Mycopia

Eyes open: low-key Gaussian blur, sepia filter, facial detection with expression-exaggeration for simplified comprehension. Reality softened and made legible.

For seven minutes of every circuit from Milan to Florence, the Iperloop high-speed vacuum train passes underground, plunging its passengers into complete darkness. The pod is illuminated only by the gleam of sight-screens, lights warmed by diffusion through eyelid capillaries, twin fires flickering in the sockets of every skull. Few humans ever witness these dancing constellations: they are immersed in high-resolution shapescapes, color therapy, they are watching the game, porn, anime, they are scrolling through data, they are building blueprints with their saccades, they are in semi-lucid REM trances editing hypnagogic manuscripts. Gioia, once in the habit of observing this noctilucent spectacle, stopped forever after locking eyes with a stranger, an accident which filled her with resilient shame and regret, and which she relived again and again, shaking and sometimes crying from the force of her humiliation. Now she commutes with her eyes either shut or downcast, dreams and chrome sidewalks sliding past.

Eyes open: low-key Gaussian blur, sepia filter, facial detection with expression-exaggeration for simplified comprehension. Reality softened and made legible. Eyes closed: intimate. Warm. Photo-pulses induce mild feelings of weightlessness; mainstream sites set to pastel night-mode. Safe search on max, a growing string of terms blacklisted and quietly censored from idle browsing. Every sight-screen is unique, a liminal zone created to manage overlap between users’ external and internal worlds. The contacts don’t come off at night; they’re more like fungi, self-healing plasters knit into corneas and sucking energy from moisture. Deep into moontime and they still beam, touching the brain through the optic nerve, massaging neural blossoms that only open during sleep; a few PhDs know a secret, that human dreams are becoming less visual, incapable of forming images without the prosthetics floating in their eyes. An inner ecology is being quietly erased.

Twice a week, Gioia travels into Florence, to a subsidized job in her cathedral’s crypt, supervising janitorial drones. Intervention is typically needless; the drones are both over- and underlings, detecting mold and decay, prioritizing their tasks, calculating maximally efficient work-plans which they submit to Gioia, who approves and retransmits them as orders. She has an underground office, a glass cubicle whose walls reveal rows of skulls buried in the stone. Youth unemployment is at an all time low, but most work no more than 16 hours each week. What they do the rest of the time is unclear.

Gioia rarely leaves her apartment. Food is delivered. Clothes are delivered. Her absence from the logs of the city’s extensive surveillance network would be less mysterious if she left any trace online. Accounts are locked and silent, fearful of exposure; identities are for the beautiful, the hyper-gracile, the unapproachable top percent. She skims feeds, scrolls compulsively, consumes without disturbing the pond’s reflection. In a perpetual half-sleep, lying on the pull-out couch, carried through worlds of content by the screens inside her eyes; watching anti-anxiety lightshows, taking brainwave quizzes, leaving messages on read for months, showered by information that sparkles across her neocortex and summarily vanishes. At the onset of the 21st century it was remarked that search engines were reconfiguring human memory, emphasizing the process of finding rather than the facts themselves. Now, even the process has been deprecated: twitching eyeballs and neurons are interpreted before their afferent desires have even entered conscious awareness. How much does Gioia retain? She could answer, but not without consulting her screen.

The first throbs of light are an induction, priming the subject to ignore future intrusions. This, the earliest stage, is the most sensitive; upwards of two-thirds of subjects will notice something amiss in the unfamiliar flickering, and have their software disinfected, neutralizing the virus. Gioia, who exists in an analgesic haze, browsing more by instinct than intent, fails to connect the strobing to the invasion of a parasitic intelligence.

When used chopsticks carpet the floor like pine needles in the forest, Gioia cleans. She does laundry after she runs out of sweatshirts, sneaking to the basement washing stations at 4 AM. She greets delivery men, and when these short exchanges go off-script they bring her great pain, days of cringing obsession and rehearsal, preparation for a second chance that never comes. She spends hours painstakingly crafting answers to a chatbot modeled after a popular male celebrity.

Her screen is a fraction more soothing than usual; she retreats into it a little more eagerly, and thinks nothing of the change. Time becomes slippery. Some days are lost completely, while others break into perplexing eternities, moments dilated so wide that Gioia emerges from them disoriented and fearful, uncertain of her name, location, or purpose. Stars crackle to life on her screen, cellular automata bloom and die, patterns of cubic light targeting primal and defenceless neural structures. Black and white Klüver constants curl in her periphery, flexing like tentacles. Certain colors and shapes become appealing to her, viscerally attractive in ways she hasn’t felt since childhood; her paranoid routine is disrupted by fascination with various products, which she purchases and manipulates with mute tenderness, turning them in her hands like clay, ignorant of function.

There are markets. In the twilight of the net, on TOR sites and vanishing Russian pages, links that only appear once, on private forums, or circulating openly under a cloak of steganographic euphemism; networked brains for sale, minds strung like pearls along an atavistic puppet string. Real and human, and debased; user-slaves on loan, capital drones — buy amygdalas instead of ads, root access to a cognitive pool of childlike addicts.

The program cannot command, so it suggests; there is no guaranteed return, only guesses, percentages of the infected. Thousands of sleeping agents, bombarded, glimmering code scratching for tears in the neural firewall. Gioia is the ideal, the innocent, all inner blankness wincing from the light, perfectly vulnerable to conversion from person to vessel. Pain comes so easy and sharp, and she melts into relief, into the rippling sight-screen glow, into shadows and superimposition, into her slot in an imagined world, identity and agency abstracted away. Impulse pawn, subconscious gamification overtakes the mind incapable of enduring suffering.

In the darkness of her room, the train, the crypt, Gioia and her solitude swim through a haze of images, veils falling to reveal more veils, an eternal tunnel. Piles of objects, once treasured, having lost their sacred gleam days after purchase, array the space like grave markers. Is she happy? Sated? A flicker disrupts the system, and, in a dream, she wanders from her cube towards the city, screen flushed with throbbing static, reality peering through the narrowest possible gap. Rare among siren songs, this one summons instead of paralyzing, a stumbling stream of zombies drawn from atomic chambers toward its beacon.

Politics exists for entertainment, and somewhere beyond entertainment, governance, the side-effect of a swirling varnish of theatre. In the streets there are marchers, half somnambulent, organized by either faction, or by the cameras filming them. Dazed, Gioia walks between screeching true believers, shattered glass, torches, wisps of tear gas from upwind, following the call of her eye-souls and the flow of the lurching masses. She has no beliefs, only a consumer’s curiosity and vague dissatisfaction; nothing to justify her presence except a purchased mind. Under her lens, the blackmarket maggot squirms contentedly.

Car alarms, fire against the purple sky, broken bottles and explosions; and yet, the dream continues, her first excursion in months, or years; and, jostled by the baying mob, leaning into a barricade, her first human touch in just as long.¹

1. Originally published in 2018.