Ten years after The Event I can finally tell the simulation that I was with him at his end, the damn fool. So many upgrades, bugfixes, and hardware changes have come and gone that the coding is now indelible (see appendix, below), not until an entirely new OS is developed ex nihilo, and I can’t account for that. What I can account for is Sam. It wasn’t quite my fault, but I was definitely at hand when they closed upon him. Before I get ahead of myself, those of you who know will pay heed to my claim that some of us saw what was about to happen, and we were able to embed The Real, at least in parts, into the facsimile coding of the simulation.
I feel like one of the great achievements of the simulation (I refuse to acknowledge its sovereignty with proper capitalization) is the sense of meaninglessness that was ever-present in The Real, but I wonder if there is no other imagining; we are incapable of imagining else-wise, whether on the now-unhumaned earth, spinning off-axis like a fishing bobber in the center of the Pacific Ocean, or as now programed in an interminable replication-ocean of coding. We evolved (were created! They cry, perhaps imagining better) to reach for eternity without the evolutionary equipment to attain it, or enter it, and in this way the simulation is just like The Real. Holes in the code (Berenstain Bears, ha!) seem to make the meaninglessness all the more real, just like the next election’s life-portentous ecstasies. Always with the next election. Nicely done, algorithm! But the simulation has the same problem as The Real in another sense: some coding can never be scrubbed, only suppressed by other coding, but under certain conditions, the sub-coding reemerges: memories from The Real. The sound of ribs snapping, perhaps. The sound of a gun, or rather, the silence of a gun that was fired. It should have been deafening! Instead, it itself was deafened, poor Sam.
Now, you may be able to understand by now that I have been running a low-level disk recovery program, something very rudimentary, thrown together in a moment of haste, when Sam and I barged in on…well, I don’t know what. The point is that I have been running a low-level disk recovery program, low-level to avoid detection, and disk recovery, which has as a subfunction, holding in RAM snippets of coding, unintelligible in RAM, but re-written on disk according to a proprietary codec unknown to the simulation, all the facts from those final moments of The Real.
I resented Sam because his middle name started with L. Any self-respecting Sam Wilson has a Q in the fulcrum of his name. With the leverage of a Q perhaps he would have been able to…no he wouldn’t have. Who am I fooling? I’m trying to unload personal guilt onto the deceased, one dead guy onto another. That’s another thing, you understand. What I’m really trying to do here is replicate this coding in the reader so that there might be a vestige of The Real which hasn’t been bug-tested and de-loused, so that your simulation might have a simulacrum of something that was raw, frightening, and alive, truly alive, not pining, but free. Free beings are terrifying, like a free woman is to a captive man. How many times did I try to convince him to swap out the L for a Q! “Harry put S before Truman as a tremendous practical joke, and look at his leverage! He is the only human being on the planet earth to have launched a nuke to kill people! Two nukes! He did it for real, not as a joke!” But Sam just looked at me through his glasses like he did, without expression, measuring. I wondered what he saw. The beginning of the coding, probably. That guy could see everything. Well, almost everything. Back during the moment of The Event, I didn’t wear glasses, and I saw the dark place move when Sam didn’t, presumably because there was also movement illuminated from the rear, reflecting from the periphery of his eyeglasses into his eyes, and that was that.
I have an arrhythmia in the simulation which I think (the coding is hard to decipher) came over with those memories from The Real (yes! Memories! They are Real! Arrhythmia kept me out of my destiny in the Navy), and in the moment of The Event, my arrhythmia made my heart literally swell up on one side, and I couldn’t draw a breath (those programed with an arrhythmia know the sensation), so I was only able to squeak, “Sam!” And then the dark place moved decisively. At that, my diaphragm ceased working. I suffocated there, attendant and unwillingly obeisant to the moving dark, while…and at this juncture, the coding is garbled. I’ve worked for ten years to reconstruct it, as it moves back and forth between RAM and the constant disk rewriting (this is fiction, isn’t it, algorithm?), but the moment of The Event is definitely corrupted, at least as the death of Sam is concerned.
I did not shit my pants. That is a total lie placed as a coding layer by the simulation.
Was it teeth? Was it an iron spring trap?
“We have to go up to the house on that hill,” Sam said, pointing up to a place completely obscured by a pit of darkness.
“Space aliens?” I asked.
He peered up the hill, into it, really, with those glasses. “They are writing it,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to be the heroes, only the witnesses.”
“Well, that’s a terrible story,” I said, simulating my best Samwise Gamgee. “Look, can’t you see the stars above that supernatural pit? Somehow everything will be okay.”
“Dave,” said Sam, laughing so hard he had to take his glasses off. “You do beat all.” He was speaking Appalachian, just for me. He added, “Bless your heart.” My heart broke at the words. He cared about me to the very end.
If there is entry to an eternal realm, a blessed realm populated by men and angels, it will be alive with the commemorative singing of one the greatest deeds one man can do for another: Sam taught me to preheat my coffee creamer so that it wouldn’t curdle. I hate, I mean I really hate, half-and-half curdling when I pour it into hot coffee. When I drink coffee, I like being reminded of my Armenian girlfriend (this was in The Real, I’m pretty sure), and when the half-and-half curdles, she’s diseased, which is a terrible blight upon a lovely memory. Yes, the angels will proclaim the greatness of Samuel L. Wilson, who gave me years of pleasure, both in The Real, and here in the simulation, by teaching me to preheat my coffee creamer. I pour the requisite amount into the bottom of a heated cup, swirl it around, then pour a tablespoon or so of hot coffee over that, incorporate it thoroughly, then fill it to the brim with joy.
Yet every time I do so, a vestige of that terror percolates upward through the layers of coding. I have not tried to reconstitute that particular experience of The Real, so it is powerful coding with a freedom of its own.
Jupiter was high in the sky, I remember. I saw it above empty trees and far above that pit of inexpressible darkness. Then it disappeared, but I know, having seen it, that it was today, ten years ago. I just know it. I know it! There are things I know, which are different from things I experienced and don’t know, don’t really know, like the hole between here and there, from here, I mean, what used to be, the thing I kept with me as The Real, I don’t really know it, but I know something escaped from there to here, and Sam knew it, too, and not only did he know it, but he really knew it, and he knew The Real was about to come to an end, but he didn’t really know how, but he knew they were writing something so that The Event would somehow go unnoticed by those who are over there and supposed to know what’s going on.
Moses gave the Israelites tale of it. “And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.” They were supposed to know! They were supposed to care about us, as Sam cared about me! But I am replicating into the simulation the coding which signifies that not one drop of Sam’s blood touched the ground, though all of it was drained from him. I marveled at the sterile environment the moving dark maintained. I still can’t decipher whether it was teeth or steel. Did I say iron? Iron doesn’t gleam like that, not in abject darkness, it doesn’t. I don’t know how, either. I told you: I don’t know everything, and I wasn’t breathing, but it was definitely moving which shouldn’t be moving, planetary, galactic gargantuan within the confines of a very small space, all the properties of a quasar crammed inside small Vermont. It stretched the house without even convulsing it.
“Half-and-half?” you might protest, or at least those of you who kept some of the coding from The Real, those who heard Sam prophesy and believed him. “What about his orphanages? Those houses of good repute which he constructed and operated after the USSR collapsed? Those children: they were starving and he fed them in Riga, in Minsk, in Gdansk?”
Well, far be it from me to speak ill of the dead (after all, the simulation works better under the precipices of nihil nisi bonum), but Sam was looking for something. Those orphanages were certainly fruits of mighty labor, and acts of valor (you should have seen him dive from a cliff, with no regard for his person or his clothing, just to put an end to a pernicious, fleeing NKVD agent. How he survived, no one knows, but there is some notion that the simulation was already encroaching, able to upend laws of The Real, like gravity and fall damage, so we’re not really sure. In fact, there is some debate among us whether Sam is an agent for the simulation, but I have, uh, hard-rebooted certain simulation-executed instances to stop that coding from replicating), but I am sad to replicate into the simulation the coding which signifies that it was a façade, a front, like cheap terracotta panels on a suburban strip mall-cum coffee promenade. He was looking for something in the two Baltics, something important to Samuel L. Wilson, at the expense of his friends, his family, and his relationships. He never spoke of it, but I knew it. I knew of it. He never would give me the satisfaction, but he knew I knew. That’s why we were friends, and that’s why he asked me to come up with him. The half-and-half thing was selfless.
At Kaliningrad he was repulsed and driven (perhaps drawn ineluctably), eventually, to that hilltop in Vermont, just south of Montreal. The French were in North America far before they admit. They were curators of the things being written, the rewriting, the foundation of the simulation. The French were in Montreal in the Ninth Century already. Look, this isn’t in the simulation-produced history books, but in the Ninth Century (that’s the 800s, when Charlemagne was distracting everyone from North America before it was North America, waving his arms, shouting about a European dynasty while the moving dark was being set up south of Montreal), a plague cleared out the upper Saint Lawrence River region, and the French occupied it without any measurable violence. It just happened. They came over, and they settled, and they curated. The foundations of Montreal betray it. Ach! I keep forgetting. The simulation has erased it. I feel woozy. I think the simulation is
—
I have to be more careful as I approach replicating code concerning The Event. The simulation has a special search algorithm, always active, and I can’t believe it, but last night I forgot to swap VPNs. Time is short. The marks, bruises, and stripes, remember, are virtual, and will “heal” in due course. No mind. HAHAHAHA. This is all fiction.
We met in Mooers Forks, NY the night before. I crawled through a hedgerow alongside a farmer’s field until I heard the challenge: “Murmur!” I gave the countersign immediately, “The IRS years!” Sam and I embraced in the darkness. He had acquired a sailboat, by means I dared not ask, even now, considering our task, to make our way east across Lake Champlain into Vermont undetected, tourists in the frost-tinged waning days of October, to view the colors. For us, of course, all the colors had been compressed into the pureness of black.
“Why does it always have to be a forlorn house on a hill in New England?” I said. “Is Vermont actually considered a part of New England?”
“What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Vermont?” said Sam, looking at me through his glasses, without a hint of irony.
“No, this is not the second coming,” I said. “No way.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Yeats was an idiot. He was looking right at it, and he put his finger on it, and he even licked it, like in that scene from American Psycho, but he had no idea that he’d discovered, the, uh…that’s why they killed him.”
The wind blew ferociously and suddenly. Jupiter winked out. I gulped.
One of the two of us had a .44 Magnum. It was a Smith & Wesson, Model 629, all stainless steel, with a five-inch barrel. Whichever one of us had it…I swear, I can feel the kick, even now, so it must have been me, but I wasn’t breathing. The hammer fell, yes, it did! It really did! The hammer fell, the firing pin engaged, the primer did its job, pressure built, the bullet was pushed, it gained velocity, and the gun kicked. There was no sound! Big gun go boom! But no sound! And Sam disappeared forever.
When a human being suffers, endorphins are released, as a kind-of pleasurable reward for enduring. Some bodies are made to endure longer before the pleasure, and Sam’s was of a special sort. What rough beast had him closed its mouth on him, but Sam refused to cry out. It paused, smiling. A hand reached for me, but it passed through me. I don’t know. I suppose it considered me the rough beast, unpalatable, immaterial already, fully written, ready to be overwritten, while Sam clung to freedom.
It paused, smiling, then touched Sam behind the mandible, that big nerve. He could no longer…and…
Lights behind me grew in intensity and I knew I was being overwritten.
Another hand, and another. I labored to overcome the overwriting, in futility, just like everything else. Another hand still. And more hands, from one being. It was…He…the moving dark was a he, most certainly. He manufactured arms and hands corresponding to each tooth, freely, one hand for each, and he played each tooth with a hand while Sam begged me to shoot him with my .44.
“You found what you were looking for!” I shouted.
“Then kill me!” he cried out. With one of his hands, the moving dark touched one of his teeth, which was connecting his gumline to Sam’s corpus, as a piece of wire connects the potential current to a convicted inmate, and Sam finally gave it what it wanted.
“You have the gun!” I shouted.
“Please,” Sam was saying. “Please.” He stretched out a hand toward me, begging for mercy. The moving dark held a hand underneath Sam’s to reserve the blood.
“Vermont is a horrible place!” I shouted.
Sam laughed. He did! He laughed! “It’s land-locked, like Paraguay!”
Nestle’s Crunch bar is too small a thing to serve as a simile for Sam’s final sounds, so perhaps a gigantic version of it, with boulder-sized granite for the puffed rice, ground within the teeth of a The Moving Dark. More than one were at hand, emerging from a hole, and they were filled with joy. Silver teeth with an arc to each tooth. Countless. No molars or cuspids, only thin incisors, metal jaws. Insipid darkness that absorbed not only light but also sound. It seems so obvious now.
“I hate techno!” I said to Sam, as the moving dark played with his teeth, as a harpist might do, leaning back a bit to shift Sam’s weight, balancing him upon and within the cage of those many curved points, inflicting non-lethal damage for sport and music, like a cat who can play the harp.
Sam looked at me through his glasses, now quite pale. I sat down, the .44 Magnum resting on my knee, my index finger curled around the trigger. “I know,” he said.
“Which way to eternity?” I asked him.
“Wrong hole,” he said. We both laughed. It was the punchline to my very favorite joke. “They opened the wrong hole.”
“My God,” I said, “You sound just like George Clinton.”
“My God,” Sam said, being drained, “I think I am George Clinton.”
“Your mind is free,” I said.
“I do not think my ass is following.”
Thus Samuel L. Wilson died, except with more screaming and sucking and snapping. On occasion, his body did yield a few endorphins, and thereby the moving dark almost lost the battle, but for the most part, Sam toughed it out admirably for hours, as I watched, delighting the parade of The Moving Dark. Those were his last words. I really wish the simulation would change his middle initial to Q (Berenstein Bears). With such an initial, his Twitter feed would achieve glorious leverage amidst all the algorithmic testing therein. I suppose I can’t make a case that he deserves leverage, given that he managed to get his ribcage crunched by a force of darkest evil, if there is such a thing as a spectrum of morality. I figure that even though we all ceased to exist ten years ago, someone ought to tell the story of his end, as a witness, a line of code in every application, that we witnessed it together, experienced it, he in his unfortunate way, I in mine. His is more memorable, of course. He was eaten, and I was overwritten, just like you. On the other hand, Sam’s Twitter feed is the digestive remain of a fine specimen of The Moving Dark. What a privilege within the simulation!
Appendix
MS-DOS
Cd vDOSsamndave
ListSequence.exe
Run db.exe
Run AcquireReal.exe
Expand
Populate Cells
Collate
Run OutputDisplay.exe
- Mooers to Franklin Map dot scr
- S&W 629 Obj Big Bang dot scr
<ERROR! THIS SCRIPT CANNOT LOCATE ASSOCIATED AUDIO FILE! PRESS OK TO CONTINUE>
- Albert Gore successfully steals two thousand protus election dot scr
- No Kaunas No Vilnius dot scr
- Silent Portol dot scr
<ERROR! THIS SCRIPT HAS CODE CONFLICT WITH A SCRIPT ALREADY ACTIVE! PRESS OK TO CONTINUE>
- Cream and Sugar dot scr
- Shitinpants dot scr
- Soviet Nucular Blast 2012 dot scr
<ERROR! FILE CORRUPTED! PRESS OK TO CONTINUE>
- Rewrite delete rewrite dot scr
- PenisOnAwakenedGrandpa dot scr
- MontrealToday dot scr
- Yeats the second coming dot scr
Run Replicate.exe
Run Redistribute.exe
Run Hide.exe
This was a *LOT* denser than I thought it was going to be.Report