Dartagnan is a writer from Winnipeg, Canada who worked as a third-party service provider for Amazon. He has self-published two books through Amazon and was recently a producer on a third. “Relentless” was inspired by the prompt offered by the facilitators of the project to write about “The World After Amazon,” as well as by Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and the prophetic writing of Marshall McLuhan. The author reminds us that a piece of writing that qualifies as a story is didactic as well as entertaining.
“Your booster raised empathy markers to post-World War II levels?”
I glanced down from the podium, framed from behind by a ridiculous, oversized TIME magazine Person of the Decade cover.
“Correct. Those were the highest we could find. If you recall, we discovered, on average, the markers have been depressed by 71% since that time”
A paunchy, bald journalist with an ill-fitting blue suit and a mustache like an overgrown hedge was next.
“You t’all concern’d ‘bout this next phase?”
I leaned forward and looked down the long table at the twelve, hopeful, mostly smiling faces. Tomorrow, they would be the world’s first supernatural empaths.
I opened my mouth to reply, but as my eyes drifted back to the reporters I caught sight of Kemuel sitting in the corner with that stern, unsmiling visage and my breath caught.
“Our track-record speaks for itself. The breast cancer vaccine… Our empathy booster… We’ve demonstrated time and time again the efficacy of our efforts. This first group wouldn’t have volunteered if they weren’t confident too. We’re all enthusiastically looking forward to producing more results, which speak for themselves.”
A twenty-something woman with metallic-red hair and matching tight blazer spoke out from the back, “Why empathy?”
Ripan, seated in the first position next to me, smiled, giving me a small nod of encouragement.
“When I was a child, two in five people had serious anxiety issues. Fifteen years later, it was three in five. Thirteen-percent suffered debilitating depression. And then it became thirty-three… and my father… of course.”
A bird-like woman with a puffy, old fashioned dull-green Regency beret moved center.
“Your thoughts on the legacy of The Annex, and of your father?”
I paused and took a deep breath, giving myself a few seconds to run through all that has transpired.
“The immediate anti-trust litigation that fractured and dissolved ‘Big Tech’ was an obvious countermeasure.”
She continued to peck, “And the Geo-Fence Commerce Accords?”
“Virtual corrals existed long before. First, in marketing, I believe, then to suppress gun violence around schools. Once monopolized convenience and remote work came to be recognized as a form of isolationism… well, after that never leaving your house became as lethal as cigarettes in the twentieth century.”
I was beginning to feel weary, but I gestured toward Ripan and continued.
“My husband and I adore buying our milk from our lactuary, visiting our crofter and butcher. Our deeper understanding, post-Annex, fortified the intimate connection between human relationships and well-being.”
The redhead opened her mouth again, “What about the three breast cancer patients that committed suici–”
The convener cut her off, “Thank you Dr. Crumpler for fielding these questions and spending your valuable time with us here today.”
I shook her hand to a standing ovation before I moved down the five or six stairs…
the scarlett journalist persisted, forcing her way through the throng.
“Comment doctor? Comment?”
I met Ripan’s outstretched hand and we followed the other eleven future super empaths down the corridor to the waiting stretchdrone.
I stepped into the foyer, but Alessia wasn’t there to greet me. The hairs on my arms and back of my neck stood tall as I looked around quickly, trying to quell the rising panic.
“MOTHER? Hellooooo?”
I strode through the archway into the great room, blinking at the sun that shone through the wall of windows. The news was on, but muted, as always.
I jogged across the landing to the kitchen. The machinery was still.
“MOTHERRRR?”
Only echo.
My hands grew slick, my forehead pulsed as I zig-zagged through the labyrinthine hallways to the Grand Bedroom.
Desolate, but…
A rising, high-pitched electronic squeal pierced my ears from the direction of the spa.
I skidded into the shower room where glass from the shattered shower door lay in a shallow layer of water made pink with blood.
Mother lay face up on the corner bench with the gynadroid’s hands pressed to her chest. Alessia’s head rotated toward me–a sterile, machine-voice warning.
Stand clear. Stand clear. Stand clear.
Deedoo-deedoo-deedoo…
WUMP.
He slapped my issue of TIME down on the table and slung his matching monogrammed white lab coat over the back of the couch.
“Final copy in the district.”
My own airbrushed-thin cheeks stared back at me. Along with our breakthroughs, technology delivered a fame that still makes me uneasy.
“Aaaaaand…”
Like he’d done a thousand times before, Ripan’s surgical touch produced a large, white vinyl disc that he lowered onto the bed of the waiting gizmo.
“PLAY.”
The player whirred and lights on the circular apparatus sparkled, color after color, as they galloped around the perimeter
A creeping, distorted guitar and a banshee’s falsetto engulfed the room. A twinge from a haunted memory.
Ripan finger-combed his salt-and-pepper hair out of his face as the couch slid back and autoreclined his thin frame.
“Your father was into this?”
“Gearhead. Always tinkering… boppin’ his head.”
I removed my round, oversized Warby-Marchon glasses and drew my thumb and forefinger across my eyes in a slow pinch. More than three long years at the lab had paid off. Tomorrow… a nudge beyond nature.
He smiled, “What would we do without coffee?”
I flopped down on the couch next to him and in unison we sipped from our matching steaming mugs.
“Ready?”
My head bobbed: so-so.
“Not the lab.”
My lip stiffened.
“Recovering… she’ll be at half mast, thankfully.”
“Kemuel?”
“Fence… if not over. ”
Ripan considered my words before he clinked my mug. “It’ll work out.”
I sighed and leaned back, trying to find peace in the driving, foreboding acoustics.
“I can’t.”
Pale and thin, Kemuel slumped at the confession. Despite his optimistic green contacts, whatever positivity might have been brewing in him had long gone.
“You can’t today?” I asked.
A long pause. “Ever.”
The back-and-forth had stretched almost a year now. But today I sensed resolve. I tried to convince him to stay anyway.
“Together we obliterated breast cancer. We measure and restore–”
“Restored, Clare, empathy restored… this… this is a complete unknown.”
I looked past him to the side-by-side awards on the wall.
“It will work”, I whispered. I stepped in to hug him.
His whole body steeled. “I have… a bad feeling about this.”
I grasped for anything. “What if this finally pulls everyone – the world – togeth–”
“I’m sorry,” he shook his head, “It’s too far.”
He put his arms around me, returning the hug, briefly, then brushed past me out the sliding doors.
I slunk to the window and watched, his unmistakeable black-and-blonde checkerboard hairdo as he exited the building and pushed through the small cluster of anti-booster protestors. One man’s sign, jiggling up and down, read…
Progress is the mother of problems.
“He’s right. This is new ground.”
Ripan nodded, “But it’s why I volunteered.”
He studied our intertwined fingers and then his eyes climbed to meet my watery ones.
“You can still back o–”
He cut me off and shook his head in a slow side-to-side. “No. Myself, the rest, we’re all in. Kemuel made his choice–we’ve made ours.”
He swallowed hard, considered his words.
“This is a new step, sure… for the better. Our combined success is a long chain of evidence.”
He traced my jaw with his fingertip. “Hey, we’re Crumplers.”
He’d taken my last name as a symbol of our future, our proud heritage of scientific innovation.
Ripan’s touch shattered the trance and I dove at him, pressing my lips to his, thoughts of the day forgotten.
A stainless steel arm extended the microneedle patch and pressed it into his upper arm. A brief wince splashed across his face.
A cold, cleansing pad massaged Ripan’s skin until it cooled while mechanical digits peeled and disposed of the backing. I pressed the glowing green button to reset it for the next patient.
As he drifted off I kissed his forehead. To lighten the mood he imitated now-ironic dialogue from Kemuel’s favorite classic film.
“I’ll be back”
Welcome, Mrs. Crumpler. She wishes that you wait in the sky room.
Alessia stood sentinel as I moved down past the giant, muted holovision wall to the sunken skirt that ran the length of the angular two-storey windows.
My mother’s new medicochair’s thrum warned me of her arrival. Somehow, that gentle chime managed to sound sinister.
“Claremonde.”
She was a shriveled, sand colored raisin in her nineties, with a shock of unkempt white hair, but she still addressed me like I was a military officer under her command.
“Your color has returned, mother”
“How’s Ripan?”
“In recovery too… taking the painkillers?”
“The savior won’t let me forget.”
She waved a swift dismissive hand in the general direction of Alessia, standing watch from the landing.
Mother pulled closer, her toes within an inch of the glass.
“Her accomplice,” her voice dropped conspiratorially, “almost drowned me.”
“I don’t believe the stand-up shower is sentie–”
“It’s time.”
“Time?”
“Time you watch… see.”
I shivered.
“I forbade you, but…” She trailed off. “I shouldn’t be here. Nature rang – twice – but you answered.”
I pushed back, “Well, first: do no harm.”
Her contraption flipped around to face me.
“I am,” she paused as if the words were unfamiliar, “deeply grateful. You saved me – and countless others.”
I stonefaced an internal cascade of pride, and… was that a glint of tears? If so, they were gone in an instant. She never did take the empathy booster.
“This last one should have.” She twisted her head to stare down Alessia.
“That’s why she’s–”
“DAMMIT, I SHOULD’VE DIED!”
I recoiled as the vitriolic spit of her words hit me.
She gathered herself and with a sombre tonality, began anew.
“I miss him more than you could ever know.” She edged her chair forward, closing the distance.
“You two peas. Roboticist, geneticist… <cough>… technology is in the blood.”
She plead. “Twas my chance to see him again.”
She spun away and steered along the window apron to a small, thin bookcase, struggled forward in her seat, then snatched a black book off the shelf.
She returned and thrust the tome at me. I took it and skimmed the cover, a crude drawing of a blazing lightbulb.
Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
I thumbed the pages, discovering my father’s handwritten notes in the margins. Inside the front cover, scrawled in his favorite frozen crystal font.
Kranzberg’s 2nd law
“This was dad’s…”
“Quiet!”
She jabbed at the roller ball embedded in the arm of her device and the giant 3D projection behind me blared.
–yacht Cleomestra fell from orbit and plunged into Ganymeade’s atmosphere, killing all fourteen passengers and crew, among them Broderick Huhn, former CEO of now-defunct Relentless (née Amazon) and current CEO of Tros Interstellar Mining. Details to–
I went numb. The smug, cavalier, miscreant employer I’d held responsible for my father’s death… gone?
“Laws. Ramparts. Your jab drove the final stake into Relentless… their ilk… father’s legacy complete. Seems avarice went one better.”
She buzzed her conveyance back to the window.
“Did you know Einstein refused surgery when he was seventy-six, to die on his own terms?”
She spun one-eighty, floated up the ramp as she flung the words over her shoulder.
“‘The Annex, Clare.”
Once topside, she paused.
“Alessia, go with Clare. I hear she needs a new assistant.”
Alessia moved toward the elevator as mother disappeared into shadow, shouting her final salvo.
“LET ME GO, CLAREMONDE.”
The security guard moved to intercept, looking over at me for confirmation. I stood him down with a look and a gesture indicating there was no need to intervene.
The massive, shiny chrome double doors slid open with a low, electronic whoosh. Ripan reached out his hand and caressed the aluminium jamb like a puppy.
Slack-jawed, he took in the outside world from various angles before he decided to take another step.
Recognizing its owner, the half-white, half-currant auto-drone nearby whistled a harmony, slid its passenger glass open and beckoned him. But he staggered past as if he didn’t even see it.
Steadying himself with an outstretched arm, he rested under the lone tree on the “lawn,” a meager, wild swatch of grass amid endless civilized concrete.
He blinked long, deliberate blinks as he sipped in his environs. Soon he wept, and sagged against the tree in a forceful embrace, like a loved one had returned from the grave. Alessia moved closer, worried he might collapse.
The other eleven wandered out from the building one at a time, a collective strange new sun wriggling over the horizon for the first time.
“You can still back o–”
I cut him off, imitated his own side-to-side head shake.
“Someone convinced me otherwise.”
I drew my finger-tip along his jawline before I pointed his attention to the far wall.
A wedding picture of my parents, my father’s identical smile shining back at me. A moment later, I lost my grip completely and my eyelids becoming swollen inlets as the familial memories flooded in.
Stand still. Stay where you are! Don’t move!
I always froze at his portrayal of the autonomous police car from Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian.”
He flailed the cardboard-roll sword to defend us from the deranged airpopper as puny, popcorn clouds arced across the kitchen and embedded in my pint-sized pineapple updo.
I smiled at the memory, absently touching the full-sized pineapple updo that I still favored.
“PLAY”, Ripan commanded the holovision.
A three-dimensional grid of tiny, virtual boxes appeared, each square a live feed from a different relentless.com warehouse. On-the-scene reportage and updates scrolled by in different languages. A digital clock displayed 8:42 a.m. local time as the in-studio anchor returned viewers to the warehouse seventeen miles from where I grew up.
I spotted a familiar figure in his relentless.com zip-up and jeans. One foot on the edge coping, he peered down past the orange and black logo, seven stories to the ground.
The minutes evaporated, his rooftop clan joined hands and stood side-by-each in a line that stretched the length of the building’s front lip.
At 8:57 my father’s amplified voice reached out.
We, the Unified, gather across the globe after a long period of deep and thoughtful reflection.
From the very dawn of humanity, we’ve been blinded by our technology… these extensions of our physical and psychological selves.
These so-called… free… gifts… have, despite their benefits, numbed our ability to sense their pitfalls.
I stood up from the couch and pulled Ripan too.
The rampant anxiety, grave depression, loneliness… it is all driven by disconnect between physical reality and digital… unreality.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alessia whir into action and started to turn my head, but I couldn’t look away and the subtle movement caused my vision to streak.
We aim to thwart the persistent darkness invading our species.
My stomach churned.
For our elders… our partners… our neighbors… our children…
I became dizzy.
…this is our sacrifice.
The protesters raised their conjoined hands into the air for a minute of silence.
The clock struck 9 a.m. local time and…
…everyone leapt from their buildings.
I fell back in kind, caught by the embrace of darkness.
Early the next morning I was eyeballs into the book.
…beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society…
The soft knock on the door startled me. I slipped the bookmark between the pages and looked up as Ripan entered, extending my handheld toward me.
“It’s K.”
I smiled and tossed the book down, the back cover flopping open to reveal my father’s handwritten explanation of Kranzberg’s law. I stared at it.
“Clare?”
I snapped back into the moment, took the handheld and placed my hand over the mic.
“Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee…”
Ripan laughed and returned the words as he moved back down the hall.
I put Kemuel on speaker and got up from the bed.
“I’m here.”
“I had to tell you, I just ran into Ste… ummm, shhhib…oh! Patient twelve.”
“Okayyyyy?”
“She was with… her dad.”
“You sure?”
“Introduced me. It’s been twenty-two years, Clare. They were both giddy and they carried on like children.”
I already knew the number. I felt the emotion catch in my throat.
“Clare? Clare?”
I sniffled, couldn’t speak.
“You did it! I’m walking, call you back in twenty.” click.
The familiar drizzly echo of coffee-making retrieved my smile.
I jumped out of bed and headed to the adjoining bathroom, intending to brush my teeth. Instead, I found myself twisting and turning the toothbrush as I studied its every detail.
My eyes drifted back to where McLuhan slept…
…subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users…
That’s when I heard it.
“RIPAN?”
The record player was full blast, and skipping.
Internal minor notes plucked the guitar-string hairs up the back of my neck.
“RIPAAAAAAN?”
A sterner attempt was drowned out.
I set my toothbrush down and marched out to the sitting room.
The volume of the repeating song fell away as I saw Ripan frozen still at the counter in front of the coffeebot.
His head and back were arched. His face a pained contortion. His arms locked, his hands pressed into the counter.
I crept close, whispered.
“Ripan?”
He seemed crystallized in statuesque stasis, save one detail. At close range I detected a subtle, full-body jitter.
My father had a word. Buf… buffet? No. Buffering.
The second the word materialized I glimpsed my father’s picture on the wall and I recalled his inscription inside the back cover of the McLuhan book.
Kranszberg’s Second Law. Technology… is neither good, nor bad…
I turned back to Ripan and sucked in a chest-heaving breath.
Nor. Is. It. Neutral.
I swept back the wispy sleeve of my blouse.
The square grid of microneedle marks dotted my upper arm and I stood motionless for who knows how long before a peripheral blinking caught my eye.
The hypnotic, alternating tap-dance of incoming calls blowing up my handheld. Kemuel for sure. The others?
Good? Bad?
The outstretched animatronic arm of the coffebot poured us two pristine cups in a slow, dark brown waterfall cascade… before it too stuttered, then blurred as it started to flick its paint room-wide to the almost-rhythm of the music.
The turntable’s skipping loop of Greta van Fleet returned to concert pitch in my ears and a cold realization flooded the room…
God machine
Malfunctioned as it grew
And the circuits blew
Falling down on you
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