I had been pressed close against the uneven surface of the rock for a long time, hunched over in an awkward posture. My muscles kept twitching, forcing me to readjust again and again. But at some point, even this unnatural position began to feel comfortable. I had been in it for so long that I no longer knew when the discomfort had faded. In other words, I had forgotten how to shift into any posture other than this one.
Walking was out of the question. Not only my skin, but my muscles and joints as well seemed pinned firmly to the rock. First, I had to peel myself away from it. But I couldn’t recall where to gather my strength, nor how to transfer it through my body in order to move according to thought and will. Unless one has studied anatomy or a related discipline, asking anyone to describe—precisely, in words—how to stand, walk, or run would be an impossible task. Perhaps movement is something that accumulates quietly over a lifetime, each moment engraved into bodily tissue, allowing us to rise and move without conscious effort.
And yet now, I could do none of these obvious things. I had to reconstruct, from the beginning, the manual for issuing commands to each part of my body. Had I been this deeply buried in glass jars, light, and algorithms? Perhaps I had lost not only my sense of distance, but my sense of time as well.
On the rock that had finally become entirely his own, he lamented the fact that he could no longer watch short clips about movement, nor ask an AI like Wilson for guidance. He spat out hollow curses. After wringing every last ounce of malice from himself and exhausting it, he decided it would be a waste to pour more profanity out of his swollen throat. He resolved to start again, from the very beginning. Beginning with his chest, where it was easiest to gather strength, he slowly transferred force downward, correcting his hunched posture step by step. Individual muscle fibers formed bundles, bundles became muscles, and the body began—once again—to perform its inherent roles as a whole. He waited until he could fully feel the concentration of strength in one place before moving it to the next. But because he had fragmented movement too finely, the transfer of force was painfully slow. Gaps appeared between the mechanisms summoned to form a single motion. And the more this happened, the more he was forced—when viewed from afar—to approach this simple act of moving his body through endless analysis and complication.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
It was radiation. Separate from the fact that his command over his body had withered inside Wilson, radiation was now roaming through every corner of him, destroying him from within. The wall, sharply scratched as if by a fork, had already torn through bundles of fibers when he zipped up his exploration suit, opening gaps in the fabric. The moment he stepped out of Wilson, radiation clung tightly through those openings. Within days, it had captured him whole, infiltrating from his organs outward, numbing every part of him. A long time had passed since then, yet he had no way of knowing what effects the residual radiation might still have on his body. Radiation was forcing him to approach even the simplest actions through unbearably complex means.
While his mind was consumed by the past and the glass jar, his muscles and nerves slowly lost their rhythm. He grew angry at a body that refused to obey his will. Losing the patience required for control, he thrashed like a child. The sensation of being seized by an irresistible force, alongside the feeling that his entire body had seized up at once, tightened around him. On a rock of such sheer height, these were movements he should never have attempted—yet he repeated them carelessly. He slammed his face into the ground where he stood, writhed violently with his face instead of his body, tried to straighten his back by putting force into his ankles rather than his thighs.
Why won’t it move? Now blood kept clouding his vision. His entire body stung and ached. Instead of wasting blood by flailing, he decided to think calmly again. As the blood traced its path and began to coagulate, filling the gaps in his wounds, he suspected that whatever radiation remained in his body was still distorting him. It was also suspicious that the glass jar was no longer leering in his direction, even though the sun had not yet set.
“I don’t know what kind of bastard it is, but there’s definitely—definitely—something watching me.”
But to be precise, he was dying. The truth that had already spread densely across the entire world—that there was nothing but death unless it was something contaminated by radiation—was fully contained both within the glass jar and within his body. Even as his uncooperative body provoked him, his strength continued to drain away. Since he could no longer hold himself upright anyway, he closed his eyes. As if it had been waiting for him to collapse, a hidden algorithm began to play inside his mind. The next scene of the sobbing “Anarchism T-shirt” followed. The place he returned to, or imagined, with his eyes closed was ultimately the “past algorithm.” It was his only novel, his only film, his only music.
