A/N: My usual remedy for splitting headaches is to lie down and listen to some music. A song called "Following the I" by Cat Full of Ghosts(!!!) off a 2010 album sent my mind on a rather sprawling, colorful, and confusing adventure. This wasn't quite a dream because I wasn't asleep, but it's certainly something. Perhaps more of a directed daydream. Chances are you won't have the song on-hand, so I tried to clean up my transcribing of what I saw and make it more narrative. I also included some random bits of concept art - specifically, the "stages" of floors that the protagonist descends in the first scene. All art is concept art from Samurai Jack, since that seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Enjoy.
FOLLOWING THE I
A writer's struggle to survive in a technonightmare world experienced through snatches of memory only he can share.
A man descends, taking an elevator ride straight into hell. Each floor dings as he passes it. The horizontal rays of light from the space between floors passes up and down his body, as though scanning him for imperfections. He is of average height. Old brown jacket with patches on the elbows. Messy hair. Rumpled jeans.
He can see glimpses of activity on the floors he passes. Jazz music, dancing, laughing. All humans, with robots serving them. As the music grows calmer and cooler, the elevator stops dinging. They are past the usual floors. Robots can be seen working maintanance. Their appearance is less shiny and appealing. Sparks. Colors fade.
After some time, the elevator settles. He is at the end of the line. Everything is dark red and black, here - no more bright happy lights from floors above. The grate to the elevator creaks open, and he must get out and walk.
The place he is in now is a stark departure from the high colors and high society life of the floors above. This is craggy rock, low ceiling, tunnels. He steps out and find millions of small, identical sentry-bots chained together at the wrists with some sort of energy. They follow each other, walking a winding trail down, down, down, into a spiraling open chasm.
The man falls abreast with the robots. His expression is oddly tranquil. He slips his hands in his pockets as though simply going for a walk in the park. He never once looks down into the yawning chasm, to see what might be there.
The expanse seems to breathe heat and brimstone. As the procession gets lower, a shape rears its head in a shower of orange sparks. The shape is dark and hulking, with horns. There is a guttural growl, as though it were an animal. A blast of heat. The size is enormous. The sentry-bots are not phased, and neither is the man. Everyone keeps on the march, as though this was what they were meant to do.
For whatever reason, the creature settles its attention on the man. It narrows its eyes, blazing red.
Just then, the tone of the vision shifts. The viewer seems to pull back. The scene is in reverse. We are leaving the chasm, leaving the winding lines of slave-bots. Back, back and up. Faster and faster. Everything starts to get blurry. Everything fades from black and red, to white and blue. A light blue. A sterile light blue. The vision fades completely.
_________________________________
2:06
Click. Cli-clak. Cla-claa-clak. Ding!
Fingers clacking on typewriter keys. The mechanical lurch of a tape being played back.
"So. I decided to take my work back underground .. "
Click. Clack.
" .. To stop it from falling into the wrong hands.
We are in a hospital. An old man lies prone in the bed. Machines beep around him. A younger man, the same young man with the patch coat and mussy dark hair, sits at a desk with a typewriter and spherical tape player. He is transcribing the tape to paper, typing quickly while stealing glances over at the man in the bed.
Step by step!
The old man is sharing his visions with the younger fellow with the patched jacket. The writer continues trying to type.
The chaos, the fear of the underground, it all seemed so far away from that tiny hospital room with the sterile blue curtains, the white floors and white walls. The writer takes a deep breath.
Left. Right. Left. We all. Fall. Down.
His fingers hesitate on the keys.
____________________________
2:39
The dirge-cry of "step by step" blends into a funky nightlife background. The buildings are tall, simple, brightly lit with cheap neon. Clubs, jazz lounges. This is the festive, fun, free atmosphere that the writer left behind in the last vision of this technonightmare world.
A woman strolls, bounces along to the pace of her own music, enjoying the evening. She has extremely long legs, black, stiletto heels. Her arms are shorter. One is biomechanical, the other is slim, toned, and tan. She has long black hair that kicks out in curls, swept to the side. Her left eye is e a piercing green. The other eye is hidden.
She walks down the sidewalk, arms swinging. On a mission.
A group of thugs fall in behind this woman. They are larger than life. Human, but cybernetically enhanced. Tattoos. Weapons, mostly blunt instruments. With some evil on their mind, they fall in with the woman's pacing. She doesn't seem to notice them.
You can't make a hoe a housewife!
The woman just keeps strolling. She smiles a bit. The men get closer. She pushes her curtain of hair behind one ear, revealing her right eye. It is a fiberoptic camera lens. It whirs, lengthens, then narrows.
A twinge in the music, now. Other people on the street steer clear. They stare, or hide. It seems this gang has some sort of reputation.
The leader of the men, the tallest of the group, reaches forward to jerk the woman around by her shoulder, just as the light piano notes start to play. Bad move. She is long and fluid, and lashes out with the cybernetic arm, smashing through his temple completely, revealing wires, chips, and sparks.
Step.
The second she makes her blow, the writer feels a flash of red; a flash of the underground vision he had before. By the time the writer tunes in again to the woman on the street (just as the soft female voice begins singing) she is running to an alley, leaping up its walls, scaling it with ease.
Step.
The second song comes back; she is standing on top of the building. All of the buildings are the same height, leaving a walkway for her, if she can jump. And she can. It is a marvelous sight. She is graceful, lithe, a true killing machine.
Step.
The third step, now, and there is a NEW figure hauling itself over another building. This is not one of the original thugs, but an assassin-bot. The woman notices it, and stops moving.
The thugs from before have returned. They scale the building. They are after her. They all close in on her.
As the woman stands there, as though considering her next step. She folds her hands into themselves, makes an odd gesture, and somehow manages to melt through the concrete and into the top floor of the building below.
Ah! Classical music, a slow piano is playing. With that same jazzy feel as before. A male singer is crooning to a lounge night crowd.
I'm your puppet! I'll do funny things if you want me to!
This is a high-society crowd. The woman dropping in with her fierce appearance has startled the patrons of this club. What startles them even more is when the assasain-bot, the thugs all claw their way into the room through the ceiling the way she did.
The robots serving the humans in that club are shiny, polished, bright metal plating. The rugged and stripped down appearance of their assassin bot counterpart is quite a contrast.
The woman takes off as the line I'm yours! begins again. She races towards the plate-glass window, and charges through it, but doesn't break it! She melts through it the same way she melted through the concrete, and fell down a floor. She arcs beautifully as though doing a dive. She falls the however-many stories, does a roll, and is off and running down the street, back the way she came.
Those following her, however, are not so fortunate. Broken glass. Broken bodies.
Darling, you got full control! the song opens up again. The men have been thwarted! She runs off into the night, gorgeous, poised, and in control.
As she runs, she glances down at a wristband, and tweaks a button. A holographic image pops up. It is a man's face, the face of the old man with whom the writer sits.
______________________
The music changes again. The man in the hospital is retracting his sight of the woman as the line puppet repeats itself. He glances over at the man, the professor ..
.. His vision is yanked abruptly back into the man's head [5:10] and experiences the bright-sounding heartbeat of the music.
He swims, nearly drowning, through the man?s memories, through his visions. And then he realizes that's where the man is, drowning.
I am alone.
The music takes a very chill, drifting sort of feel. Everything is pale white, pale blue. There are echoes, words, someone somewhere is trying to say something. But there is a body, the body of the man drifting (very dead) in space.
I am alone.
The sight of the body fills the writer with terror, and a sense of helplessness. Despite the old man's desperation, the writer pulls himself from that vision, returning to the hospital room. The tape he had been listening to earlier still is playing. He tries to piece together what it means, what he saw, the woman, the underground, everything, even as the words wash over him.
" .. That is the whole scene. Picture-by-picture .. We can learn from pictures .. if we can learn from them."
ZING!
A black disc flies in out of nowhere, and SLAMS into the writer's typewriter. It flies like a knife, spinning like a shrunken. The typewriter (a far more high-tech device than it had appeared, a vintage look, is ruined) There goes his writings, his recanting. The young man whirls to the door and she is standing there, the woman from before. The beautiful woman, the half-android.
The music, the lyrics slow down. Slow. Down. Things are a blur.
I pray .. the Lord .. my soul .. to take.
The writer snatches up the spherical recording device, with its hologram, the device he had been listening to. Within it are snatches of the visions he has been seeing. He palms it, raises it in the air, poised to smash it.
A heartbeat. The woman pauses. But then she lunges. So the writer lets it leave his hands, and it begins to fall, fall, fall, in achingly slow time. Black and white visions flicker within its light blue sphere, memories playing back in real-time (fuzzy sounding dialogue) and there are smiles, laughter. We see the old man holding a child with familiar black mussy hair.
The woman, the fighter, rushes forward but with all her speed and fighting skills, she cannot save the orb before it smashes into the hospital floor, into bits.
When it smashes, the old man's eyes fly open.
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In their fifth year of collaborating with designers to create limited edition Christmas cakes, H?agen-Dazs this year commissioned British design duo, Doshi Levien, to combine their artistic vision with ice cream and unseen recipes.
