Plastic Gods Chapters 1 & 2

"Mona": "Aios"

Mona

Mona Blank had formed a sort of alliance with the spider in her shower. She’d gotten used to him being there. He’d never bothered her before. Plus, she’d heard that if you killed a spider that was carrying eggs, the eggs could shoot out everywhere, leaving you with hundreds of little baby spiders to deal with. If he turned out to be a she, that could be a huge problem.

Of course, if the spider were carrying eggs, Mona figured she’d be screwed no matter what. The spider would lay the eggs eventually, and showering amongst hundreds of little baby spiders would be a lot different than showering with just one spider. The safest option would be to trap it in a cup and bring it outside—

Mona suppressed the thought. She didn’t want to get rid of the spider. She liked him. It seemed like he’d gotten pretty used to her, too. The first time she saw him, he stayed completely still until she left the shower and then practically sprinted out of sight when it seemed like she wasn’t looking.

What had stopped her from killing him that day? It probably had something to do with her being naked and vulnerable, her only weapons a bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap. The spider seemed to have the upper hand, somehow. Plus, Mona didn’t like how bugs always tried to escape when you killed them. It made the whole balance of power shift. One second she wielded the power to destroy the thing on impact, and the next, it’d be wriggling away, and as it fell off the wall and onto the floor, it would pull her confident facade right down with it, and then she’d be screaming and stomping her feet, and the damned thing would get away, and then she’d have made herself an enemy, and she wouldn’t relax for the rest of the night because she’d keep seeing spiders out of the corner of her eye. No, it was better to just leave them be, Mona thought, unless you were sure to kill them on the first try.

The next few times Mona met her spider, he crept stealthily into the corner, as far out of sight as he could manage on an all-white backdrop. Eventually, the spider even became accustomed to Mona’s company. He’d crawl wherever he felt like, run across the ceiling right above her head (a habit she wasn’t particularly fond of) and stop to rest right in the middle of the wall, without even taking cover. He seemed to be getting bigger, too.

Today, Mona put her face up really close to him, way closer than she’d ever dared to approach a spider before. She was trying to see what he really looked like. Legs included, he was a bit smaller than a dime. His body was broken up into two halves, one smaller and one larger, like a snowman. His legs were striped, he had two fangs that Mona regretted ever getting close enough to see, and there was a little white dot on the center of his bigger half. She wondered briefly if this meant he was poisonous. She didn’t think so, even if the dot on his back made him look like a miniature black widow. Still, those fangs could probably break skin, should they ever want to.

Mona wasn’t scared of him, though. She might not have been scared even if he were poisonous. It was like she knew he wouldn’t bite her. Maybe he would have on that first day, if she got too close to him while he was playing dead, but not anymore. Didn’t animals only bite when threatened?

Mona could tell that he didn’t perceive her as a threat anymore. He just went about his business uninhibited as she listened to music, moved her arms this way and that, plastered tufts of her fallen-out hair along the walls—his walls, probably, in his mind.

He was right, she thought, in a way. Who spent more time there? Regardless, the spider seemed to accept Mona as a frequent visitor. He didn’t even flinch when she brought her face up to him to study his features. Why would he expect her to suddenly turn on him now? It was like they had a little inter-species friendship going on.

Well, friendship might have been a strong word for it. Mutual understanding, maybe. It wasn’t exactly like it occupied much space in her mind—things of that nature never do. It was buried somewhere deep below, forever knocking at the ceiling but too submerged to ever carry a sound, insulated by rubble and only ever perceived as a vague stirring with no identifiable cause. What was on the forefront of Mona’s mind was that she had to go to work, and that she’d managed to make it through another full morning without any of her real work getting done at all.

Mona didn’t like where she worked. This was what was occupying the most space in her mind as she gathered her stuff in preparation for her daily ten-minute walk to her twenty-minute train ride. It seemed almost too obvious for her to even articulate this fact, a bit like saying “water is wet” or “the sky is blue.”

Of course, she’d heard both of those things refuted before. She’d seen an article before that stated that the sky was actually violet, and that humans only perceive it as blue because of the way that the light hits their eyes. She wondered then if everything in the universe had an “actual” and “perceived” color, and if so, whether the definition of the word “color” would just revert back to what it was before people had come up with the idea of an “actual” color in the first place. She assumed that this must be the case: that “perceived color” would just become the implied meaning of the word “color” unless explicitly stated otherwise, rendering “the sky is blue” a factual statement once again.

She reckoned—rightly—that it was all just semantics. Besides, the sky wasn’t always blue. As Mona opened the door to the outside world to decide whether she needed to wear a sweater, she noticed that the sky was a pale, dull grey.

And the statement that she didn’t like where she worked was just as semantically unsound. She worked in a record store—a small, cramped hole-in-the-wall called Cheap Jerry’s packed with old and new records from every genre of music imaginable. Mona loved places like this. At one point, it had even inspired her.

No, maybe it was more accurate to say that she disliked her job. She wanted to be the person making the records, not the one standing behind the counter of the store that sold them. Still, this wasn’t quite right. The job itself was fine. She enjoyed talking about music, conducting thirty-second assessments of people before helping them pick out their perfect album. Really, it was the quantity of work that she didn’t like, and her position relative to it.

She’d been there for too long. A statement which, too, is relative. She’d been there for three years, which wouldn’t seem like very much at all if it were three years as a singer in a band, but felt soul-crushingly long at her menial job that she aged out of when she graduated high school. There was simply nothing keeping her there besides habit and a resistance to change.

Of course, this was merely her take on the situation, a feeling which commingled with her desire for connection in that buried space beneath her consciousness. In reality, her distaste for change hardly outweighed anyone else’s, and what was really keeping her there was the delicate balance that some human beings like to call “fate.”

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Aios

Above the apartment where Mona Blank lived there were two more floors, and above those floors was a roof, and above that a collection of gases which English-speaking humans such as yourself might call “sky,” and above that (or rather beyond it) was an expansive void without much going on at all. This void was populated only by a massive heat lamp and some magnets to keep everything evenly balanced as the rock atop which Mona’s house was built turned around like a rotisserie.

Beyond all of that was a cubical panel of glass, and beyond that—much, much further than Mona Blank or anyone like her would ever care to imagine—was a room. Atop this room was a series of other rooms, above which was a roof, and above the roof was a collection of gases that you might call a “sky” but which people from this planet called a “deus” (a word which, incidentally, has absolutely no relation to the Latin word for “God”). The room was separated from other rooms by a door, and this door had a nameplate affixed to it. Written on this nameplate was the name “Aios Roe.”

Aios was an academic. This meant he was employed by a university, and this meant he conducted research, published papers on his research, and hosted lectures for other academics and academics-in-training. It also meant that he was looked upon by others who did not understand what he was saying with a certain reverence, considered to be intrinsically superior to the “common public.” What he said was generally accepted as true, and yet he was rarely called upon to say anything at all, and when he was, he was almost certainly misunderstood.

In the time that it took Mona Blank to make breakfast, shower, change, gather her things, and leave her house (a process which took about two of what you would call “hours”), Aios Roe walked into the room which contained the box which contained Mona Blank’s reality, picked a flake of dandruff out of his hair, noticed that he had forgotten his computer, walked out of the room, realized that the computer was actually in his pocket, and then walked back in.

Time moved quicker for humans of Aios’s size than those of Mona’s. It was Thursday in Aios’s world, as it would remain for another seventeen hours. In that time, Mona would live through about forty Thursdays. In fact, Mona had made it through her entire day of work by the time Aios was able to find where he’d put his damned glasses.

For some context, the word ‘computer’ is actually a bit of a misnomer. Aios’ portable communication and calculation device had capabilities which far surpassed anything that you would refer to as a computer. The computer in question was a tiny device connected to a vast interwoven data set for which the closest English equivalent would be ‘Internet.’ It had the capacity to project any desired number of screens, at any desired size, at any desired distance from the user. It responded to its owner’s thoughts, their sounds, their movements.

It was so complex, in fact, that save for a few highly intelligent technicians, almost no one who used these devices had any clue how they worked, including people responsible for their manufacture. If a computer broke, repair was so expensive (and wait times were so long) that it made more sense to just buy a new one.

Aios found his glasses in the same place he always forgot to look. Then he sat down in the same chair in which he always sat and checked in on his planet-in-a-box (which he termed a ‘Microcosm’) just like he did every morning when he first got to work.

Aios’s desired setup typically consisted of three screens. The first displayed the current subject of his interest, and was usually rather large. The second displayed a constant panoramic overview of the entire Microcosm, and was considerably smaller. The final screen was his palm-sized ‘control screen,’ with which he could switch between camera-views and audio-recordings of the Microcosm, and enable, disable, or program each of his cameras.

By the time Aios sat, stretched, and logged onto his computer, Mona Blank was home in her studio apartment in a seat of her own. A notebook was open beside her, and a guitar rested on her leg. She played a few chords shortly and choppily, muting the strings with her hands after each abrupt strum. She was trying to get a ‘feel’ for a song that she was trying to write, but couldn’t. By the time Aios Roe dealt with a momentary lag that often happened when he first started up his computer and surveyed the whole Microcosm for any crises, Mona Blank was gone from her apartment, her notebook left open to a page where she had scribbled a few lyrics, crossed out a few more, and left the rest to be filled in later.

Aios had watched Mona before. In fact, she had recently become the first thing he checked on every morning once his initial survey was finished. She caught his eye one day, while he was searching the Microcosm for that beautiful hollow instrument called a ‘guitar’ that he’d only heard about in myths.

By the time Aios settled in with his computer screen focused on Mona, she was cooking dinner. A strange and foreign music played in the background by a strange machine in which a needle pressed itself up against a large flat disc spinning in place. When he heard her singing along, he slowed down the audio to hear it at ‘adjusted’ speed, so it sounded like he was right there with her.

Aios’s time lagged behind Mona’s considerably; thirty seconds in Aios’s world was approximately three hours in Mona’s. Because of this, watching Mona’s life on the screen was like watching a movie on fast-forward. When he wanted to see and hear her life in ‘normal’ speed, he opened up a fourth screen which displayed a slowed-down view of the desired scene. He’d then manipulate the audio to approximately one two-thousandth of the speed, and he could watch and listen to a conversation or a song at a comprehensible speed while still having constant updates of Mona’s current whereabouts.

The effect was marvelous. He was able to hear her sing along to a song as he watched her eat dinner on her couch, with her eyes affixed to a bulky black box which you would call a ‘television.’ It was still playing when she got bored and picked up a book from the large shelf she had in the corner of the room. It played as she lost focus, put the book down, and poured herself a glass of a red liquid that you would call ‘wine’ into a clear, long-stemmed glass that she grasped loosely with three of her forefingers as she drank. It played as she finished the glass and poured herself another, this time almost all the way to the brim, and as her hand clutched the stem tightly, resigning its former elegance, veins popped out from her wrist to about halfway up her slender forearm. It was still playing when she sat back down with her guitar, the glass nearly empty, and braced herself with her fingers on the strings and the pick in her hand, before pausing to finish the rest of the wine in one steady gulp.

At this point Aios abruptly updated his audio and third screen to ‘real-time’ and then slowed them down one two-thousandths yet again. He heard her strum a few chords—strange, sad chords, different from the bright-sounding ones he usually heard her play. She soon found her rhythm—an edgy, repetitive rhythm, alternating between just two chords. She messed up at first, had to stop a few times and gather her thoughts. Her mind often worked faster than her fingers, it seemed.

After a few moments, she continued to play. She let herself get lost in the music this time. Her face curled up in focus. Her large brown eyes were pressed closed, and the motion of her arm broadened. She started to sing, and as the same two chords boomed in Aios’s ear, he heard Mona’s soul transcribed in the vibrato of her voice and the slight variations in how she strummed her instrument.

Then Mona put her guitar down and started scribbling something in the notebook that was still resting on the arm of the couch. Aios zoomed in on the notebook, as far in on the page as he could manage while still keeping all of the words in frame, and took a still image of the screen. The words before him were becoming somewhat intelligible to him—he was picking up Mona’s language fast. He could already follow a conversation, and soon, he’d be able to read, too.

Aios fast-forwarded to real-time again. Mona had poured herself another shallow glass and managed to drink half of it in her bed before falling asleep with a book face-down on her stomach. She’d trailed off pretty soon after recording the idea in her notebook. The pause had interrupted her flow; she made a series of mistakes, and then decided that she’d had enough for the night. Mona was satisfied, though. She’d gotten more done than she had in a while. She had the seeds for a new song.

Aios was satisfied, too. He had pressed the ‘archive’ button on his computer as soon as Mona started playing music, and pressed the same button again at the end of it. Now, a slowed-down clip of that moment in Mona’s life was saved onto his computer, isolated from the other masses of data. It was an impossibility—a piece of a genre of music long-dead, which he could listen to whenever he wanted.

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