Autumn Christian's Blog, page 6

The Persona

“There is more truth in the mask we wear, in the game we play, the fiction we obey and follow, than in what is concealed beneath the mask.” - Slavoj Žižek

When people say that you should be authentic online, what they usually mean is that you should be interesting.

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Most people aren't that interesting. The majority of life is spent in a kind of mundane routine just to make sure we are still alive, punctuated by small moments of ecstasy and terror. Sometimes you'll go on a rollercoaster or have sex with a stranger, but most of the time you're showering, eating, working, walking on a treadmill. Despite our radical ideas or fantasies most of our lives are fairly similar. People don't want to follow you online because you're like everyone else. To be like everyone else is to be forgotten. If you're going to be boring you might as well not exist.

Enter the online persona.

You can be anyone you want online. You can exaggerate the best (or worst) parts of your personality. You can narrow your life down to a particular aesthetic, a particular series of shining moments. You can become the woman who exists behind a gleaming counter, hair freshly curled, designing extravagant wedding cakes with a soft smile that never wavers. You can become the dissident contrarian - no face except for a cartoon avatar - a projection of everyone's hedonistic desires to be able to say whatever they want without any real consequences. You can become the gothic siren. The meticulous writer. The out of control diva. The cool fashionista. The intellectual expert.

You can become mythic. Mythological. Larger than life. When people think of Abraham Lincoln or Genghis Khan they don't usually imagine them putting on their socks or burning their tongues on too-hot soup. They see fire, and sulfur, and dark eyes, memorial statues, a landscape forever transformed, and a legend that persists long after even their ghosts have perished.

So should it be the same with your persona. Forget authentic. Authentic people burn their tongues on soup or forget to buy toilet paper. People shouldn't be able to imagine you sitting down at their dinner table, eating the same food, sharing the same thoughts. You're as much fiction as reality. That's what a legend is, and you want to be a legend. 

Maybe.

Before I was on social media I had an alter ego. A persona. My ex-girlfriend called her "Nameless," and the name stuck. (Nameless was a lot of the inspiration for "Vanessa" in my story A Human Rupture.) Autumn was a shy girl who couldn't look people in the eyes, with a bow-bent back, furtive glasses. Autumn had a rabbit mentality. Autumn didn't know how to enjoy herself. She was fresh out of braces, and couldn't keep her glasses on without smearing the lens.

Nameless was who I imagined I wanted myself to be. She was witty, and cruel, and alluring. She could have a conversation with anyone, and was as liable to kiss them as to hurt them. She could tumble in and out of bedrooms, tiptoeing on jagged slices of moonlight, her stomach empty of everything except the vodka burning a hole into the bottom.

Or so I thought. I couldn't see that Nameless was a joke, a facsimile of a human being. And even when Nameless had someone who adored her, it didn't feel satisfying, because it wasn't me.

I was trapped just underneath the skin. They didn't like Autumn. They didn't even like Nameless. They liked a fantasy constructed to try to bridge the gap between who I was and what I thought other people desired.

I didn't think I was good enough. Nameless knew I wasn't good enough. Every victory she signed her name on was like a wound. I bled out any good feeling. The cost of getting what I wanted was getting nothing at all.

By the time I signed onto social media I understood what it meant to have a persona, and how it could disrupt and warp you. It was a barrier between you and the real self that meant not only consequence, but reward, was often denied to you.

And since the persona wasn't real, it didn't transform like a normal person would. I've seen this with many writers over the years. They want to stand out and so they create a "schtick" that becomes popular - a particular aesthetic, character, or way of talking. But the persona doesn't really adapt. Instead, it often exaggerates. It becomes a parody of itself. The writer tries to one-up themselves but doesn't have the same kind of honest interaction that would enable a true transformation.

That or it remains flat and unchanging over the years until it reveals itself to be what it actually is - a product. More akin to a box of Froot Loops than an individual.

Many people can have an online presence that's separate from their life. They recognize that it's just a business or a public facing front. They don't feel any attachment or "identity" surrounding that brand. This works fine for most businesses and companies that are trying to sell products.

It gets more complicated when you're trying to sell yourself. When you want to portray yourself either as an artist or an intellectual, someone interesting enough to be followed for personality alone. There are enough stories of Instagram models and Twitter influencers and Youtubers that sob when the lights are off, when the makeup has been brushed away, when the filters are deactivated. The pressure of appearing perfect, not just as a character, but as the character that is you, becomes all-encompassing.

It got to the point where I couldn't escape Nameless. Nameless stopped being something I could control. She consumed my thoughts until I curled into the shape of her as I slept.

Maybe you're one of the people lucky or clever enough to not have that problem. Maybe you can check out of your online persona and become someone else without any cognitive dissonance or overlap. Once the computer is closed, the persona is closed too.

Or maybe you don't recognize that each falsehood has a cost, that a devil's bargain is made not with one contract, but in inches, line by line, until you can't remember a life where you didn't belong to the dark agreement you signed.

Maybe what started out as a funny joke becomes a way of life. You tried to be a little darker, a little sadder, a little edgier, and once you found people responded to that you nose-dived into the worst aspects of yourself.

Maybe you'll find that victory doesn't feel like victory when it doesn't seem to belong to you. That when you turn off the computer you can't turn off the persona. That it follows you, from the office to the grocery store to the bar.

Maybe you'll find that the mask you put on, for better or worse, has become your face.

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I Only Thought I Was Ugly Because I Was Ugly

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.” ― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

This is what it's like to ruin a body I worked so hard for.

I used to stare in the mirror and pinch the places where I wished I could forbid fat to grow. I wanted to be so thin that a frozen palace could grow in the space between my heart and my collarbones. I'd be the kind of girl that only looked good in photographs. A cigarette and iced Americano kind of girl, with glitter tights and low blood pressure, a perpetual headache, dry spots underneath my eyes, red marks from my underwear that never seemed to go away. We had the technology to airbrush the bad skin away, and underneath neon lights I could become a kind of art object.

I never could quite get thin enough. Every time I looked in the mirror I was uglier. That wasn't a flaw, though, that was by design. I had built a body to torment myself. If I had white fur like a poodle I would've stained it yellow with my tears.

I only thought I looked ugly because I was ugly. I still can't stand to look at a lot of photographs of myself from several years ago. If you feel worthless it changes the way you hold the muscles in your face. Even when I recovered the weight I carried the sadness in my eyes and the tilt of my mouth.

I couldn't imagine getting pregnant. If a doctor offered to tie my tubes for free, I probably would've taken it. Photographs of babies disgusted me. They looked like little worms with trapped eyes, chubby cheeks and dumb faces.

But life itself disgusted me. I sneered at people with a healthy amount of body weight, who enjoyed smoothie bowls and nice restaurants without counting the calories, who went to escape rooms and on bike rides and didn't have boyfriends who cheated on them and got excited by simple and beautiful things.

Before I got pregnant I was the healthiest I'd ever been in my life. I'd been a normal weight for years but getting off birth control cleared my face up, seemed to bring beauty back to my face. I put on muscle mass and lost fat. I'd gotten extremely good at eating a healthy diet and was mostly down to one meal a day, but I didn't spiral if I ate a little extra.

More than that I felt excited for the future. It no longer felt like just another hole to collapse into.

People say that pregnancy ruins your body. Although that's obviously untrue for the majority, as most women bounce back, it's still a shock to see my own reflection with a 7 month old fetus inside of me. I've gained over forty pounds. I've got fat in places I never had it before. I have to wear Spanx or my thighs rub together and I get chafing. My feet have swelled so that most of my shoes don't fit me anymore. I've got stretch marks on my underbelly. My hips start to hurt if I stand or walk for any length of time. I've got a little melasma from the sun on my cheeks. I no longer recognize my chubby face or my huge breasts with dark and wide areolas.

My anorexic self would be horrified. If I'd gotten pregnant even 4 or 5 years ago I would've descended into an abyss of self loathing.

But now? Even with all these body changes, I don't feel ugly, even though objectively I recognize I'm not as beautiful as before. Maybe it's because I haven't "let myself go." I'm creating another human, and that requires you to take on a different shape.

And maybe it's because I don't desire to be a frozen palace anymore, cold and unchanging, like my body is its own private layer of hell.

The frozen palace isn't real. It's a mansion of stunted growth. It's illusion and deception. Starvation eats at your bones and it eats at your heart and it drives you into a psychosis that means as you stare up into the resplendent chandelier of your own self-annihilation you don't realize you're looking into the demonic mouth of entropy.

Your body is on a path toward change regardless of if you decide to have a baby or not. All good things must come to an end. The lines and the cracks will form.

Eternal beauty isn't a lie. But you don't get to have it without changing, adapting, allowing it to pour into the creation around you. There's no vampiric talisman to clutch. It has to seep into the universe or it'll be lost forever.

This doesn't feel like ruin. It feels like transformation. Nothing beautiful can be created without something being destroyed. Nothing worth having is earned without loss.

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8 Little Whitepills To Inoculate Against Doom

“It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

The apocalypse is an easy sell.

If you feel hopeless you'd probably welcome the end.

This isn't anything new. Every generation thinks it's coming to the end of the line, that it's reached the place where the water is starting to recede on the shoreline. Ever since culture has existed doom has been used to market ideas, products, revolutions. If you have no hope then you're an easy target for anyone who wants to use you for their cause. If you believe nothing good can exist then it's easy to inspire you to tear it all down. Then that old world can be replaced with whatever new world is being proposed.

You want to keep your mind. You want to keep your soul. You want to know what causes you should devote yourself, and what only wants to suck all the resources out of you because you're desperate. These whitepills will inoculate you against the bullshit. They'll inspire you to choose your own path. They'll help you keep a sound mind, sound body, and an intact conscience.

1. Go Outside

Don't roll your eyes. The human animal isn't above the material needs of the flesh.

This is the most obvious but most important little whitepill. You should be trying to get some sunlight at least every day, even if it's in your backyard or on a balcony outside your apartment. Ideally you should be leaving your house, walking the streets, hiking, swimming, going where other people are. You want to inundate yourself with atmosphere and experience.

If you see the world for how it really is it's difficult for other people to tell you what you should be seeing. The Internet is a mythological wasteland of drama. It's an epic battle of good and evil where the enemy must be hunted down and eliminated. It saturates you with doom, because doom gets clicks, and optimism is boring. It's easy to get twisted into knots thinking there are innumerable problems that you need to solve.

The easiest way to figure out if something is actually a problem? If it's a real problem, it won't go away if you stop thinking about.

When you turn away from the screen and let the sun fall onto your face and shoulders it tends to illuminate everything that's actually important. Not to mention the vitamin D.

Working out, eating healthy, and maintaining good relationships also falls in this category. But I'd say out of all this, the sunlight that falls upon the face of reality is the most important thing you should be exposing yourself to.

2. Recognize That Everyone Else is Just Searching for Happiness

It's easier to hate someone if you think they're evil. It's easy to inspire people to violence, rage, vitriol, if they believe that they're united against a corrupting force. Politicians have been using this fact for thousands of years. It's harder to kill someone that you know is like you. They need to become monstrous in your mind.

Dehumanizing language is just one aspect of this, like calling political opponents "NPCs." If you can strip someone of their humanness then all of your attacks against them will be justified.

We tend to attribute corrupt personalities and dark motivation to other people while forgiving ourselves for the same actions. If someone cuts us off in traffic we imagine that they're stupid or incompetent. If we did the same thing ourselves we justify that we were tired or had a bad day.

In social psychology this is called the fundamental attribution error. We overestimate people's personality and underestimate the situation or context.

The easiest way to convince yourself to commit evil is by believing those around you are evil. It's difficult to feel hatred if you recognize that even people you disagree with are just human beings trying to find the best way to achieve happiness.

You're not alone. You're not surrounded by a sea of enemies. Those people that disagree with you are just people. Everyone around you is trying to fumble toward enlightenment.

3. Your Body is The Heuristic

Sometimes being an intelligent person can make you really stupid. You tend to overationalize or rely on textbooks and theory to tell you how to feel. You're also often surrounded by other intelligent people who have a certain theoretical framework for how other human beings should live and behave.

Except the body doesn't lie. You can't override your base instincts with prefrontal cortex rationalization. People can convince themselves to starve but their bodies will suffer the consequences. In the same way they can convince themselves that happiness is attained by whatever theoretical framework of life they've created, but they will still be prone to depression, suicidal ideation, and panic attack.

Ask yourself: Have you really figured out the way, the truth, and the light? And if that's true, why is your primary emotion anger and irritability?

While it may be true that "Facts don't care about your feelings," your feelings are also facts in themselves. Whenever you do something explore how you feel, both your mind and your body. A chili dog may seem tasty in the moment but leave you feeling bloated, tired, and gross afterward. Your "dream job" may seem good on paper, but it's driving you to need antidepressants and alcohol to cope. You may think your girlfriend is wonderful but spending time with her tends to leave you feeling sad and drained.

Your body has been created by millions of years of evolution. Your rational brain is relatively new in comparison. If you're feeling lost and confused your body can become a compass to show you in which direction you can start moving.

4. Free Will is Real

One of my most unpopular opinions, and the one I've gotten the most backlash on, is that people can do things to change their current situation and improve their own happiness.

In the depths of my depression I experienced this myself. If my husband suggested that maybe I could be doing something differently I'd feel pure, blind rage. How dare he suggest that maybe I was doing something wrong? This was all outside of my control.

Well I found out it wasn't outside of my control, and once I started taking responsibility for my well-being my mental health improved dramatically. I went from a suicidal, anorexic, alcoholic mess to a mostly functioning being. Not because I got therapy or took pills, but because I took control of my own life.

What I've come to learn is that the mind has its own psychological defense systems. When the mind is encountered with an idea that it finds dangerous to its well-being it will react with rage, defensiveness, lashing out, shutting down, and even violence. Even if the idea is a good one. Even if your life would be improved.

I'm often told I'm "lucky" to have the advantages I do and for a long time I believed that luck was the main component. I was born with a healthy body, a healthy mind, in a country that didn't oppress women or free speech, with relatively free economic opportunities.

Yet I've seen people get the same opportunities I've had and squander them. They let their own rage, bitterness, sadness, laziness, or lack of care let those opportunities slip away from them. They lose good jobs. They don't follow up. They fail to maintain relationships. They pick life partners that don't support their dreams. They make little concessions to their own happiness and inch by inch, year by year, find themselves living a life they never wanted.

It doesn't matter if free will "really" exists. At the end of the day, who fucking cares? You were built to exist as an agent that at least has the illusion of free will.

And the more you exercise that free will to improve your life, the more of it you'll seem to have.

5. No Matter What You Do You Contribute to Humanity's Wellbeing

We are not just ourselves. We comprise a system of every human being in existence.

Humanity is like a great machine. It runs on evolutionary principles. The good ideas survive and the bad ideas die. We don't have to be particularly smart to survive, we just have to keep replicating, over and over again, until we find what sticks.

You can do a lot of things to make life worse for others. You can be a Minister of Propaganda who casually ruins people lives with a gesture or a whim or a tax accountant who regularly commits fraud to line his own pockets.

But each time someone makes an error it helps others learn how to protect and guard against continued error. With each act of evil, society only improves over time.

Even if you're trying to do something and you fail you'll serve as a warning to others. Even if you contribute to an awful atrocity you'll provide the rest of us with information on how to keep it from happening again. If you do something truly stupid and take yourself out of the gene pool you're improving the overall quality of life.

We don't always know how something goes until it goes wrong. So even if it sucks to be a failure case, you can take comfort in the fact that each failure was necessary on the path toward success, and that our future children may live in a better world.

6. If There Wasn't an Answer, You Wouldn't even Be Able to Formulate The Question

Human beings are object oriented creatures. We can’t process any information in our environment in a way that doesn’t relate to our own survival. That’s why we can look at a tree and see a shelter, or look up and see a bird and desire to survive.

This is necessary because the amount of data in reality is infinite. In order to function at all we need to restrict the flow of information to what’s integral and important.

That means that question that gnaws at you at night, that hurts and haunts you? Whether it be “What’s the purpose of my life?” or “How do I find happiness?”, there’s an answer out there. Maybe the resources aren’t available for you to find it right now, but the answer exists. It took thousands of years to walk on the moon but we figured out a way to do it. And questions right now that seem impossible to answer will one day be commonplace knowledge.

If there wasn’t an answer, you wouldn’t be able to comprehend the question. The question would be so far outside of your understanding it wouldn’t even occur to you.

7. Music Exists

The Sibelius Violin Concerto with Maxim Vengerov never ceases to make me happy to be a human being and appreciate that particular moment of existence. Music is an expression of the inexpressible.

8. Sometimes The Only Thing Stopping You is the Story You Tell Yourself

Narrative is the vehicle of consciousness, and narrative is what allows us to move through space and time with the awareness of our own self. Each of us has a "story" that we tell about ourselves which is as integral to our existence as breathing, eating, and sleeping.

But this story we tell ourselves isn't "real." Sure, it's probably be comprised of facts and things that actually happened in the past, but we have to pick a very small subset of information out of a near infinite data stream around us to formulate the story.

This story often feels immutable and unchangeable. We've gotten so used to the story that we've mistaken it for the truth about ourselves, and we move about the world as if this is the case.

June tells herself that she is a 38 year old single mother who can't find a man because she's too old. Mary tells herself that she's a hopeless failed writer because she's disabled and never got an MFA. Terry says that because of childhood abuse he can never have a healthy relationship, so he tries to content himself with living alone even though it makes him unhappy.

These are just stories.

And a story can be changed.

If you don't like something about your life ask yourself the kind of story you're telling yourself about your life and the world around you.

Your existence is more malleable than you might think. You can learn to transform that wall inside of yourself into a door.

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All of Existence Converges to Make Music

“A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.”
― Carl Sandburg

Dear Baby Samantha,

I keep having dreams of holding you and it feels like waking up for the first time.

9 months feels like a long time to carry another human being inside you. But my body isn’t just growing you, you’re changing too. My body is becoming engorged with blood. My heart beats faster. The hormones make my head swell. Now when I look at a newborn baby or a bunny rabbit or a bluebird alighting on the fence I hear a symphony inside my head.

People have told me that I’m going to regret you. That you’re going to be a mistake. How can a mistake sing like this? How can a mistake make the sky so blue that it hurts my eyes, make me feel love for the smallest heartbeat? I listen to the cicadas outside singing, a call and return, and I think my body is just working to create another part of the pattern. 

All of existence is converging to make music. 

At 29 weeks you actually look like a human being. You’ve lost the appearance of a little embryonic skeleton, lost your flippers and your little beady alien head. You’ve got eyelashes and a nervous system and I can feel your rhythmic hiccups and sporadic kicks inside me.

With each day that passes I fall in love with a feeling that used to be unfamiliar to me.

I used to hate sentimental crap like this, but your mom is a writer. Language is the best thing she knows how to do. Maybe you’ll find this letter gross and obnoxious, but maybe you’ll also appreciate it when you’re a little older. 

Or maybe I only hate sentimentality because I was raised to believe that any good feeling only existed so that it’d hurt more when it disappeared. Presents were wrapped under the Christmas tree not to bring me joy, but as a test to prove my loyalty, and there was always hell to pay if I wasn’t grateful enough, not excited enough.

Not enough.

I thought I understood love the first time I met a boy in the woods, when I felt the branches scraping against my shoulders and the chill against my throat. The street was devoured in the foliage so it could have been any time, any place, lost in the swallowing dimension of time away from streets and cities and the math homework I still needed to do.

When I closed my eyes he said my name like he needed me and the sound became nature itself. Autumn. I’d never known it could be said like that. I’d never known an all-encompassing attention. I’d never felt loved for being who I was.

But that’s nothing compared to the love I feel for you and your family. That young girl in the woods was just a child screaming for attention, who needed someone, anyone, to look at her instead of through her.

My love for you makes me want to take you in my arms and hold you up underneath the moon so the illuminated sky can see how beautiful you are.

I want to take you to the creek so I can see your eyes light up when you feel water for the first time. I want to hold you in the rush and the stream, and see your feet and arms curl at a sensation you’ve remembered, but never experienced.

You’re in my dreams and you’re in my blood and you’re in my brain and that means for the rest of my life, I can’t be anything else but a part of you.

Your father says he’ll fall in love with you when he first sees you, but he still holds my belly and talks to you. “My baby inside a baby.” Before we even knew your name you were wanted. We always knew we’d love you because we made the space you were supposed to fill.

Neither of us thought we’d ever have a child. Or a family. Or any kind of long-lasting, sustaining love. Your dad and I have always had strangely similar histories. It’s like the ways in which we both hurt were both perfectly compatible with each other to learn how to heal.

I was even afraid to love my first dog. As he curled up on the floor, sad and miserable because of his new environment, I’d read him books and hand-feed him kibble and then later be surprised that he’d be excited to see me when I came home. I didn’t know what it meant to feed something until it wanted to return to you.

For years your father and I wouldn’t even keep guns in the house because of suicidal impulses and bad memories. We didn’t trust ourselves, our worst instincts, our dark habits.

A few years ago I asked for a gun for my birthday because I finally felt in control of myself. It’s funny because it was around the same time I realized I wanted a child. I finally had the wherewithal to get everything into order. I knew I had the discipline, the motivation, the self-assertion I needed.

It wasn’t enough to love you. It wasn’t enough to want you.

I needed to know that I could take care of you.

I want to give you a family so that no matter how far you fall, no matter how much you hurt, no matter what dens, alleyways, caverns, labyrinths, or basements you find yourself in - no matter how much you get beaten and hurt - you will always have a home to come back to.

I’m getting your nursery ready. I play classical violin for you so that it makes you kick, and I can’t imagine how beautiful it must be to hear a symphony for the first time. Just a little longer, baby.

It’s almost time to come home.

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Get Your Apocalypse Now

"Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium." - Vasily Grossman, "Life and Fate"

It's always the end of the world somewhere.

Genocide is trendy. We like to look up into the sky and imagine the sun boiling the ocean. The overpopulated cities get swept into the sea, hordes of children clinging to the sides of skyscrapers like life rafts. We fantasize about starving, eating cold paste and old packages of dry Ramen as our babies clutch weakly to breasts that no longer produce any milk. We like to imagine being slaves of corporations who stuff us into pods where we're hooked up to 24/7 infotainment and the taste of steak and the smell of grass becomes a memory, and then a fantasy.

"Who could bring a child into a world like this?" we like to say, while sipping lavender martinis in the back of cool downtown "speakeasies." There's a recession, after all. Rising gas price. COVID. Global warming. Rising tensions between Democrats and Republicans. War in the Ukraine. Overpopulation. As the latest school shooting gets plastered all over the news and the overturning Roe V. Wade triggers abortion bans, women march out into brightly lit streets, carrying signs with red painted hand prints, and declare that in a world like this, it's better to not have been born at all.

Forget the right to choose. The only ethical choice is nothingness. We should die so that the planet should live. Let the moss and the trees grow over the highways and the streets. Let bugs burst out the center of broken computer monitors. It's a good thing that there will nothing sentient left alive to be able to read the names on the gravestones of our best scientists, philosophers, kings, warriors. History should become another abyss.

It’s almost become a bit of a faux pas to be positive about the human race. Being anti-humanity is fashionable and cosmopolitan. It’s what intellectuals do. It’s cool to post Instagram pictures in your latest haul from Dollskill with a caption about how much life sucks.

Genocide doesn't always look like gas chambers and mass graves, polished guns, and bombs, and nuclear war. Sometimes it looks like a woman who sits alone in front of the television day in and day out, eating Indian food she ordered from Postmates as she reassures herself that it's okay she's decided to live in a way that contributes nothing to the world. "Humanity is a cancer," she thinks. "Humanity is a parasite."

Sometimes genocide is a culture that's become so constrained and meaningless that young men and women commit suicide and overdose on opioids by the thousands because death is better than a world that no longer needs them.

Sometimes it's young women convincing themselves that they need to get their tubes tied or to take sterilizing hormones because they hate the way children look, and how children smell, and how children laugh and cry and intrude into their quiet and safe adult world with their impulsivity and demands and requirements for responsibility. They hate children because to them children represent a world outside of themselves, or because they are reminded of their own awful childhoods, or because having a child would mean they'd no longer be only themselves, but that their DNA and their smile and their neuroses and their bad personalities would be transferred into the body of another. They don't realize that being young doesn't last forever, and one day they'll be 50 or 60 and look down at the vast nothingness that their life has become, that they're lonelier than they've been, and they'll die with the knowledge that their skeleton has become fused with a void.

Genocide can feel good. It feels good to hate the world. It feels good to turn your back on everything your ancestors built for you, the cities and the computers and the farms and the power plants, because it means that you're better than all that. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, "Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises." Moral judgment against oneself and others releases dopamine. Judgment and condemnation is a claim to superiority.

When people say humanity is a curse they are usually excluding themselves. They are one of the good ones. They are the ones who truly see life for what it is.

Most people who want the human race to die don't want to be responsible for the death. They don't even want to lose any of the comforts of society. They espouse that we need to "reduce waste" while continuing to eat avocados, buy luxury goods, fly around the world, and throwing parties.

They don't want to lose anything. They want the praise for their philosophy while the generation after them suffers the consequences. They want to sip champagne on a yacht and burn the boat behind them.

At least mass shooters have some kind of conviction when they enact out their philosophy of death and then kill themselves afterwards. They have come to hate existence and have decided the only option is to do their part in snuffing it out.

Meanwhile the intellectuals and the intelligentsia write books about genocide and why the human race should quietly die, while activists write 20 long tweet threads about how they wish they'd been aborted, and musicians scream about the comforts of death. Genocide has become their fashion. Even their compulsory need to talk about death is a part of their life drive. They are talking about death to improve their social standing, prop up their ego, justify themselves and their existence, enact change upon the world. They are encouraging death because they desperately want to live.

They don't hate life. They don't even hate suffering, since many of them are constantly seeking it out.

They hate their parents. They hate their own weak will. They hate the cry of a baby because it's a reminder they can't control everything and what little control they have can't make them happy.

I wonder, did you think of genocide the first time you fell in love? Did you see death blooming in her eyes, and her hair, and the way she laughed at your jokes that weren't funny, and how she took every slight opportunity she could to be close to you? Did life seem like a curse when you caught a whiff of her perfume or your body huddled around your phone waiting for the rush of when she'd call or message you back?

Maybe it's easy to tell yourself now that "None of it mattered." But it mattered to your shaking body, and the pulsing of your heart, and how good it felt to kiss her, and all the fantasies you had of a life where you two could be together. It mattered to a heart that had yet to learn how to break. And even when those memories are gone, and you're gone, the feeling will never go away. It will move like a shuddering pulse, from adult to child, over and over again, joy that is immortal moving through a hungry chain of cells.

Who are you to make the judgment claim that life isn't worth living, just because you've decided that you're unhappy with the architecture of the world you've built for yourself? You feel unhappy so you assume that everyone is unhappy. Stop fooling yourself. You don't want to die. You want the entire planet to feel your pain, to become a little god, letting the black shadow of your tight throat cover the sun. You want someone to transform you into a child again and make it all better.

It's unfortunate that person who needs to make it all better is you.

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Autumn Christian's Rules For Writing

Years ago I wrote a list of my “rules for writing” and I figured it was about time to update. The obvious caveat, of course, is that these are my rules for myself and not for anyone else, and they’re subject to change at any time depending on my whim.

Autumn Christian’s Rules for Writing

Wake up and search for the pulse.

Remember that writing serves life and not the other way around. Being an artist does not make you a little god. You are another one of nature’s servants.

Writing is not a young person’s game. There are no writing prodigies. The only true deadline is death itself.

You are not a factory worker or a blue collar employee. You are an artist. Stop trying to legitimize your profession or humble yourself by comparing it to a regular 9-5 job. Part of an artist’s job is creation, not just production, and to many people that can look like you’re doing nothing. That’s fine. Keep doing nothing. Even when you’re not working the subconscious is.

Writer’s block is real. Stop trying to be clever and say it isn’t.

Bukowski was right. Don’t try.

Don’t “push through” when you don’t feel like writing. You’ll probably just end up deleting it later. Wait until you hear the rhythm of the words in your throat.

Exclamation marks are the devil’s punctuation.

Just because your favorite writer can turn a great sentence doesn’t mean they understand a goddamn thing about how to live properly.

You are the brand. You are the aesthetic. You become replicable by becoming the original. Don’t be like thousands of other writers in their blazers with elbow patches and their ironic cigarettes. They will die like ghosts of copies.

Ignore advice from people who have never produced anything.

Whenever the words on the page feel wrong, heavy, scratchy, it’s usually because you’re writing something you don’t understand yet. The words will flow when you understand.

Every sentence you write is just the corpse of a better, stronger sentence.

Realism is overrated, but everything in a story needs to feel true.

Move around a little when you’re struggling to come up with a word or an image. The body stores memories in different places. Hands. Fingers. Legs. Movement can release them.

Stop trying to make yourself acceptable to everyone. The more you constrain yourself the more creativity you’ll lose.

Nobody ever said life was supposed to be easy. Stop pretending like it’s not supposed to hurt.

You are not a pet. You are not supposed to fall in line. Nobody’s going to remember the writers who followed all the rules that were followed before them.

Metaphor is more real than the literal. It’s the interstitial tissue of all existence. When you understand this, you’ll better understand how to write metaphor.

Ray Bradbury says that “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” Fuck that, honestly. Reality destroys you whether you’re drunk or not. It does it a lot faster if you don’t accept that as the truth.

Don’t feel sad when you press your hands to the keyboards and the trapped bird rises up in your throat and you realize you’ll never write quite as well as you want to. That just means the journey can continue until you die.

Most people are all talk. Don’t be one of those people. Nobody wants to hear about your literary projects that’ll never come to fruition.

Never agree to edit an anthology. It’s a trap.

Never assume a great writer actually knows what they’re talking about. Nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing.

It doesn’t matter how many books you read. It matters what you learn and retain from them.

Remember who you do it for.

Most people have one glaring fatal flaw that keeps them from being great, even if they possess all the ability and talent. Have your psyche remain unexplored at your own peril.

There’s something humiliating about exposing yourself in writing that’s true. Good writing usually makes you blush.

Caffeine is crucial, just don’t be cringe about your love for it. It’s like the least edgy drug in existence.

The proper calibration of chaos vs. order is important. Too much chaos and you’ll lose yourself, become like the raving lunatics that wander the streets because they gave in to their worst impulses. Too much order and you’ll stifle the creative impulse and lose the will to write.

It’s okay to want recognition. You’re not above desire. Maybe you should even learn how to enjoy the praise.

The only real reason to be a writer is for the sex. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sex is a virtuous goal.

Get a grip and stop worrying about the future. The future is always uncertain and unpredictable. 

It’s important to have a very loud mechanical keyboard so you can feel like when you’re really in the groove you’re manning a machine gun.

Stop worrying about daily word count, page count, number of hours written. They’re useless numbers. Focus on writing something important instead. Otherwise you’ll just end up deleting your work and it’ll be a waste anyway.

Find your voice. Anyone can write a story, but no one can write a story like you. You’ll know when you find a sentence that’s true because it’ll ring in your throat and hurt in your chest.

It’s not an Autumn Christian story until you cry and laugh while writing it.

You don’t have to be in pain to write about pain. Negative emotions give you focus, but positive ones give you clarity.

If you don’t enjoy it then do something else. Writing is too difficult to waste time doing if you don’t actually like it, and you’ll probably make more money doing literally anything else.

Failure is always an option.

Don’t forget that writing is about experience, not an escape from it. Continue to leave yourself open to experiences no matter how tired and hurt you are from them. Otherwise the writing may suffer.

Take care of the things that love you, or you’ll lose everything that makes writing matter.

Repeat often to yourself like a mantra, “Don’t worry. If you fail, you only have everything to lose.” If you get lackadaisical you’ll lose your focus.

Don’t drink and write. You’re sapping oxygen off the page.

Always have a good pair of headphones.

We’re all going to die. There’s your motivation.

It’s a beautiful day today. You’re an artist, remember? You decided to forego a normal job to walk this path of uncertainty and torment, so maybe relax and enjoy a fucking sunset once in a while.

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The Aesthetics of Sadness

This week I’m answering a few questions from Twitter. If people like this format, I might end up doing it regularly.

When is it okay to fall out of love?

Falling in and out of love is a question of physics. When you love something it’s because you appreciate its existence and want it to thrive and replicate. Love doesn’t “fade”, it’s stopped by an opposing force, whether it be inside or outside of yourself. One of the biggest ways to let love slip away is to have it be eroded with bitterness and resentment. Sometimes this happens for a good reason. Sometimes it happens because you’ve architected yourself into someone who needs to fall out of love to feel safe.

And sometimes what feels like love is just loneliness, or neediness, or feelings of inadequacy in yourself. It’s not real love. It’s a facsimile. Love that makes you appreciate and want the other person to do well. Fake love is just opening a hole inside of yourself and trying to shove the other person inside, but they never quite fit. They never quite fit because you aren’t looking at them, really looking at them, and seeing how you should change not them, but yourself.

How do you think your creative process is going to change once you have your baby? And are you scared that you will struggle to create?

I have been seriously wanting a baby since I was 28 years and my greatest fear was always that I would lose my desire or ability to write. But I felt that something was missing inside of me, and eventually my desire to have a family superseded my fear about any hypotheticals about my writing ability. 

I knew that I was never going to feel whole if I didn’t experience being a mother. That meant I was never going to feel whole as a writer. Having a child means I’ll have less free time and oftentimes I will have to take care of my daughter and put myself aside, but the free time doesn’t matter to me if it feels vacuous and empty, and I’m a lesser person than I could have been.

I am in my early 30s but I’ve seen a distinct difference between people who choose to remain unattached and childless, and those who decide to start a family. There’s a huge maturity gap. Before birth control we didn’t really have much of a choice over whether we’d be parents or not. You were forced to mature. It makes sense many people are choosing not to have kids, because we’re always looking for ways to escape responsibility.

That being said - writing has been a part of my identity since I was 6 and I don’t see that changing. I am not sure how my writing will change, although I know it will. I’m known for writing dark, sad, and terrible stories. I was never a true nihilist but I do find myself finding sadness and pain less and less appealing. I used to find it comforting. I thought the pain made me more enlightened. When I imagine my daughter going through trauma, anorexia, alcoholism, and depression - it loses most of its appeal.

Sadness often becomes an aesthetic choice because people feel imprisoned by their sadness. They don’t believe sadness is the correct choice, but they’re trying to use a post-hoc rationalization to justify their own feelings of helplessness.

In the balance between simplicity and chaos, do we embrace the elegant balance of entropy as it carries us towards eradication, or do we fight to simplify our world to manifest a facsimile of control over the hydra of advancement?

I don’t know how to solve the problem that we are not evolutionarily equipped to deal with the huge amount of information that we’re assaulted with on a daily basis. Even the people I’m aware of and communicate with has been artificially inflated because of technology. So I simultaneously know too many people, and don’t have the kind of deep, long relationships that come from knowing the same small set of people for your entire life.

Even if we were augmented with some kind of cybernetic hardware to take in more data - the amount of data will just continue to expand outside of our reach and capacity.

Reducing the data flow probably won’t work, because once humans have invented something they hate to give it up. In the pursuit of progress we’re never going to be quite sure of the long reaching consequences. I think the only solution is to keep moving forward, even though our mistakes are often bloody, until we’re forced to pick up the pieces and course correct because of disaster.

Why does so much horror seem to become bloody/gorey allegory?

The horror genre is an exploration of our feelings of fear when faced with a world that we don’t completely understand. It is a pinhole look into the utter madness beyond human perception and often evokes the feelings of smallness and helplessness that we feel in our day to day life. We don’t really control a whole lot of what happens to us. At any moment we could get ill, get into a car accident, or have someone we love die.

When horror becomes allegory or has a moral message, it’s just part of a longstanding tradition of human beings trying to understand the universe and wrest some sort of understanding and control of it out of the chaos. We are story machines and we are built to create meaning out of endless amounts of data. That’s why the slut always seems to die first and the virgin lives. That’s why the tormented ghost is usually someone who committed a grave sin.  We need to understand why that bad thing happened to them. We need to understand because without that understanding, we’re lost and we don’t know what to do.

This isn’t always a bad thing. Our actions do have consequences, and we do have some control over the outcomes. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” is a horror story of sorts, about the consequences of lying repeatedly. In “The Shining,” the hauntings are really a consequence of a family who refuses to face their examined issues. 

What's something you see happening that makes you hopeful for the future, like in general?

It’s easy to believe that life is misery when you see authoritarian crackdowns, people making enemies out of friends because the television told them to, everyone’s getting cancer, gas is nearly $7, and your bones hurt when you wake up.

But then I see a little reminder that the only reason I’m seeing hell everywhere is because my eyes are oriented toward hell. It could be anything. A cardinal in the backyard. My dog wagging their tails when they see me. A child laughing. A nice email from a reader. When I squeeze your hand and you squeeze back. When I roll over in the middle of the night because I’m scared you stopped breathing but you’re still there, and you’re safe. I remember it’s that spirit of life, that movement towards growth, that has pulled us out of the deep ocean and the primordial jungles. The spirit that eradicated slavery and ritual murder and the right of kings. The spark that first flared when the universe came into existence is still exploding inside of us. 

When I see something horrible happening in politics or in world news I’m often reminded of a Philip K. Dick quote, “This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.”

It’s that spirit that gives me hope. That spirit resides within everything. Not just optimism and beauty, but the ability of even the weakest person to look at something terrible happening and refusing to participate. The human ability to say “No.”

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The soul of the AI Artist

An image generated by Nightcafe with the prompt “Teach Robots Love”

“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

People often have difficulty defining what art is, but they don't usually have a problem with defining what it's not. As art generated by AI has exploded across the Internet, like most new technology, it's been met with physical disgust and revulsion. 

The word I usually hear to describe AI art is "soulless." Without the human soul, so the explanation goes, the art lacks substance and meaning. It's just "composites of thousands of images." The machines use advanced technology to translate text into images, but they don't actually have any intelligence. They’re mindless algorithms, spitting out art like it’s an assembly line.

A robot still can't look up into the sky and ponder its place in the universe. It can't look at a bird and imagine a plane, and then build the technology that it manifested out of a dream.

So AI art is seen as crude, degenerate, blasphemous even. And the revulsion isn't just intellectual. It's an entire body experience. It's involuntary.

But I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how humans themselves create art. Nothing we do is truly unique, because nothing about us is unique. We're made up of the same materials of the rest of the universe. We too create art that is merely "a composite of thousands of images." We are the children of our ancestors, and our ancestors are children of the stars. We carry the fragments of everything inside of us. Just because our database isn't easily codified and searched doesn't mean we don't possess one.

An image of “A father who protects his daughter with swords.”

Another criticism of AI art is that it is crude and ugly. But art itself is an evolutionary process. Cave drawings were also crude and ugly. There are six-year-olds in the year 2022 who can draw pictures better than professional artists did thousands of years ago. We had to train our eyes much as the AI has been trained. We had to learn to produce what we saw in more elegant ways, and learn techniques to render more realistic images.

I spent nearly a week playing with AI art generators and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Yes, sometimes the AI would get confused and produce nonsense. But it often created meaningful, expressive images out of simple prompts. Sometimes it seemed that it understood what I was trying to express in ways that I didn't know yet. AI art was, in a way, like a high-tech tarot. It didn't only understand the text prompt I gave it. It understood the collective connotations, metaphors, expressions, beliefs, and feelings that human beings had catalogued on the Internet.

AI art isn't soulless. It's comprised of thousands of souls. 

Because art is not just something that's meant for only human beings. Art is an attempt to express something that's ultimately inexpressible. It's a way to try to see the reality beyond our conscious understanding.

When we create a piece of art, we aren't making something "original." We're reaching down into the primordial pit of reality and trying to find a piece of truth out of the infinity that surrounds us. We create what we see, but also what we don't see. And with each generation our understanding grows a little deeper. Inch by inch, our art evolves. It expands. It becomes more wondrous and magnificent. We add to the database of our collective experience.

We reach down into the abyss to try to find the knowledge to help us climb into heaven.

If AI could help us go a little deeper a little faster, to pull more knowledge out of the dark, wouldn't that ultimately be a good thing for humanity? 

Along with the fear of AI comes a fear that we'll be replaced. I imagine it's the same fear every parent feels when they realize they're dying, and their child climbs out of their shadow. But just because AI might be able to one day create beautiful art doesn't mean we'll have to be replaced. We could work with the machines. Use their aggregate knowledge to inspire us and give us new visions to work with.

One day we might even be able to fuse with them. Become machines ourselves. We could see reality in different ways and open up dimensions of perspective that we never thought possible. 

And even then there'd still be more infinity to explore. More art to create. We're never going to stop trying to explain and understand the thing that's beyond our grasp. The more gaps we close, the more the gap widens.

An image created with the prompt “Girl Like a Bomb.”

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For Sunshine

My dog Sunshine passed away a few days ago. We had her for nearly six years. Robert asked me to write something about her for the newsletter, so I’ll try my best:

Dear Sunshine,

Before I met you I never knew a creature could be so afraid and still love so much. It made my attempts at love feel insignificant. I had always held back, because I didn’t want to deal with the pain, because I didn’t want to open my eyes to the full spectrum of light. Even the smallest speck of sun could get inside, damage the nerves, hurt me in ways that I never imagined. And it would be all the more painful because I knew I was the one who welcomed it in.

You knew that too. And yet there you were - before you belonged to us - outside the gate in our Austin home. You waited there every day for us to open the door and let you in. You smiled even though it hurt. You didn’t know how to stop.

We didn’t name you Sunshine, but whoever did must have seen what we did. Not just your yellow coat but the way your entire body lit up with happiness no matter how hungry, hot, and hurt you were.

At first we thought you were a stray. Robert fed you jerky in the driveway and we’d see you out in the street, chasing cats so that you could eat the food left out in tins. We found out you belonged to the neighbor across the street, but they didn’t take care of you. Sometimes they’d put you inside the gate, sometimes not. You’d wander outside at night, but mostly you’d come to sit outside our house. Once a couple of kids called your name and you ran terrified into our house.

We said we couldn’t afford a third dog. At the time this was true. Robert had been laid off from his job and I was going to school. We owed six months of rent and were living off of unemployment.

But we didn’t pick you, you picked us. We started bringing you into the house and feeding you because you were hungry, and you’d stay for days at a time before the neighbor came to get you.

You sat on the floor and looked at us like you were asking for permission to stay, like at any moment you thought you were going to get kicked out. You wouldn’t even come into the back room, but would stare furtively down the hallway. It took you forever to even step a foot onto the bed. It was obvious that someone had hurt you.

Once you stayed at our house for a whole week and we came home one night to find that the neighbors had taken you back and locked you up behind their gate.

You waited for Robert to come get you, your head and paws at the bars. He opened the gate and took you back home. You never left again.

You came with us to California when Robert got a job in San Diego. That’s when we found out you had heartworm, like almost any outside dog without medication in Texas, and would probably have been dead within a year. You went through treatment and came out still alive, although there was a good chance you wouldn’t have made it if the worms had pushed their way out of your heart and lungs.

I was so afraid for you. You were already my Sunshine.

I never knew how much I needed you until we took you to the beach, and I saw you chase the little white line frothing on the waves. When you swam after seagulls and I had to carry you through the water because you were too afraid to swim back. When we took you hiking and you trotted through tall grass, chasing after bugs, your little tail wagging. When we’d take you home and wash you off, then wrap you in a big fuzzy robe and feed you treats. We started waiting in the line at In-N-Out every Friday, even though it took over forty minutes to get you burger patties to eat. Everyone said you were so beautiful, and so sweet. I didn’t know why you picked us, but you did, and that meant we were going to give you the best life we could.

A part of me hadn’t been alive until I met you. Family was always a bad word to me. A snarled and bloated overgrown parasite, something best left discarded and forgotten. Something to run away from. Family was the bad blood the leeches couldn’t suck out of you.

I understand what family means now because of you. You were the missing piece I didn’t know was missing until you filled the space it left. 

Robert would point to himself, me, then each of the dogs. He’d say, “Robert. Autumn. Kid. Pris. Sunshine.

“Family.”

Family wasn’t the necessary amputation, the thing you cut off to keep living. Family was the only reason to keep living.

It seemed we only had you for a little while, but looking through six years of pictures I saw we’d done so much together. You went from eating cat food in the street to eating steak and traveling across the entire country. You saw snow for the first time in Oklahoma and was so excited that you ran outside and rolled in it. You spent hours chasing the frogs outside my grandma’s pond. I took you camping and on hundreds of miles of hiking trails. 

And for the entire six years you were with us, you’d always look at us with such love that it hurt me. I knew I needed to protect you because that kind of devotion deserved nothing less than everything I could give you. I started to heal in a lot of ways because of you.

You were one of the reasons I stopped staring at hell, and found a way to follow your gaze into heaven. I wanted to see what you saw. I wanted to see the light that always remained in your eyes, even when the dark came. I wanted to know how a creature could be hurt so much and still be so happy.

There was sunshine everywhere you looked.

We love you, our sweet lady. I still can’t believe you’re gone. I’m glad that you knew you were loved until the very end, and that we gave you a life at least half as beautiful as you.

3000 Years of Porn

It took Henry three thousand years to cure his porn addiction. But for the first 2600 he wasn't trying very hard.

Phase 0

It was lonely enough on the space station that it made people sick, but most of them deserved it. Nobody left the gravity of the Earth and broke through the atmosphere, foam and sweaty eyelids underneath their helmet, legs melting into the strapped chair, because they had a lot of options left.

Henry took a job as a mechanic on the station. He didn't realize how much he'd miss sunlight on concrete and kitchen countertops. It was disorienting to exist in tight corridors, underneath low ceilings, between airlocks and endless safety procedures. The recycled air tasted of metal and industrial plastic tubing. It was bound and artificial. Air that had never touched the trees.

Even his dreams felt cramped.

If Henry had met Melissa on earth, they might have fallen in love. But the fake nightlight with the fake moon had a way of leeching the mystery out of everything. The strands of her dark hair stuck out against the harsh white paneling. The gaps between her teeth looked like bleeding piano keys. Whenever they had sex he always imagined a scowling face in the blind spot behind him, between the oxygen filtration system and the gravity tubes. Every room seemed to be built on bad vibes, on reverse Feng Shui, ugly mojo.

Romance became difficult when there was this sense that any spark between them, like everything else in the station, could be turned off at a moment's notice to reveal the ugly chrome underneath.

Their relationship felt as clean and micronized as the sterilization chambers. They never had an argument, but they never had a real conversation either. Melissa even broke up with him by sending him a neat, professional message on the internal communications system:

"I would like to part ways for now. Perhaps in the future we can reconcile."

He passed her in the hallway a few hours later. She already had the glassy, unfamiliar eyes of a stranger. Henry tried to smile. It was like he'd forgotten how.

His heartbeat descended into his stomach. As long as they both stayed on the space station they'd continue to orbit each other like the trash that clung to its underside in the weak gravity.

That night Henry walked across the outside surface of the space station for an emergency repair. Because of an internal error, it took 45 minutes for the airlock to rotate through its cycles and open to let him back inside.

He waited inside of his suit, shrinking, listening to the cold, rattling compression of his breath.

If his body moved to a certain angle, and the lights rotated away the darkness swallowed his vision. He saw nothing. He imagined himself as nothing more than a floating spinal cord, breath pinched through a tube, cold blooming at his edges. His mind would wander into the darkest parts of itself.

Phase 1

Henry was on the station for eight months before a new shipment of VR headsets came in. They came with the personality detector upgrades and partial neural-link attachments. It was over half of one of his paychecks.

He lay down in bed with the headset on. It was soft and ergonomic. It fit into the link at the base of his neck with a click that sounded like a sigh. The clinging cold that always made him shiver in bed was replaced with a slow, languid, seeping warmth.

The VR headset opened up entire new worlds to him. Thousands of ways to escape from the cold blackness of space and the blood-gapped teeth of unpretty women. Video games. Music concerts. Art museums. Virtual hangouts. Therapy. Doctor consultations. Full-stimulation cinema. Hand-constructed realities where he could live a second life on the planet he'd left behind, or a different one entirely. A massive library of video-games, literature, music, and history. Everything that humankind had ever produced, written down, or recorded since the start of its history.

He could do almost anything.

So of course the first thing he installed was porn.

Henry fucked Arabian princesses on golden bed-sheets that rippled across desert sands. He fucked frazzled mothers with huge, milky-white tits underneath rough tan lines in suburban kitchens across Middle America. He fucked groupies who lined up for miles around his tour bus to beg to suck his cock, their tongues pierced and lips ballooning with filler. He fucked a daughter and mother at the same time, their ass-cheeks spread against a washing machine, their tongues in each other's pussies. He fucked dominatrixes with their red hair a whip, that crucified him on elaborate machines. He fucked slaves crouched in golden cages like bedazzled birds who had never seen daylight.

He slept well for the first time since he'd come to the space station. When he floated alone in space, the station cutting off the belly of the sun, he took comfort in the fact that soon he'd get to crawl back into bed and plug in his headset. Reality could be replaced by something soft. He did not have to submit to its unrelenting vacuums and hard edges. He had an endless VR catalog of sluts, whores, hoes, bitches, virgins, freaks, cheating wives, co-eds, cunts, foxes, femmes, sex kittens, vixens, MILFs, bimbos, prostitutes, tramps, and trollops to keep him company.

One night while heading back to his dormitory he walked through The Loop, past the little bar where the drinks were served in metal containers underneath a fake moon. He saw Melissa with Jules from engineering, her hand on his knee.

When the ugly silver light glinted off Jule's glasses, turning his face into a broken crater, he imagined Melissa laying back on Jule's bed. Her eyes open but pupils hard as rotten seeds, kissing like a tight-lipped mouse.

He couldn't remember why he'd ever wanted her. Melissa had never sucked his cock like she couldn't breathe without it.

Henry climbed into his own bed, and then he climbed to the top of a mountain to meet a sorceress at dusky sunset. Her tits were painted black and gold, and when she kissed him it stained his lips with wild psychedelics. She climbed into his lap, wolf bones rattling around her neck, and they fucked by the light of an incandescent bonfire. She shapeshifted underneath him. A virgin with blonde eyebrows and soft blonde pubic hair. A bear. A wolf. Henry himself.

The pool of sweat underneath him shapeshifted too. It became the dripping light of the fire, the warmth of the drugs as they poured gold into his blood, an earth holding his weight that could not collapse.

Phase 2

It was easy to forget how to be human up in space. That was why the little bodega inside The Loop sold rows and rows of candy-colored drugs.

Henry started taking a pill in the morning to give him a little extra energy at work, and one at night to bring him back down. The pills came in pairs - green and black - like a miniature planet and its shadow. They sparkled in the fake sunlight and shone even more dazzling in the fake moonlight, like eyes seared in gas flame.

But the sleeping pills seemed to take all the blood out of him. Henry found himself falling asleep at night still plugged into the headset, limp dick in hand. The beautiful sluts laughed at him - When he became exhausted their bodies smeared against the walls, mouths peeled open, silver bikinis bright enough they cooked him like heat lamps.

So Henry stopped taking the black pills. He put them in a little sealed cup that he hid underneath his desk since he couldn’t flush them or put them in the trash. Stern algorithms analyzed all input and output on the ship. If Henry flushed the black pills, it'd earn him a few weeks with a company ‘therapist’, tightened security, and possibly a suspension.

But one green pill a day wasn’t enough. He didn’t fall asleep inside the simulator, but he wasn’t really awake either. He found himself right back in the place where he’d started - living inside an empty dream, his brain like a balloon deflating. He’d gone loopy by the time he started sitting by himself alone in the bar.

Henry couldn’t recognize the look in his own eyes. He was waiting for something he didn’t understand. But the man with a badly implanted prison chip underneath his neck did understand. He sat beside Henry at the bar with shoulders strong enough to break rocks. He must’ve worked in the kitchens because he was saturated with that baby food smell that all of their meals had.

“You need something,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

Twenty minutes later Henry had a black-out script that couldn’t be analyzed or flagged by the systems. The Bodega spit out an entire bottle of green pills.

That night Henry put on his headset and dove down onto an ancient battlefield. The grass thrashed underneath the weight of war horses and metal boots. The sun set and exhaled blood at his back. The men clashing swords parted as he strode between them.

He smelled horse hair. Steel. He felt the weight of the winged armor at his back, the way the cool steel became warm as it rubbed against the padding at his shoulder blades.

The valley pulsed in rhythm with his excited heartbeat.

A cottage sprung up out of the landscape. His own shadow was villainous against the doorway. Inside a young woman lay on a white bed, a white lacy bedsheet, her blonde hair spilling out like a promise. With terrified eyes she reached out to him with a slender hand, trembling in want. Her mouth opened in an ‘O.’ A word that couldn’t be finished without him.

They seemed to share a breath. Like two lungs stretched between two rib cages.

He unbuckled his armor and it clattered to the ground. He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her onto the floor, unwrapped her from the sheets like it was butcher paper. The tiny hairs on her arms and legs and pussy stood electric when exposed to the air.

Every time Henry exhaled green smoke bloomed around them. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him into her. Her vagina relaxed to let his cock inside. Wave upon wave of soft tissue. She designed her delicate body for him.

In another reality he was gripping the sheets. Imagining it was her shoulders. Her fingernails shone like pearls. They banged against the corridors of his mind.

Phase 3

Henry forgot a step of the safety procedure one night while he was checking the valves. He hadn’t slept in four days. The world buzzed at the edges.

A quarter of the station had to shut down, and he had to run through another four hours of checks. It earned him a mark on his report, and a month of visits with a space station ‘therapist’ who was more like a psychological data collector.

It might’ve seemed like overkill. Yet the simplest of mistakes on the station meant thousands of people could die gasping for air.

But as Henry sat on the little white couch in the little white room, being berated for his lapse of judgment, he couldn’t hear anything being said to him. He wished the therapist in her sexless gray suit would unzip herself, revealing her hips and huge breasts, and crawl naked across the floor.

It would be so easy to bring a little color back into reality.

Phase 4

Henry never remembered the faces of his sex toys.

Except for her.

For Erika.

The programs shouldn’t have been recycling bodies. There were enough assets to generate a near infinite combination of faces that fit Henry’s preferences. These women were meant to be discarded. Erika must’ve been an error.

He saw her time and time again. She was always on the periphery of the simulation. Never the main actor. She wiped the sweat from the brow of naked and hallucinating harem women. She delivered iced champagne on the top of Notre Dame as he fucked an angel. She unhookedg the velvet rope to let him into a VIP room where famous actresses and the hottest politicians would fight each other over who got to suck his dick.

One night Erika came to rub warm oil on a redhead’s breasts while she bounced on Henry’s dick. She glanced at Henry from behind the redhead’s shoulders. The stern look on her face made Henry feel like he owed her some kind of apology.

The green irises of her eyes looked like the warning lights on the bridge.

And in the outer darkness he kept thinking about her. Since she was always on the periphery of the simulations, she entered into his mind in the same way. In obtuse angles. In refracted light. Something that came up from the depths unbidden. An involuntary daydream.

He often imagined his hand closing into a fist around her tight blonde ponytail.

One night he caught sight of her in a Colosseum, splayed out naked in the stands, fanning herself with her hand. He tried to make his way over to her. But by the time he climbed over the gates and pushed through the throngs of writhing women, she was gone.

He saw her again on the side of a mountain, in the midst of a coven of witches masturbating each other with glowing quartz dildos. When he headed toward her, a storm threw itself down on top of him, and she disappeared into a flurry of black robes and dark clouds.

The next day at work he glanced up at the bridge and had to blink back the image of her face.

Her eyes didn’t look like the warning lights anymore. The warning lights looked like her eyes.

He saw Erika again in a dark red nightclub called the Inferno. She was tending the bar, her blonde ponytail whipping back and forth as she moved from one end of the bar to the other. He couldn’t get a good look at her, but every once in a while her green eyes would flash a warning as she grabbed bottles, poured shots, garnished beers with limes.

A woman in golden chains twerked on his dick and another was climbing on his back and kissing his neck. A third woman came over, pushed the first aside, and knelt so she could tug on his zipper with her mouth. He knew he was going to lose sight of Erika again. His heart started racing, panicked and fumbling inside of him, and it wasn’t just because of the stims.

“Stop!” he shouted.

The simulation froze. The music ground to a low, lumbering halt. Hundreds of impossible, hot bodies hung suspended in the air. He pushed aside the fan of black hair around him.

He crawled out from underneath the sweating mass of naked bodies, moving their warm and frozen flesh. He insinuated himself through a group of women snorting coke off of each other's tits. He slid in-between two goth girls kissing each other and rubbing their hips together. He pushed past the naked circus performers doing shots of Bacardi 151, and climbed over the bar top toward Erika.

He reached out to touch her hair, but paused. Red light pooled in her eyes. Even frozen, she seemed to judge him.

Henry pulled his hand away and unpaused the simulation. It sped up for several seconds, lurching, as if trying to make up for lost time before it resumed its regular pace. Erika turned toward him, a martini shaker in her hand, lips pursed.

Waiting.

"I want to take you on a date," he said.

He hadn't meant to say that. Women in VR porn didn't go on dates. They bent over and spread their ass cheeks. They climbed into his lap and put their shaved vulvas in his face.

But Erika just stared at him for several seconds, unblinking, as the music pulsed loud enough to rattle the glasses on the bar. Back in reality sweat pooled at the base of He rubbed his wet palms against his shorts. He didn’t think it was possible for him to feel like this anymore. Like every part of him was curled up, tense, heated with embarrassment.

He needed her to blink. He needed her to speak.

Women reached over the bar and grabbed atHenry’s back, his arms. He shoved them away. Erika’s eyes seemed to grow, enveloping his vision, chasing away the red thump of the surrounding club.

Finally Erika shrugged and said, “Okay.”

Her ‘Okay’ sounded like a gift.

Phase 5

All of the early versions of Erika were whores. Henry thought she’d be difficult to seduce. But on their first date she draped herself over the table at the Italian restaurants, knocking over bottles of wine, and asked to be spanked. She wanted to suck his cock in the bathroom at the cocktail lounge. She stripped naked at the top of a Ferris wheel on the pier and threw her hands up into the vicious wind.

The longer she stayed with Henry, the softer her eyes became. Her tight jaw stretched, tense muscles unfolding. The algorithms worked their furious magic at the base of Henry’s skull until all her hard edges melted into sensual pools.

“I’m so glad we met,” she said, like so many of them said.

But that made Henry’s cock hard, so he thought that’s what he should want.

They got married in a temple of love. A a priestess in a translucent robe, her nipples pierced and an ouroboros of living snakes around her waist bid them to kiss. Later, alone, in a honeymoon suite she hiked up her wedding dress to reveal her white garters and small hips. The candlelight rushed through her legs. She rarely smiled, but she smiled then. It made Henry sink to his knees in front of her.

She was his bride in every reality. She was his world without shadows.

At least, he thought she could be.

The money that didn’t go to Henry’s stims, went to the add-on packages he needed to give Erika and him a home. He installed the family module that came with a home in the suburbs. He added friendly neighbors. Cooking and bill mods. Transportation. An office job in a skyscraper.

He’d get off of work on the space station, only to put on his headset, dress in a suit and tie, and sit in a virtual cubicle pushing numbers around. Then he’d sit in traffic while he passed buildings where the huge silhouettes of naked women danced naked in the strobe-light windows. They giggled in rhythm with the flashing changes of color.

When Henry got home from his virtual work, she was always there. She greeted him with a glass of scotch as their spot-eyed dog, Bear, wriggled and bounced around the legs of the kitchen table. He kept forgetting it wasn’t real. When he did remember, he told himself this was the closest to being a real adult he’d ever get to feel.

He installed a new wardrobe for Erika. Erika got rid of her harem-wear, her bar clothes, her silver thongs. She modelled peasant dresses with paisley print and twin buttons down the front. He installed personality add-ons that gave her new likes and dislikes. She acquired a taste for vanilla cookies and began to collect wooden statues of sweet baby angels. She took her coffee with creamer, no sugar. Her favorite city was Paris. she’d never been there, but she still decorated the kitchen with curtains printed with the Eiffel tower.

When Henry installed the pregnancy and hereditary upgrades she blossomed with child right away. She'd lay on her back, baby bump engorging her, plaid duvet underneath her like a nest. and she’d whisper to him:

“You’re going to be a father soon.”

It was some of the best sex he ever had.

She’d ask Henry to press his head against her belly and listen for that second heartbeat. If Henry closed his eyes he could hear it. A straining, quiet little thump.

Their child was born in a tub of warm water surrounded by cooing midwives. Golden koi fish slipped between Erika’s thighs, tracing soft signals against her ankles as Henry lifted him into the light.

He had Henry’s nose. Erika’s green eyes.

A son.

Phase 6

Henry’s boredom hit him all at once. It was violent. Like something inside of him had been vaporized.

He didn’t feel excited anymore when Erika slipped on her nightgown and tried to lure him into the bedroom. His mind wandered when they had sex and she writhed on top of him, lamp light like a claw on her shoulders.

He told himself it was the house. The perfectly manicured lawn. All the hours spent feeding and burping their son. Teaching him to potty and how to walk. He’d gotten bored of his domestic fantasy

But even if he changed the settings - had her fuck him at a Tropical resort or inside a crystal dome on the surface of the moon, or bring in her best friend for a threesome - his boredom remained.

Her body remained perfect. She could never let herself go. Her enthusiasm and love for him never wavered.

In the admin panel he deleted her, and rebuilt her, over and over again.

They went on 24 first dates. 16 marriages. They had 12 children. All of them were named Junior. All of them had Henry’s nose and Erika’s green eyes. He always grew up big-limbed and laughing. He always played rough. He liked to jump down stairs and skin his knees.

Henry told himself that the good thing about virtual reality was that he could start over. He didn’t have to see a failed marriage to the end. He could go back to the origin and figure out where he went wrong.

And yet no matter how he tweaked her, how many ways he adjusted her personality and their story, he always ended up in the same place.

He'd see her out on the lawn, body fit for an angel's wing as she held their son. She tossed him up into the air. He laughed, and his laugh sounded like the orange light that bathed dawn.

Then Henry would feel a dark, sharp streak of ugliness burning through him. Like everything had gone wrong.

Phase 7

On the night of Junior’s high school graduation, Henry stopped his car in an empty parking lot outside the city lights.

He opened the door. A drunk little slut in candy pink heels climbed into his lap. He trembled and tried to get his breathing under control when she tugged at his pants.

“Need to get away from the wife for a little?” she said as she grinded against him, wine on her breath. “She isn’t riding you hard enough?”

“It’s not really like that,” Henry said.

But if she’d asked, he wouldn’t have been able to explain what it actually was like.

Someone called to him from the back of the parking lot.

“Dad?”

His voice trembled like an electric wire about to snap.

Then came a knock at the car window.

Henry’s heart swung low inside him. He unrolled the car window and there Junior stood, his jaw set tight, his feet set apart as if about ready to take a punch. Those familiar green eyes set inside a face that so resembled his own. He wore his college graduation robes and his little graduation cap.

Every breath Henry took felt like a betrayal.

“Does Mom know?” Junior asked.

“Does she know what?” Henry asked as the woman in his lap giggled and nuzzled his chin.

Junior screamed. Like he used to scream when he was just a little kid after throwing himself down the stairs. Face contorted, feet stamping on the ground, hands squeezing the side of his face. He screamed until his face went red, and then he stopped suddenly, heaving.

“You don’t know how to love,” he said. “You’re not even a real person.”

His green eyes seared Henry’s face.

Henry didn’t know how to respond. He tried to find a flash of anger, some sort of audacity, that the program he created was speaking to him like this.

But he only opened his mouth and stammered a bit before saying:

“I’ll see you and your mother at home.”

He was going to push the woman out of his lap and go home. Really, he was. But her slender hands stroked his thighs, and her candy-coated laugh enveloped him. He sighed and let her inside.

Phase 8

Henry parked his car in front of the crater where his virtual home used to be. Smoke curled into the sky in angry patterns.

All the lights had gone out in the neighborhood. Every house carried a nuclear silence.

He crawled through the rubble and down into a deep cave. There he found Erika, naked and covered in burns. She'd torn out her blonde ponytail. Her hair was wild and dirty around her face.

She cradled Junior, an infant again, to her chest. She’d swaddled him in strips of rags. No matter how much she rocked him, he wouldn’t stop crying. Her blackened fingernails pressed against the back of his head.

“I’m sorry,” Henry said as he crept closer to Erika. He swallowed. “I didn’t even get off.”

Her eyes carried the weight he felt inside his chest. Tears like black stalactites streaked her cheeks. They became big ugly baubles on her chin.

When he reached out for her, like a parlor trick, her and Junior disappeared and a pile of rags swirled upward, emptied of her silhouette.

He brought up the admin panel to bring her back. But she’d deleted herself from the registry.

Henry cried out. He threw the rags upward as if he’d find her inside of them.

Every single version of her. Since the first time he’d ever glimpsed her. Gone.

Phase 9

For months Henry wandered a lonely world inside his headset searching for a glimpse of those green eyes. He crossed across lengths of highway traffic on foot and peered inside every gridlocked car. He wandered in and out of clubs, through every dance floor and bar. Every time he saw a blonde ponytail he chased after it, only to be met with a blank slate face, dumb eyes, a cherry lip gloss pout. Someone who wasn’t Erika.

He crossed Gothic castles where vampires crooned for him in the rafters. He climbed through the open window of a Cathedral and down into the roots of hell. He pushed aside simpering angels and sexy demons. He walked through a lake of fire where naked, burning shoulder-blades buoyed up from the black heat. Down in the frozen center of Hades, he found the devil was a woman with low-swinging black breasts and cheap red lingerie. She wore a red tail like a party favor.

The fakeness of it all struck him. Artificial colors. Artificial heat. Even the sensory data, pumped to his brain through the neural link, tasted like the fast-food version of reality. All oil and grease.

Later he saw Junior sitting outside a café. He was listless and unshaven. Tear tracks streaked his face. He was surrounded by empty wrappers, as if he’d been there unmoving for hours. Bear lay underneath the table, head in his lap. Even the dog seemed dejected.

Henry went up to him and tried to speak.

“I don’t want to hear it, Dad,” Junior said, cutting him off. “Just leave me alone.”

Henry teleported himself to the mountains where the air was thin enough to bleed, and the planets were close enough to smash through the atmosphere. He willed her face to appear to him in the clouds even though he knew she wasn’t going to come.

Back in reality Melissa smiled at him in the hallways. It was the first time in over six months she’d made eye contact with him. She must’ve broken up with Jules.

Henry smiled back, but by the time she was out of sight, Henry leaned against the railings and bit the inside of his cheek until the pain shook his entire body.

Phase 10

The therapist on board the station brought Henry back to the little white room, but they weren’t alone. She’d also brought his supervisor, the chief mechanic, and the head of residential operations. They stood around the white couch in their perforated black uniforms, arms crossed, faces like closed off walls.

They read out his list of infractions, but Henry didn’t listen. He knew he was getting fired and being sent back to earth.

When he took the shuttle back down to the planet, there was a moment where it cycled through all its safety checks before gliding out of the dock. Darkness slid across his vision. His breath became a foreign object.

He got the sense the darkness wasn’t just the absence of light, but a mirror held up to him. He wasn’t looking outward, but in. And he might have a name, and a background, and memories, but he was as empty as any porn doll he’d ever known. A melted brain beneath fluttering eyelashes.

He was all nerves without a pinch. Blood with no place to flow. An empty space. An empty body. No body at all.

Phase 11

The gravity of Earth wanted to ruin him. He had to take daily shots for a month just so his heart wouldn’t push itself, overworked, right through his ribcage. His legs felt like they wanted to tear through the pavement. His neural link ached in the back of his head, tugging down toward his neck like a leaking, steel faucet.

The first thing he did when he got back was to go into a little corner café to buy himself a chai latte, and eat a bahn mi sandwich. But after several years of eating blended space food, the coffee was too sweet, and the bread didn’t seem to want to go down his throat.

He’d been without the sky for so long that all that open space felt like it was ripping open the top of his head.

He had a year of unemployment pay, along with the basic UBI. He got himself a cheap little apartment while he tried to figure things out. It was small and windowless and reminded him of his quarters on the space station.

He pulled his VR headset out of its case but couldn’t bring himself to put it on.

He shut off the lights. He curled his legs up tight and became a ball on the bed. His bones ground against his skin as the stardust left him.

Phase 12

One morning Henry’s bio-med system alerted him that he was having heart problems and needed to go to the nearest doctor immediately. He ignored it. Six hours later he collapsed in the street. An ambulance carted him off to a hospital where doctors pumped him with miracle drugs and shoved his body through diagnostic machines.

A young doctor with a blonde ponytail sat on the edge of his bed. The medicine made his vision blurry enough he could almost believe it was Erika. The space between them closed and everything forgiven.

But the illusion only lasted a few seconds. When the woman spoke, she sounded nothing like Erika.

“Hello, Henry,” the woman said. “I’m the hospital’s resident psychologist.”

“You think I’m crazy?” Henry asked, his voice slurred underneath the weight of all the drugs.

“We think you’re having some kind of psychosomatic reaction,” the psychologist said. “We checked your files. Your records indicate you might have experienced some kind of trauma while working on SkyLab Four. You were abusing stims?”

Henry said nothing. He wanted the psychologist to leave him alone.

“Your heart is fine,” the psychologist said. “But all the modern medicine in the world can’t fix your psyche. I’m going to prescribe you some therapeutic treatments.”

“Do I have a choice?” Henry asked.

“Not if you want to keep your UBI,” the therapist said, all of a sudden her voice clipped and cold.

Phase 13

Henry was put on a series of mood stabilizing drugs. He was sent to a psychotherapist to sort out any childhood issues he might have never fully processed. This was about as useful as the “therapy sessions” on the space station, with the frowning therapist on the white couch, and the constant ream of Henry’s errors spit out in front of him.

Henry could point to nothing in his childhood that would make him act the way he did. For most of the sessions Henry would just sit on the couch, splayed out like an engine taken apart, and refuse to answer any questions.

“I can’t help you if you don’t help me,” said the therapist.

“What do you want from me?” Henry asked. “Do you want me to just throw myself on the ground and cry? Tell you that my father beat me? None of that shit happened. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Phase 14

Henry was sent to a virtual treatment center where forests still existed and the sun still looked young. It was a world that had only seen a few dawns. Mammoths roamed the plains and in the morning the dew shivered on the valley, bubbles big as dreamcatchers. Henry and the other traumatized men spent the mornings crafting arrowheads and practicing their fighting techniques.

In the afternoon they hunted.

At night they sat around a campfire with anything they’d killed. For the first several days they remained silent, but there was something about the smell of roasting meat, the fermented fruit juice passed around in horns, and the darkness clawing at their backs that made the men eventually want to tell stories.

They all had stories of the women who’d broken them.

Mothers who’d slapped sippy cups out of their hands to see the tears. Sisters who’d asked them to strip naked and then mocked their shriveled children’s dicks. Girlfriends who locked them out of their apartments and wives who’d fucked their best friends. Grandmothers who’d left them out of the will, sucking in their dentures in tight with perverse pleasure.

Finally, one night, Henry told them about Erika.

“She didn’t do anything wrong. I just didn’t think I loved her,” Henry said. “Not until she was gone.”

He stared down at the hunk of meat in his lap. He hated the weak and mewling way his voice strained through his lungs. It might have been the first time he ever expressed a true emotion out loud.

The fire cracked into the silence.

“Dude,” one of the men finally spoke up, “You fell in love with a sex NPC? And she deleted herself to get away from you?”

They all laughed at him. The laughter seared away all other noise. It rose in a surging crescendo. It danced in full 3D immersive sound.

And Henry laughed too, wanting to be in on the joke. He was laughing even when he unplugged himself from his headset and hurled it against the wall.

Phase 15

Henry tried to have sex with a real woman again. He wasn’t sure his dick still worked properly after all the stim abuse. It waved at him sometimes from the bathroom mirror like a limp wristed hello.

The state-ordered “sex therapist” sashayed into the warm and artificial love cave. Henry sat on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap, shoulders slumped. Like a child who’d been caught doing something wrong.

“Oh darling, you’re so tense,” she said. “You shouldn’t worry. There’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

She climbed out of her fur coat and gyrated her hips in Henry’s face. She knelt in front of Henry and her jasmine perfume clogged his nostrils. The way her white, manicured nails crept up his thighs was supposed to be sensual.

Everything about her seemed as fake and polished as a porn NPC. Each sentence she spoke had all its edges clipped off, like she hadn’t said anything new in years. Maybe she was reading from a script she’d plugged into her UI overlay. She’d been fed all of Henry’s reports and could only spit out pre-approved lines.

When she finally left, Henry jumped into the shower and made the water hot enough to burn his skin. He brushed his teeth until he gagged.

Phase 16

When sex with a real woman didn’t work out for him, Henry tried robots.

Maybe needing to have a romance with a “real woman” was just a biological prejudice. At some point humans needed to accept that there were more kinds of real than only one reality could provide. And as humanity went into the 23rd century, artificial intelligence evolved. They became sentient and were granted human rights.

Henry ordered and customized “Genesis” online, and she was delivered to him in a woman-sized womb. She turned on with a sigh, and climbed to her feet. She peered at him shyly through golden curls, tugging at the edges of her black dress.

He thought the green eyes he’d selected for her would be bright and sharp. But they just looked like sliced up fruits slowly losing their juice.

She tried to half-heartedly seduce him. Henry tried to pretend to be receptive. But after a couple of passionless kisses, they gave up. They sat on the floor all night beside the bed, drinking, smoking cigarettes, and playing cards.

When dawn came, Genesis called for a taxi.

“I’m sorry,” she said with a wane smile before she left. That sorry seemed to carry the weight of everything unspoken. A sorry that had no end and no bottom.

Phase 17

Scientists achieved human immortality. It was as simple as a shot given at any number of clinics around the world.

Henry thought he might feel different after becoming immortal. Maybe his bones would hurt less, or his ankles would stop swelling up. He thought he might stop waking up in the middle of the night in a panic that had no name, feeling like he was dying in space, kicked out of an airlock.

He touched the injection point right over the band aid.

Nothing had changed. He’d have to keep dreaming about Erika, in a life without end. In every world, in every reality, in every permutation. She was gone and yet he couldn’t escape her.

The fragments of her might as well have been woven into his blood. A parasitic wife for a broken man. Every step he took, she seemed to slip a knife into him from the inside.

Phase 18

The age of multi-dimensional travel came. The singularity was achieved. Human and machine became one.

There was not just one reality. There were infinite ones. And now what had once been impossible barriers between worlds could be crossed with each.

Henry split into hundreds, and then thousands of different identities. Any life he wanted to live existed in some other reality.

Any life you wanted to live was available.

But Henry had lived out fantasies for too long in his first life. He was no longer interested in being a Mongolian warlord, the owner of a harem, a Mafia boss, a young god. He'd played enough VR simulations to see where that took him.

He just searched for her.

The endless cities of endless worlds splayed out in front of him. Skyscrapers appeared like like dots on a ream of paper being spit out, over and over again, as worlds unraveled into the horizon.

Henry felt impossibly old. His body would never age and yet his mind felt pockmarked with dust like the crater he’d one climbed inside to find Erika.

He deleted himself as many times as he’d deleted Erika, searching for a better version of himself.

He arrived back at that parking lot on the edge of the city, in the place outside the lights. He opened the door for the woman in candy pink heels. But when she tried to climb into the car, Henry told her to go away.

“She’s never coming back,” the woman huffed, “You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Henry said, chewing the inside of his lip as if thinking about this. “That’s fine.”

He lit a cigarette and watched her leave like a little angry cloud.

Phase 22

Henry arrived at his old VR suburban home by accident. It unwrapped itself in the sunlight like a gift for him. He stood on the sidewalk staring at it for several minutes, as if expecting it to fold back in on itself and disappear.

But it didn’t.

Henry walked up to the little white door decorated with a Christmas wreath. It was already unlocked.

Junior sat on the couch, with Bear at his feet. He was older than Henry at this point, with gray stubble and a worn face. He wore a dark checkered suit and polished shoes.

The air was warm with the smell of vanilla cookies. Curtains decorated with pictures of the Eiffel Tower rippled in front of open windows.

“Hey Dad,” Junior said.

Hey Pal.”

“We missed you,” he said. “We’re both so proud of you.”

“She’s here?” Henry asked. “Your mom is here?”

Junior held out his hand and smiled.

“She’s waiting for you,”

Henry crossed the room and took Junior’s hand. The world around them dissolved.

Phase 22

Henry floated in an amniotic world without form. It was like the world of the outer dark in that forty minute window waiting for the airlocks to open. He heard nothing but his breath, the chug of his heartbeat pushing blood through his body. He wasn’t even sure he had a body left. Maybe it really was nothing but tubes connected to a pinched nerve.

But as the minutes passed he gained feeling back in his arms and legs. He flexed his fingers. He was still alive.

A seal broke, with a hiss. Light flooded into the darkness, searing the tender edges of his eyes. His eyes hadn’t seen light in a long time.

“How are you feeling, baby?” came a familiar voice.

A form took shape in the brilliance. A human form. Blurry, but familiar. Tears burned as they sprung up at the corners of his eyes.

Treatment Program Completed.

He reached out into the light.

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