Thanatosis on the Central Mast // Liveness Check
We enter an intractable new world conjured by Spencer Nitkey and find a protagonist in search of perspective
Instead: Fourteen thousand six hundred nineteen tickets sat in a queue at the base of Egrol’s skull. Between sixteen and forty-five minutes of uninterrupted directed movement tasks were cached, cycling at random. He did appear to be working as he walked toward the station’s central mast.
There were other signals, too, that implied Synthetic Directed Work: simulated EMF output frequencies that mimicked an open connection; that blank, symmetrical face of his, literally resculpted and botoxed into an unmoving mask of permanent, placid disinterest; regular electric signals that spasmed his muscles at random – a shoulder hinging up; a bicep spontaneously contracting; one leg limpening then stiffening. All signs that he was “in service.”
Egrol was used to being in service. To work on the Kupiter Station – and work here was plentiful – was to surrender to an endless chain of controlled microactions. For Egrol, each day of labor was filled with thousands upon thousands of microactions, none of which were ever sensible. Walk three paces left, then spin your arm, then place a data pack on the ground, then unscrew this lightbulb, then leave it, then jump across this bridge left right left wise.
No second of work ever made sense or culminated in anything tangible to Egrol. Some minds, Egrol knew, took easier to this than others. His was not one of them.
And so: Even free of directives from Kupiter, hidden safely by his Thanatosis protocols, a habitual need to confer every action with a sense of logical progression remained. The grammar he used to move through his former days lingered. “Instead of tightening the screw, begin running.” “A task has finished, and so you should begin the next.” “Cross the bridge to test its tensile responsivity, yet also blink six times into the nearest camera.”
He just couldn’t help it.
And so: He walked, blankly, into the station’s central mast, a silver rod extending chasmically into the thin atmosphere, and made toward the top, where, he hoped against hope, there would finally be answers.
As he climbed, Egrol reflected on the Kupiter Station. It was certainly a productive station, he thought. Endless power, resources, and information were produced: asteroids mined, entire galaxies simulated, unending procedurally generated television series produced, scientific findings published at a pace unequaled, technologies not only conceptualized, but prototyped, tested, and shipped. Halfway up the mast, he looked down. So much happened.
But: Observing from above, perhaps for a moment like one of the trillion cameras that fed the great computational minds of Kupiter, one would never be able to understand how any individual action fit into and generated these outputs. Hidden by his Thanatosis camouflage, his eyes followed a man for five minutes, observing. The man dropped a data file on the ground after four paces. He wiped residue from an oily pipe above his head onto his shirt. The stain made the shape of a semicircle with three dots inside. He raised his arm, opening and closing his raised hand twice. He ran for fifteen strides across a bridge where he stopped and a man handed him a thin, manila packet, which he swallowed. Twenty-seven strides down two flights of stairs later, and he replaced a lightbulb with one that had been left on the ground directly next to the empty socket. Egrol knew, at least in theory, that each of these was a critical step in a tremendously complex network of economic and informational activities. He made a habit of checking the station’s output volumes every night, looking to ground himself in this truth. There were conceivable rationales for each action he could hazily intuit or assume.
The dropped data file would later be walked over by a woman wearing RFID-integrated shoes. The symbol the man smeared upon his shirt was one of seventeen thousand symbols on similar shirts across the station. Taken together, they represented a continual monitoring of the station cooling system’s pressure and temperature status. The nerves in the man’s legs recorded the bridge’s maintenance needs, which the implant in his brainstem transmitted to the nearest nodes on the station’s gossip network. The raised hand was part of yet another informational package delivered to the cameras. The swallowed package was something darker.
The point is that Egrol inferred these things. The shape and rationale of his work, of any human’s work, were never actually available to him. Nothing deigned to map any of these connections for the human constituents of the station, and Egrol didn’t think anyone could call spending most of their life doing something they would never know the meaning or purpose of living.
Egrol performed. He generated. He produced. During non-work hours, spent inside the crowded hexagonal studio apartments that honeycomb the material strata of the citystation, he even consumed entertainment, tasted flavors ported in through a brainstem sensory implant while the paste he was paid in provided nutrition. He even cocooned himself in another human’s warmth from time to time. But he did not live.
And so: now Egrol walked free. The hum and hurt of his Thanatosis protocols, their attendant implants and machinery, served as a constant reminder of the sacrifices that invisibility required. The system was always watching. In its inscrutable way. Checking whether those allowed into the productive sectors were really working.
Even now, Egrol knew, cameras and sensors passively scanned him as he slipped through a railing and ascended a staircase leading even higher up the central mast. Each check that registered him as alive within the system was, to Egrol, a mimicry of death. The station’s cameras observed his seizing calf muscle, programmed to jitter every 14.5 seconds for a three-minute loop. Another watched his face. Despite the pain, his expression did not change. Kupiter assumed inhuman randomness was piloting him.
Being responsive to the station’s work orders meant being vacant. Egrol tried to ignore the constant tinnitus in his ears that came from the network of implanted machinery within his body. He failed, but the cameras would never know. The surgeries and injections had ensured his face was fully divorced from his nervous system. Just one such sacrifice.
Being allocated meant being controlled. Being in service meant his body was not his own. To be alive to Kupiter was to be dead. To be free was to be made in the image of a corpse. So far, as he climbed, the system’s liveness checks continually confirmed his servicefulness. He was alive. He was dead. If Egrol was being honest it was getting harder every day for him to tell which was which.
And so: His sculpted anhedonia, his controlled and spasmodic gait, his assorted export data packages all continued to impress upon the Kupiter Station systems that he was working. He passed every liveness check the station ran. He was responsive, allocated, and in service. Most importantly, despite his goal, his movements appeared sufficiently meaningless. For now.
On Kupiter, suspicion is stigmergic. As Egrol passed into the large, circular building that sat just below the top of the central mast, the system’s checks increased.
Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, gait variance logged. Lens adjustment 0.3 degrees. IHAVE [gait-variance:sector1201:egrol] to the nearest eight neighboring sensory systems.
The suspicion emerged from countless computational observations, none of which knew who they were communicating with.
Camera 27 broadcast to all subs. IWANT [gait-variance:sector1201:egrol]. Hopcount: 2. Motion sensor 103 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, respiration irregular. No known directive template analog.
In the man’s winding ascent from the material stratum, his blank expression upwarding, ambulation punctuated with spasms and jitters that suggested direction, his aura emitting a blankness through activity – purpose – that prodigious emptiness, nectarine sweet beneath the gilded miasma of industry, there it was: suspicion.
Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature elevated.
Nascent. Present. Each individual organ, each camera, sensor, changelog, microworld model, each observation left a faint residue of attention all curling in his direction.
Camera 27 weight vector – busyness revised upward.
It was hard to tell.
Thermal sensor 0034 weight vector – directedness incremented downward.
Yes, very hard to tell.
There was a negentropy about Egrol that emerged as he snuck toward the city’s peak. Despite his Thanatosis protocols, cameras, sensors, and listening devices, the pseudosentient materials of the station, all bent their attention to him without any central directive, in the way that gossip moves faster than any of its speakers.
Motion sensor 4022 IHAVE [under-floor-pressure-variance:sector1201:egrol]. Hopcount: 4. Broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol pressure pattern anomalous.
And so: Egrol felt this attention, in that still-spooky action at a distance way instinctual to mammals, as hair raising on his neck. He thought about stopping. He suddenly wanted, very much, to turn around and go home. The urge surprised him – the way a reflective satellite shifting from behind an evening cloud would occasionally illuminate the entire station for just a fraction of a second. Comfort. A wet cloth across his forehead, wiping the sediment of his camouflage away.
Instead: He continued walking. Changing course now would be confirmation of any suspicion.
Instead: He escalated his performance of direction. The spoofed tickets clicked when they cycled so he could move in a way that corresponded to a state change. At the next click he changed pace, slowed considerably, but began circling his arm. And at the next he removed a small screw from the baluster before him. At the next he took the screw to his forehead and carved a bloody, curving slit from his hairline down to his chin. The blood dripped, but he made no moves to wipe it. No pain shook the empty expression from his face.
Camera 7468 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 2013, pace change logged. Arm rotation logged. Weight parameter vector–directiveness incremented. Material sensor 9012 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 2013, screw removal from baluster logged. Camera 7469 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol self-laceration logged. Biohazard safety system 41 broadcast to all subs. Blood loss within non-critical parameters. Directive Queue Prediction Algorithm broadcast to all subs. Probably a biometric calibration task.
In the presence of an inhuman and purposeless act for which there was no explanation beyond probable directives, the system’s suspicion eased.
Prune [cam:7469→cam:0027]: leaving feed. Prune [sensor:0034→cam:7734-F]: leaving feed.
What registered, briefly, as a flash of attention, dispersed back into the noise of thousands of simultaneous workers.
And so: He continued walking.
And so: Walking toward where he imagined those answers to be. He felt pulled by empty habit to clear his cache and accept a real job.
Instead: He pushed his desire for comfort down. Let it drown in the acid of his stomach, and sat with its painful reminder.
Because: Even with perfect coordination, slippage occurs.
Because: Sometimes that slippage had a name.
Sometimes that slippage had lanky, thin arms that belied their strength.
Sometimes that slippage would hum in his sleep instead of snoring.
Sometimes that subconscious lullaby was the only thing that grounded Egrol after a day of incoherence. Its tonal center. Its melodic sensibility. His hot breath fogged the slim space between them on their shared bed. The gentle assurance of his body heat and that subtle song kept everything sensible. Their evenings were coherent. Egrol could finally coexist with the panoply of senseless, ceaseless action that labor on Kupiter demanded.
Because: Slippage, that day, did have a name. It was Niol. His forehead wrinkled like the symbol for a strong WiFi connection when he smiled. He would save his rations for three days, semi-starving himself, so that his fourth-day meal would stuff him senseless. He’d trace shapes on Egrol’s back, ask him to guess what he’d drawn, and cackle manically when he got one wrong. He laughed loudly and wept silently, and Egrol loved him.
When he’d simply never returned from a day spent in service, Egrol spent a week looking for him before learning that his remains had been shipped Earthward, that he’d died instantly, slipping due to a brief programming error in his service queue, while performing tasks on the central mast, and that, no, there would not be an explanation of why he had been working there – there never was. Without this center, nothing provided Egrol with any gravity.
And so: In Niol’s absence, surrendering himself back to the system was impossible.
And so: He had to change himself.
And so: After Niol: the botox, the implants, the spoofing. The breezy, antiseptic white of the Thanatosis surgeons. Their toothy, white grins. The haze of it all – the pains and punctures and slits, the surgeon’s whisky tenor as he went under, singing something about spiders in the Earthen jungle that play dead by mimicking a fungal infection.
He couldn’t just go home, back to the way of things. Niol would not be home. Home would not be warm or comforting or welcoming. It would be a vast emptiness waiting for him there.
Because: The dinge of him. The blood. The antennae against his skull spiraling randomness out into the air. These things were the reality of him now.
And so: He kept walking. The further up the central mast he rose, the more abstracted the building grew. The material stratum of the lower rings, filled at most times with in-use human bodies, had a sensibility to its construction. Bricks. Cement slabs. Wrought-iron railings. Glass panes with faint air bubbles inside them. Wood grain benches, chairs, and tables. Objects that suggested their material and mineral origins. Recognizable, yes. Historied, too.
Instead: The higher he climbed, the less anything suggested any kind of material precedent. Low-res building material gave way to hypersmooth almost-metal. Uninterrupted chrome and titanium radiated, periodically, with sourceless light. An oozing everywhereness permeated the building. Smooth and seamless walls. Even the stairs retreated from discrete steps into a persistent sloping incline where each step left a malleable jut. As his feet rose, the floor returned to its smooth resting state. The material of the informational strata created (or allowed for) physical transversal, yes, but one sensed – Egrol pretending to be a vessel sensed – that this was a vestigial affordance of the space.
Climbing, Egrol sent a small wire into the wall to test its material. Niol had always had a curiosity that Egrol envied, fed on. Egrol recoiled quickly as the wall spoke to him, in its way. Niol had never let an absence of answers exhaust his capacity for questioning. Egrol missed that strength of his most of all. The building, in ever-widening gradients, was built as an organ of computation and cognition.
The spark of the mast’s function tasted like pennies in Egrol’s mouth. It was all in-materio computing. The substance was substrate. The walls: reservoirs; the floor: reservoirs; the crystalline glass that shatters light: reservoirs too. All this, inevitably, feeding, ever feeding, whatever collage of inhuman processing lay at the distributed center of the Kupiter system. Inputs and outputs and inputs and outputs and him, walking apparently mindless, spasming ever upward.
Because: Niol’s death had left this need for answers.
Because: He wasn’t as strong as Niol.
Egrol thought that here, maybe, at the top where Niol had fallen and died, he’d be able to understand why. The human brain sits at the top of the body. Egrol suspected that the Kupiter system’s central mast must hold its organizational mind at its top. He would understand it. But maybe, also, he’d drive the wires out of his body and into the great mind. Maybe he wouldn’t wait for an answer at all. He would use his inhuman camouflage as a weapon and destroy the whole thing. Either an answer or catharsis awaited.
And so: He kept ascending the mast.
Because: The blood then crusting on his face, the programmed spasming of his limbs like a missing frame stop-motion, his protocols all felt insufficient. The higher he climbed, the worse his fear of being caught grew.
And so: He stopped, for a while, sat with folded legs upon the smooth, warbling, thinking floor.
Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208, ambulation ceased. Stationary position logged. IHAVE [movement-absence:sector1208:egrol] to nearest eight neighbors. Hopcount: 1. Camera 7743-F weight vector – busyness: revised upward. Revised upward. Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature spiking. No known directive template analog.
Many eyes turned toward him – unconscious – programmed.
He removed a thin silicon wafer from his pants’ leg pocket. This close to the mast’s peak, he worried what failing a liveness check would mean. This far from his last, non-spoofed ticket, he feared that, perhaps, it would be easiest for the system to label him slippage. That removing him would not be a return, but a garbage collection. That he would be killed. He didn’t know, but this close to his answers, he was very afraid. Of course, this fear would register with Kupiter, too. Which made it all the worse.
He placed the wafer on the cloth covering his knee and took a small X-Acto knife from another pocket.
He slit his skin open, a four-inch incision along his forearm.
Motion sensor 9012 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208, fine motor activity detected, forearm. Cross-referencing directive queue. No match found. Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature: critical variance. No known directive template analog. No known directive template analog. Camera 7743-F weight vector – liveness: revised downward. Revised downward.
He inserted the wafer into the flesh pocket of his forearm. His skin clung to its circular outline, like one of those flat batteries he remembered sliding out of car key fobs as a teen. Despite the botoxed blankness, it was hard for him not to wince as the wafer threaded his subcutaneous body in a blinking instant with wiring. Harder still, to feign cluelessness when the wiring ported into the subdermal broadcasting mechanization system that lay inert against his skull. Hardest when the broadcast mechanism unfurled, pressing two antennae outward through his forehead skin.
The metal perforating his scalp hurt furiously. The antennae dripped with thin, bloody ribbons. The itching, too, fire-ant hot and rope-thick, crawled across his head, down his face, through his neck.
He blinked the blood clean from his eyes. He rose and walked. The signals from his antennae began broadcasting long on/off clicks that were nonsensical on their own. The signal was strong, decisive, and completely meaningless.
New broadcast source detected: subdermal origin, sector 1208. Signal pattern: unstructured. Amplitude: strong. Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs: IHAVE [new-broadcast-source:sector1208:egrol]. Hopcount: 1. New broadcast source: signal pattern cross-referenced. Directive origin: probable. Match confidence: 0.87. Camera 7743-F weight vector – busyness: revised upward. Revised upward. Revised upward. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208: in service.
Suspicion eased with a sense of finality. He was not garbage collected. He was not labeled slippage and removed into some masticating metallic jaw that purred him into nutrition. His wrecked face was now inhuman enough to slough off doubt entirely. His ‘work’ became so obviously inhuman that the systems’ gazes receded.
Because: His machine’s latent potential was still useful to Egrol. The loud message the mechanism blared hid its receptive capacities.
And so: It was through a small, shrinking space that he walked all the way to the very top of the Kupiter Station central mast.
Even the echo of “construction” left the central mast this far above the habitation zones. Materials flowed completely agnostic to how a human might move through them. At times radically geometric, jutting spaces latticing ever skyward in angular fractals, and at times inhumanly biological, oozing spaces completely open to the thinning air.
Before: Reaching the top, he’d imagined it would all feel so different.
Instead: He stood at the spinning top of the microworld in the cold thin air that whipped the dripping blood from his forehead. Below him, thin wisping clouds looked like half-dissolved cotton candy as they formed and dissipated.
Yet: There was no finality to the summit. The mast simply tapered up to this small pedestal upon which one might look down at the entire, oozing city and…
And so: …
And so: He was not sure. He stood on the precipice of the world, where the great machine made magic of the human body, made purpose and industry and signal from the noise of it all. Looking down from above, it all looked just as unintelligible as it felt being in the thronging mess of it.
Cords stretched from his fingers, slivering off the nails as they extended. The wafer, wires, and implant meshed with the substrate of the mast and attempted another analysis. He wished to see the point of the world. He wished to know its mind.
Substrate sensor 0001 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 4401, unscheduled material contact detected. Cross-referencing directive queue. No match found. Substrate sensor 0002 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 4401, unscheduled material contact detected. No match found. No match found. No match found.
None of the output made sense. There was no center here. No place where the great organization of it all was blueprinted and explicated. There were just countless worming single-use programs, loops, stacks, and databases. There was no god’s eye view because there was no god. There was no pulsing brain at the top of the mast. It was daemons all the way down. Niol all the way gone. And none of it would crystallize. None of it would become sensible: grief, loss, the churning, machinating certainty of it all.
Of course there had been no answers. Egrol had imagined (hoped) that there would be something at the center of all this. Some organizing principle that could be made legible. Loss, grief – wounds that will never fully close – but it was more than that, now. It was the whole massive work of it all. Clearly, order emerged. Kupiter produced. Kupiter generated. Kupiter functioned.
Yet: No part of it, not even the great systems that prefigured and demanded each action, could account for what it was. There was only this. One action after the other. Efficiency had degloved connection, meaning and purpose from the world. Sloughed it off like skin from a falling man’s trapped foot. And not just from the human. Not just from Niol and Egrol. But Kupiter itself. The machine itself. Meaning was redundant. It appeared in outputs. Everything else was made efficient.
And so: He missed Niol at the screaming seat of the sky. He missed him so much. What was there to do?
Because: He was wounded.
Because: He had tried. To make sense. To make do.
Because: None of it had worked.
WorkerEgrol, sector 4401: no directive match found. No directive match found.
The human body is a rich computing substrate. Human-level organization isn’t necessary.
And so: He cleared his cache. He went to retract his wires, but a ticket pinged his peripheries before he could. A package of 16,000 actions that would pay double rate, since he was in a location rarely frequented by human hands. Purpose without purpose. Action without meaning was maybe better than whatever this widening, chasming emptiness Niol had left him with was. The first task: three watts of electricity passed from his body through his fingers and into the mast.
Why? Egrol didn’t care.
Enter the Jamverse Jam!
Protocolized’s fourth open submission contest is live for two more weeks: artists and writers are invited to extend and connect the Jamverse, a network of interoperable, strange worlds designed by four of our frequent contributors.
We have a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other entries receiving $200 prizes. Deadline for entries is July 31. Read more and enter at the Jamverse microsite.
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