The State of The Art

I’ll appreciate all that if I ever see it again. I’ll know then what it is to feel so safe, so pampered, so unafraid and confident.

I never get anywhere in that dream. I’m always simply walking, each and every time I have it. It is always the same, always as sweet; I always start and finish in the same place, everything is always the same; predictable and comforting. Everything is very sharp and clear. I miss nothing.

Day thirty. The mountains way behind us, and me — us — walking along the top of an ancient lava tunnel. I’m looking for a break in the roof because I think it’ll be fun to walk along within the tunnel itself- it looks big enough to walk inside. The suit says we aren’t heading in exactly the right direction for the base, following the tunnel, but I reckon we’re close enough. It indulges me. I deserve to be indulged; I can’t curl up like a little ball at night any more. The suit decided we were losing too much oxygen each time we melded the limbs and inflated the suit at night, so we’ve stopped doing that. I hated feeling trapped, and unable to scratch, at first, but now I don’t mind so much. Now I have to sleep with my legs in its legs and my arms in its arms.

The lava tunnel curves away in the wrong direction. I stand looking at it as it wiggles away into the distance, up a great slope to a distant, extinct shield volcano. Wrong way, damn it.

'Let’s get down and head in the right direction, shall we?' the suit says.

'Oh, all right,' I grumble. I get down. I’m sweating. I wipe my head inside the helmet, rubbing it up and down, like an animal scratching. 'I’m sweating,' I tell it. 'Why are you letting me sweat? I shouldn’t be sweating. You shouldn’t be letting me sweat. You must be letting your attention wander. Come on; do your job.'

'Sorry,' the suit says, in an unpleasant tone. I think it should take my comfort a little more seriously. That’s what it’s there for, after all.

'If you want me to get out and walk, I will,' I tell it.

'That won’t be necessary.'

I wish it would suggest a rest. I feel weak and dizzy again, and I could feel the suit doing most of the work as we got down from the roof of the lava tunnel. The pain in my guts is back. We start walking over the rubble-covered plain once more. I feel like talking.

'Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?'

'If what’s all worth what?' it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again.

'You know; living. Is it worth all the… bother?'

'No.'

'No?'

'No, I don’t ever wonder about it.'

'Why not?' I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath.

'I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.'

'Not important?'

'It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.'

'Oh. That easy, huh?'

'Why not?'

'Why?'

The suit is silent after that. I wait for it to say something, but it doesn’t. I laugh, wave both our arms about. 'I mean, what’s it all about, suit? What does it all mean?'

'What colour is the wind? How long is a piece of string?'

I have to think about that. 'What’s string?' I have to ask finally, suspecting I’ve missed something.

'Never mind. Keep walking.'

Sometimes I wish I could see the suit. It’s weird, now that I think about it, not being able to see who I’m talking to. Just this hollow voice, not unlike my own, sounding in the space between the inside of my helmet and the outside of my skull. I would prefer a face to look at, or even just a single thing to fix my attention on.

If I still had the camera I could take a photograph of us both. If there was water here I could gaze at our reflection.

The suit is my shape, extended, but its mind isn’t mine; it’s independent. This perplexes me, though I suppose it must make sense. But I’m glad I chose the full 1.0 intelligence version; the standard 0.1 type would have been no company at all. Perhaps my sanity is measured by the placing of a decimal point.

Night. It is the fifty-fifth night. Tomorrow will be the fifty-sixth day.

How am I? Difficult to say. My breathing has become laboured, and I’m sure I’ve become thinner. My hair is long now and my beard quite respectable, if a little patchy. Hairs fall out, and I have to squirm and pull to get an arm into the body of the suit to poke the hairs into the waste unit each night, or they itch. I am woken up at night by the pain inside me. It is like a little life itself, pawing and scraping to get out.

Sometimes I dream a lot, sometimes not at all. I have given up singing. The land goes on. I had forgotten planets were so big. This one’s smaller than standard, and it still seems to go on and on without end. I feel very cold, and the stars make me cry.

I am tormented by erotic dreams, and can do nothing about them. They are similar to the old dream, of walking on the ship or the seaship or whatever it is… only in this dream the people around me are naked, and caressing each other, and I am on my way to my lover… but when I wake up and try to masturbate, nothing happens. I try and try, but I only exhaust myself. Perhaps if the dream was more powerfully erotic, more imaginative… but it stays the same.

I’ve been thinking about the war a lot recently, and I think I’ve decided it’s wrong. We are defeating ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by winning it. All our statistics and assumptions mean less the more they seem to tell. We surrender, in our militance, not to one enemy but to all we’ve ever fought, within ourselves. We should not be involved, we ought not to do a thing; we’ve gambled our fine irony for a mechanistic piety, and the faith we fight’s our own.

Get out, stay out, keep clear.

Did I say that?

I thought the suit said something there. I’m not sure. Sometimes I think it’s talking to me all the time when I’m asleep. It might even be talking to me all the time when I’m awake, too, but it’s only occasionally that I hear it. I think it’s mimicking me, trying to sound the way I sound. Perhaps it wants to drive me mad, I don’t know.

Sometimes I don’t know which of us has said something.

I shiver and try to turn over in the suit, but I can’t. I wish I wasn’t here. I wish all this hadn’t happened. I wish it was all a dream, but like the colours of the earth and air, it’s too consistent.

I feel very cold, and the stars make me cry.

'Inside-out, inside-out, inside inside-out,
Inside-out, inside-out, inside inside-out!'

'Shut up!'

'Oh, you’re talking to me at last.'

'I said shut up!'

'But I wasn’t saying anything.'

'You were singing!'

'I don’t sing. You were singing.'

'Don’t lie! Don’t you dare lie to me! You were singing!'

'I assure you—'

'You were! I heard you!'

'You’re shouting. Calm down. We still have a long way to go. We shan’t get there if you—'

'Don’t you tell me to shut up!'

'I didn’t. You told me to shut up.'

'What?'

'I said—'

'What did you say?'

'I—'

'What? What did — who is that?'

'If you’ll ju—'

'Who are you? Who are you? Oh no, please… '