrified, I just closed my eyes, bracing for the collision as it lunged toward me and the waist-high bat I held. We went sailing over the dining room table, launching its contents. My breath was taken by some solid block protruding out of the black bin liner I landed upon, but I scrambled to my feet nonetheless, blinded by the light’s intensity and swinging wildly.
An empty apartment. I glanced around rapidly once my vision returned, adamant that this was another one of its gimmicks. Only a humming emitted from underneath the clutter beside me. I dug through it until I came across Alan’s device. The panels it was composed of had jutted outwards half an inch; inside was a softly glowing orb rotating behind a cage. It faded as the noise trailed and the thing shut, letting off a deep tone.
I slumped onto my back, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Staying there for the next twenty-four hours would have suited me well, but I peeled myself upward so that I could barricade the door first. Amongst the unpaid bill warnings and spam advertisements littering the area, a piece of red paper was isolated. I picked it up and unfolded it.
Blacklisted
Leave the city
They no longer need us
-A
The note had been printed. Driving up to the countryside was already on my mind, though sleep had to take priority; I could barely stand without swaying. I collapsed into bed, not even bothering to get changed. It would be my last taste of the grid before having to live off the land someplace rural, or die trying. I drifted off thinking of vindication the night had brought me, along with all of its near-death experiences. Maybe I wasn’t such a pessimist after all.
Knock knock.
8:00am blinked the alarm clock my bleary eyes could just about read. I groaned and lumbered to my feet, feeling sick. The knocks ended with the sound of furniture scraping the floor in the hall, the pointless blockade I’d created now requiring piece-by-piece dismantling. I shifted the desk I’d planted beneath the handle so that the door opened an arm’s width. Outside were two police officers.
“Sir, you’re being placed under arrest for assault. We have CCTV footage of you committing a violent act against a McDonald’s employee.”
The cops saw my bloodied side and called an ambulance, some unnoticed wound having scraped a tear in the fabric. I told them I’d fallen but saw their shifting gazes meet each other’s, obviously doubtful. They waded past garbage, concluding my mental instability when I told them I was being stalked by things that looked like people. Putting on a façade of normality would’ve achieved nothing – I wasn’t an actor. I tried to level with them, but they hadn’t heard any similar reports. Without context, the note and device had no meaning.
Getting sectioned was a speedier process than I recalled. As I waited in my jail cell, I was interviewed by a lineup of doctors and psychiatrists touting endless clipboards, assessing whatever subconscious findings they could glean. New people put me on edge, which didn’t help. There was back pain medicine I was supposed to be taking; that flagged me on their system. One charge of vandalism from when I was a kid…no nearest relative to consult…and I wasn’t confident in my former co-workers to leave a good word.
Schizophrenia was the diagnosis. I was spared a stint in prison for giving an innocent employee a concussion, instead sent to a hospital for the crazies. The neon sign on the front of the enormous patient building spelt ‘NEUROWORKS’, and seeped pink light into my anti-suicide room. ‘Benbezalel’ was the name of the prescription I was supplied – three tablets a day. It was child’s play compared to the cocktail of drugs my peers indulged in. Spending an evening drooling on one of the facility’s sofas was considered a pastime. And none of the staff gave a damn about the smartphones.
It's been six months since I got here. Total resignment has led to my acclimatisation – I’ve convinced myself a restricted life beats a non-existent one. The pills do their fair share to numb away the boringness, the repetition, the monotony. Even when I unlocked temporary leave access, I never took it. What was awaiting me out there? The newspaper told us the world was plunging into a kind of hushed confusion, soaked in the by-products of acid clouds that melted potholes and the fur off the skin of cats. Most foreign governments had been disassembled, and rocket ships were blasting off every other week. To where was a mystery. Public figures stopped showing up to events. Then there stopped being events.
Last week, I was scheduled to have brain surgery done to implant a chip, opting for the procedure as an alternative to electroconvulsive therapy. But no-one came to my room that morning. No-one has come to my room since. And no-one in the entire ward has made a sound. It’s as if the walls of my enclosure have thickened a million times over, except I know the real reason. Why would there be anyone left to check on me?
Hunger and thirst should have already brought my end, but I can’t bring myself to leave. That’s fine; the old world would be better off remembered for what it was, anyway. It’s just…I think the worst is the light. The sun is blinding at all hours. And so is the bulb. Even the brightness of the monitor is agonising. In the space the tissue on my forehead has stretched apart, shadowed by midday dust, I can’t see where one beam begins and another ends.