Flux

by Jinwoo Chong

“You don’t need to know anything to be in love.” He poked my forehead with a straight finger. “Idiot.”

TRY THE ONE PERCENT. —JEM.

The smile she gave me was pointed and arresting, but I guessed this was just the way she treated everybody.

It’s a fallacy, that hard work and busy schedules disrupt a person’s natural balance, their chemistry. What’s truer is that some people are better built for it than others.

Perpetual motion is not fantasy. It’s entirely possible given the right constraints, regardless of what the science may have you believe. Look at me, disputing the science. But I mean it. They would have us believe that so much is impossible. Would you live, willingly, in a world like that? I wouldn’t.”

Persistence.

Now, there are genuine religious applications for this story. It’s thought to be instructive to the action of prayer. Ask and ask, and ask again, and it will be given to you. But more than that, it’s an escape valve in an action. It has no other meaning. It’s transactional.”

“I think it’s educational. It teaches us ways in which our connections are more of a numbers game than we think them to be. Even ones between those of us that we love. It’s sad but true, which—in my mind—makes it less sad.

There was something to be said about the way that damaged people sought more pain, if only because it was familiar. Comforting, in a way? Maybe.

Moto is the first and only child character to be given lines. With his introduction comes the acknowledgement of new ground, a new atmosphere through which Jacket Guy must navigate, and, more importantly, a new and laborious facet of his personality that is given in part to humanize the stony hard edges of his character. This much is clear: neither Jacket Guy, nor the show, will ever be the same.

But something has changed in the way Jacket Guy views this boy and, by extension, himself, a change that does not announce to him its absolute enormity just yet, but will, soon enough.

It is apparent, in this moment, that Jacket Guy does not habitually show love, perhaps because he has never been shown it in the first place. It follows: an apathy intrinsic to his character has completed its transmogrification into something warm, for once, and forever.

Jacket Guy raises his head, and on his face, unmistakable, is a little smile. And oddly enough, to this viewer it has always been plain. It is this moment that this viewer can pinpoint, the moment in which a terrible sense of foreboding has always invaded. The smile is too comfortable, the music too heightened.

“Try the one percent” meant “take the motherfuckers to motherfucking court over this bullshit.”

You’re just a little boy, aren’t you? Still hurting, still torn up. It comprises everything you do and say.

“I don’t think you can accurately estimate the level of comfort you operate at. Nobody can. I think you get so…comfortable, that deep down, you will accept any truth they tell you that lets you keep existing the way you’re accustomed to.

Moto, an orphan, a gang child whose parents left him for dead, someone to whom the worst possible things have already happened, but still—a kid.

And what was I thinking about? Maybe that I’d drunk the wrong milk in my office and fucking blasted myself through time, through space, all the while realizing that I’ve been the pawn to some twisted psychopathic science experiment for months and, for all I knew, was floating in a tube of goo somewhere dreaming all of this up in my sleep. That I was being watched, that Lev was probably looking at the two of us right now through a camera he’d installed in my toilet, under my bed, behind my own fucking eyes.

“What do you have? Endless, repeated wire systems. A hydrogen bomb that keeps performing fission, keeps replenishing its source. In a word: renewable. In two: perpetual motion.”

It’s tough living this way, in a jar of my thoughts. I can’t imagine doing this forever. The choices are: go back to the dark, or go forward, and I am still not sure which way I have decided to go.

You saved my life, man, you kept me alive. Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to say all along, that the reason is, more or less, you, and always has been.

It crosses my mind that if in any way I still deserve her, it would be because people, in some primitive and primordial way, need at least one thing in their lives to give meaning to everything they do, and since I had none, not anymore, it would have to be her.

There was valuable, cutting-edge research just on the cusp of uncovering something extraordinary, locked away in the biochemistry of brains. She didn’t understand much of it, only that the research couldn’t continue without more information. The first commute, it ran away from us, things were so fast after that. Nobody knew where it would lead us. Perhaps that was what made it dangerous, what would come to be at stake, the lives we’d involve on our way there.”

“They obliterated a framework around the consciousness. A framework used by the brain, the mind, to place a person within a reality. Take, for example, the heat of a room. The feel of one’s clothes on the skin. Gravity. These are things acting on us, of course, at all times, yet we don’t have to concentrate on all of them at once to feel their presence, to be a conscious mind within these constraints. That was the framework. Something happened to that framework when one commuted. It fell apart. It transformed in ways we couldn’t predict. Some were waking up, telling us about visions they’d had of other people, other places—”

But that was the thing about memory. It often obeyed the capriciousness of a mind trying to hide from guilt, but one, always, had to live with the deceit.

Nobody has ever closed the loop, that’s for sure. When you do, you’ll be the loneliest man in the world. And nobody, not you, not me, not anyone, can change that.”

“When you close the loop, you eliminate the precedent that allowed the commute to occur in the first place. You’re talking about two points on a line, except that the difference here is that one point not only led to the other, it is responsible for the second point’s existence through direct action. What happens when you sever that link? One goes on, one doesn’t? Both go on? Neither? Read every book ever written with some hokey plotline like that, they’ll never agree. What you’re dealing with is an exercise of the imagination.”