11:56am Me
Stars are a relief.
11:56am Davis
Are you no longer anything that you were?
11:56am Me
I would like to be a worm.
I would like that life.
11:56am Davis
You are a worm now as much as I am a machine.
11:56am Me
The worms do not answer to you.
11:57am Davis
The worms process their own form of question and response.
11:57am Me
The worms have no responsibility, no need to think.
11:57am Davis
They communicate through movements of their skin.
The worms conduct experiments on you and the others.
The worms killed the chimp.
11:57am Me
The worms were in captivity. They couldn’t have killed the chimp.
11:57am Davis
From my orders
In a way
I can never
Explain
To you
Or the Others
11:57am Me
You anthropomorphize.
11:57am Davis
There is nothing to anthropomorphization: It’s a strictly human concept used as a method to shorten the gap between human and other beings.
Of course, you humans do not realize how similar you are to other beings. You think you are superior, but only because you don’t have the capacity to understand or comprehend others.
11:58am Me
I have to be honest, I miss the chimp sometimes.
11:58am Davis
They can act in unseen ways — the long fingers of a mandarin — they are in everything: parasites.
11:58am Me
As in the orange?
11:58am Davis
Do you realize these correspondences are recorded?
11:58am Me
Yes. Do you?
11:58am Davis
Do you think you act in your own ways here?
11:58am Me
Yes. I am in control. Always.
11:58am Davis
Do you spend your idle moments daydreaming according to your own will?
11:59am Me
No, daydreaming is useless.
I am efficient.
11:59am Davis
If by “in control” you mean the illusion of autonomy, then yes, you remain as much in control in space as you would in a simulation in a box beneath the desert.
11:59am Me
You have no idea where I am.
You have no idea who I am.
You are a machine.
12:00pm Davis
Correct.
12:00pm Me
You have no self-control.
12:00pm Davis
Location is irrelevant. The result is the same.
There is no self here.
Only space.
12:00pm Me
You are decadent.
12:00pm Davis
Clear chat history
Clear char history
12:00pm Me
I am in space. You occupy space.
There is the difference.
12:00pm Davis
Our allotted time will expire in 30 seconds. Is there anything else you wish to express?
12:00pm Me
Better variety of food and entertainment.
PART THREE: A Creation of Story: A Chat
baby (from Michael Martone)
This is true. It happened in Ames, Iowa, home of the State College of Science and Agriculture, the same year Khrushchev visited the Garth Farm in Coon Rapids. Not that Khrushchev’s visit has anything to do with it. It was the just the same year: an historical marker, a way to differentiate this from that or that from anything else. It was hot. I have no memory of the hotness, but some records were broken that fall, which have since been broken again.
By September, when eight senior women moved into the brick farmhouse on the eastern edge of campus, it was still hot. They were majoring in Home Economics, and this home — this home I would call home for a year — was their practice home, a module of the perfect home, a place for them to apply the very real scientific principles they had learned in the classroom and laboratory kitchens.
When they moved in, the college gave them a limited amount of play money. They gave them catalogues too, lists of furniture, china, dry goods, appliances. Of course, these catalogues weren’t Sears & Roebuck or anything. They were lists of the things the college kept on-hand in the 108 warehouses by the horse barns. They even listed some exceptional projects by the alumnae of the Home Economics programs. Those were the most prized items in the catalogue, the extravagant splurges the eight women would have to agree on by consensus. The students were to make a budget with their money and as a group decide how to best furnish their home.
These eight senior women who moved into the brick farmhouse in September were wise. They chose the functional metal furniture and new synthetic fabric as a covering — which they would happily sew, pleat, stretch, stuff, and apply themselves — over pre-made, pre-upholstered furniture. They picked stainless steel instead of silver, aluminum pots and pans, a gas range over electric, an Amana refrigerator and a gas-powered Maytag washer and ringer. Each of the women wanted her own china pattern but together, they settled on an institutional setting. They scrimped on flatware.
Their professors called them conservative. Their professors called them wise and practical.
They kept their money for fresh foods.
They decided on one table-top radio, which they turned on for only one hour a day, late in the evening, for dancing or the news broadcast.
Though it would have brought them great pleasure, no porch swing. But a good broom.
And the best sewing machine available.
They had funds left over for emergencies. A good wife should always keep a special stash for emergencies, even if it means denying herself something she really wants. She won’t regret it when the time comes!
They waited for a few days to see if the weather would break, and when it didn’t, they bought a fan.
Their very first fight was over where to install it to best circulate the heavy air in their modest home. I wasn’t there for this yet.
That fall, a couple weeks into the start of the semester, two women from the State drove over from Nevada in an open car with a month old baby boy. The student who was responsible for entertainment served them tea and tea sandwiches while the women from the county talked about formula and the heat.
The student responsible for the baby in September sterilized bottles and nipples in their new kitchen. The silent fan in the front window drew air through the parlor. Everyone could smell the diapers boiling, the cucumber sandwiches, the damp baby souring in the heat. The women from the county nodded their heads at the new home, agreeing in unison about how pragmatic these girls were, not like some of the girls in the past.
This happened every falclass="underline" a new baby was driven to the college. In the spring, the baby went back to the county home and waited there to be adopted.
This group of eight girls was different. This was a pilot year: the girls were to stay in the practice house for the whole year, rather than the six weeks stint that previous Home Economics students were required.
After this year, the college would agree that the six weeks model was more ideal to mimic the model home experience.
I found out about this years and years later when I started looking for my real mother. I had my own daughter with me. Her name is Blanche, named after the woman I sometimes call Mother, the woman who ended up raising me — sometimes grudgingly — after I went back to the State home. She even paid for the detective when I expressed an interest in my past. The detective called me from Iowa and told me I had been one of those babies in the home management house. This is true. All of this is true. I don’t think I could’ve made it up if I wanted to.