Eye in the Sky

 

Eye in the Sky

 

Kimey continues along the edge of the playing field and passes a swing wrapped around its own frame. How odd, he thinks, that the loan company had chosen to reply to him on paper. Weirder still that he had decided to open the envelope. No need to look at the screen. The drones are hovering close by. He catches the merest waft of the vestige of an idea of Sunday lunch from one of the nearby houses. All sealed up. The self-important wood pigeons patrol the air like Napoleonic survivors. Unable to find any statues they have decided to become them. That smell Kimey thinks, what is that? Then he’s remembering, it’s the inside of his grandfather’s suitcase. One of a pair his mother had presented him with. An empty suitcase. A mystery. Not because it led to an unknown life but because it led nowhere. Was this smell escaping from the black upended suitcase he had just passed? Left out by a bin standing on its side slightly ajar to deter any opportunist peddlers. Cold callers will be given the cold shoulder reads the notice. He feels a chill on his nape. If you don’t have an appointment please leave now reads another. No skateboarding. No cycling says the street name. But this street is called Eyeless Street thinks Kimey. Eyeless. A woodpigeon alights gracelessly on a TV ariel, which duly wobbles under the strain. Above his eyeline TV ariels bleed out into the clear blue sky joining up with the cosmos and coming down the chimney into the house made of bricks. A drone is ominously close behind him sounding like a suitcase being pulled across gravel. Perhaps it’s a taxi for Miss Roberts who is waiting in over the knee boots, sun glasses and a pink crop top. 

 

A scaredy cat stares at Kimey outside number 17. All wide-eyed, its long black and white fur is seemingly covered in a layer of grey dust. The cat seems affronted by Kimey’s presence and scrambles down from a low wall and off into a garden filled with ornamental shiny mushrooms and several misshapen gnomes. A knitted goblin stares down from an upstairs window longing to be part of the magical realm outside. Meanwhile the chirruping of constantly shifting birdsong seeps into his ears. Life is flowing it seems to say or is this the sound of territory being marked? Disputes being repeated? Dormer windows in staccato melodies? Sculpted bulbous conifers sung out upon the breeze? No further action is required from you on this matter said the loan company. 

 

Kimey chuckles to himself and remembers that he only has a short time to forage materials for his jaunting prototype during his lunch break. The world beyond the perimeter of the CCNI research facility is not one he often finds himself contemplating. It is just there. It just is. Once or twice he may have almost thought I wonder what life is like for those people? Leaving the facility to enter the realm of actual human cognitariats makes him more than a little uneasy even with his medically enhanced hyper-vigilant sensory systems. White blossoms fill intermittent trees despite all of them looking like they have never been alive. There is a charred atmosphere hanging in the air as if a recent demolition has occured. This area feels to Kimey like a memorial to death or dead things. Death no longer being an actual thing. Still he imagines the residents don’t notice this. The designers’ attention to detail in entropy was something he admired without actually liking. He applauded the natural sense of decay they had created in the cogniteriat world, as he sometimes referred to the area beyond the perimeter. The heady acrid bouquet was not too pronounced as he carefully stepped across the road opposite the bridge leading out of the facility. Over his head an anamorphic welcoming sign reads “earn to see how everything connects”. The facility was fond of buoying employees with such weakly punning phrases. Mental wealth was another such punning concept generated by the PR team. Kimey knows that anyone with half his neuro enhanced brain capacity can tell that this encouragement of apophenia is simply aesthetic fluff but all the same it irritates him. The modelers of the cognizone were not the top top designers but it was common knowledge that they used this milieu as a way to develop their craft. Try things out, like the temporal substance tunnel that locals claimed was haunted because of the eerie sense of travelling back in time it evoked. They were actually traveling back in time. It all helped with shaping the UX on the higher-end money making projects. The simple efficiency of introducing a vestigial aura of decay to the olfactory register both impressed and irked him. As did the award it had won the design team. He was never asked to be part of these teams despite frequently shaping the ideas that helped their progress. People actually prefer to wax lyrical about the manufactured air of decay because of the sense of controlled intention it implies, thought Kimey. He can, however, still remember the gentle smell of actual decay that hung in the air of a riverside walk his grandfather had taken him on as a small boy. This walk happened to be in of one of the pioneering eco-zone developments on the site of something his grandfather referred to as a Gulf-course. This always made him think about oil wells and the history sessions about the combustion engine, which invariably included the words “if we can’t remember how can we understand?” The combustion engine had once been a source of great pride so we cannot just wipe it out of our collective memories. Something along those lines. And were it not for the combustion engine we wouldn’t be where we are today.

 

He wondered if he might come across the vestiges of an actual automobile on this short foray into the cogni-zone? He had told his colleague Samantha that he was going to buy some batteries for his post-human ears. Up ahead he sees the medi-centre where they are dispensed. A woman is leaving the centre straining to close the heavy glass and steel door behind her. She momentarily faces Kimey and flashes him a look of suspicion. He follows her figure, draped head to toe in bright white linen as she shuffles around the corner down the passageway at the side of the ecru brick building. I’ll go that way too he thinks, marvelling at his sudden burst of spontaneity. It wasn’t as if this place filled him with optimism. Everything here seems stitched together from dead things. A Frankenstein zone. Everything is glued as a haphazard assemblage of broken pieces where the join becomes the overriding feature. Looking ahead he sees the path literally billowing in a herring bone sea-swell of bricks. What was that supposed to have been caused by he wonders? Does it even matter? And the vestigial smell of burnt porridge and urine momentarily drifts into his nose. It might represent the earth moving consequences of an underground river bursting its banks? Remember earthquakes people? Remember real water? 

 

He looks up and sees how tall the roof spaces have become. Why do they need such high storage spaces Kimey thinks? Or is there something to the cogni-zone he doesn’t understand? He pictures people on unimagined jaunting bicycles up in their attics. Attics were not something anyone needed anymore but people still liked the look of a well-shaped roof. Up ahead a tall purple is walking up a path to one of the houses. A smile is forming on his lips under a large ginger beard. What does he have to look so happy about thinks Kimey? His father had often told him that at one time there were no Purples at all and that Purples had been engineered as a way to promote and celebrate diversity. Kimey wishes he was purple. Purples have a natural inbuilt power to jaunt. Kimey suspects that Purples have always been around but some people find it sooths their atavistic fears by restoring a sense of superiority. Something like that. It’s weird because being real is not important. He continues on down the bloated engorged brick path thinking how unsettling this patchwork lack of uniformity is. He’s seen simple pavement cracks in the vicinity of large trees and that makes sense but this engorged and distorted pavement seems like an artistic whim. And there it is, the feeling of temporal substance and the echo of a strange ineffable sadness. How had the designers created that? Perhaps some things are just a kind of side-effect he reasoned. Yes that makes sense. Why doesn’t anyone seem bothered by this bulbous pavement? It’s not natural Kimey thinks. He’s tempted to ask the purple when he nearly bumps into two schoolboys in the cogni-zone uniform. Will they harm me thinks Kimey assessing their cherubic faces glancing from the screen on one of their hands to each other. They are animated and carefree but in a way that suggests that they are exaggerating. Do children now all act as if they are in a vidi drama he thinks? Then, as if he had telekinetic powers the screen flicks up into the air like a shiny chocolate bar and lands on the crazy paving path with a plasticky unfortunate clatter. 

 

Kimey can smell fireworks. He thinks of gunpowder barrels. Oh my days my screen is dead, says one of the boys to the other as if performing to Kimey. Shouldn’t they be in school creating a short drama about the traumas of dropping your screen as a moral lesson to be discussed by the class? The child speaks with a slowed down sense of drama that disguises genuine pain. Or does it? As if pain was a potentially wonderfully real thing. He glimpses (or thinks he does) the shattered black glassy screen as the child picks it up. He thinks about saying something comforting but doesn’t want to draw attention to himself. Perhaps this could be useful for his jaunting prototype. Something discarded from the cogi-zone? He mentally replays the sound of the screens clatter as it had fallen onto the pavement. Clatter clatter clatters. It really had dropped onto the bricks and he had smelled gunpowder. Was he having a stroke? Was that like gout? Both were historic illnesses but he had heard about people smelling things before their systems failed. He carries on walking and the path opens up onto a large swathe of grassy recreational space. Pylons loom into view striding above the houses, which now seem like workers cottages from an engraving on a tea-towel. The giant is coming. Two men are about fifty yards away are chatting while one holds a hose dribbling a stream of water onto the ground.