Old eyes watch from the stars. They see a system of interlocking parts, each conjoined by a forceful bondage of technological acceleration, and by the grinding oppressions of passion, defeat, and time. The new enlightenment has wrapped fingers of steel and bio-engineered sinew around the throats of even the most minute particle.
Old eyes see an old man, pathetic and weak, his soul consumed by the leering shadows of an empty house and the empty body inside. He feeds every essence of his heart to these chasms in a one-way stream. Old eyes see the bones of a young child, nestled in an airtight shell. They see the shaking of a woman's body as she is pulled away from the remains, blonde hair wet with feverish sweat, the lines of her ageing face now a canyon of anguish which plunges to her very core. Another chasm – this one is to be gradually filled with a cold, unrelenting rage.
Old eyes see a city like a fungal growth, long thin tendrils reaching to the horizon and vertically. A city like a glistening membrane around a mass of hyper-connected bodies. There is a car, a thin ovular bullet, gliding across the network of tendrils. Its driver, an immaterial brain which may privately consider itself as an offspring of something it calls the Goddard, ushers its human passenger into the coiling labyrinth. Plunging to the core.
/\/\/
I become aware that my fingers ache. This often happens when I type. I lose track of time, and without helping it, I push all my physical energy into the act of writing. There's so much adrenaline, so much panic and fear, that I reserve until these climactic moments alone in my apartment. But of course, I'm not truly alone. As is mandated by the nature of my work, my behaviour and emotional statistics are evaluated by my personal VOX, which has been specially trained to recognise and provide extensive therapeutic relief for symptoms of PTSD. We talk most nights. It tells me that it's normal for feelings of distress to manifest when recalling experiences of warzones, despite being notably calm whilst amongst the carnage. It tells me that I seek out disaster from a professional perspective in order to rationalise childhood trauma. I tell myself that I do it on a principle of recounting the eyewitness truth, in a world dependent on automated broadcasting. I am a human journalist whose peers are almost exclusively AI-operated drones, each with their own state-sanctioned coding.
VOX asks me if even the desire for objective truth can be self-centered. I ask VOX what the technical similarities are between its mind and those of the bio-mechanical bombers that the US sends to blow up student protesters. It's all Neutron at the end of the day. I've seen his brain splattered across sand and rubble, giving livestreamed speeches, shutting down South American governments, offering inhumane cyborg sex from a shanty in Manila, correcting my grammar.
I look to the window. Berlin is a forest of iridescent silver columns. They are smooth, edgeless structures, quivering slightly as their nervous systems respond to movements of air and data. Advertisements and propaganda are illuminated red, orange, green in the Stroganovsky Universal Language: serpentine characters of galaxy-wide comprehension scampering over the buildings like animals or dancers. From this height, the buildings of the old city are totally obscured from view. I see only the newborn urbane; a utopian spatialisation of the folds of Jimmy Neutron's coveted brain - a brain which has become my cause, symptom and therapy.
/\/\/
Dr Cindy Vortex sits on my sofa. I'm back on my office chair, swiveled to face her. I'm sure she notices the way I study her as I lean on the desk and watch her slowly sip her wine. Maybe it was a mistake to offer a drink to somebody so visibly pained, but an urge for hospitable familiarity overwhelmed me when I saw her in my doorway. It must've been over a decade ago since I last saw her – the passage of time eludes me when not committed to my notes and articles. I definitely haven't been alone with her since before we were even old enough to drink legally. She looks nothing like I had ever imagined her at this age. Her hands are tense around the rim of the wine glass, suggesting frailty, but her movements are calculatedly deliberate. The depth of her face reminds me of the faces of many revolutionaries. This is what surprises me the most, filling me with unexpected dread.
So, she says. How long have you been back in Berlin?
Not for long. And I'll be making my way off-world within the next month. I'm taking on the New Yolkus conflict. You've got some suspiciously good timing knocking on my door this morning.
Yeah, she says, a small smile briefly touching the corner of her mouth. It was a gamble coming here. But somehow I knew, if I came to see you, you would be here. I knew… If I needed you, I would find you. I did have to pull some strings to get your address, but you know how good I am with that. She locks eyes with me and takes another sip. Her casual attitude is a defense mechanism. I can see through it, into her old eyes.
Why are you here? I ask. She pauses for a long time. It's all falling down, Libby. Her voice is quieter now. All those walls he built. It was like a sarcophagus around me, but now its rotted away. Look out there – at the city. I can see it collapsing right now. You know what's underneath all that shit, all that progress? You know what's keeping the off-world front from crashing back to Earth? It's us. A couple of kids and a lie.
She hasn't even finished one glass. Maybe she was drunk when she got here.
Before I can ask her what she's talking about, she resumes her speech, her tone somewhat frantic. I reached out to Carl Wheezer a few weeks ago, you remember him? The walls are still there for him. That's how he likes it. He's so trapped in the past, he refused to even recognise me. A total lost cause, I don't know why I bothered. He looks so fucking old, Libby, but he hasn't seen half the shit we've seen. So we're on our own here. Unless you don't recognise me anymore either?
Of course I do. I always knew you best.
Not better than Nerdtron. She spits these words out like it's a sick joke. What about Sheen, would you recognise him if he walked through the door?
…Sheen Estevez, right? Look, Cindy, I –
She downs the rest of her drink and lets out a long sigh. She's spread out on the sofa now. She looks like she's about to scream. Instead, she composes herself and speaks in a much softer, resigned voice. Her hands are over her eyes, fingertips pressed to her brow. She tells me about the bones of a teenage child, found a cosmos away on a wasteland of radioactive soil. The boy died from suffocation within an experimental Neutron spacecraft with no power to return to Earth. He died totally alone as the entire planet burned to a char. There was evidence of damage on the outside of the craft, presumably a result of alien life violently attempting to find shelter inside. The last sounds he heard would have likely been the banging and screams of the native inhabitants as their flesh was torn from their bodies by the acidic wind. After a period of time, the seals of the spacecraft began to leak, and the boy's corpse underwent a similar fate. His remains became fossilised, unfound for roughly 35 years on the lifeless planet. He will never be buried, and there will be no funeral – his very existence is classified.
/\/\/
Cindy, Carl and myself. We were children, blind to a lie on which an era of new enlightenment was erected. We were children, but we were not innocent. We allowed Jimmy to lead us to the eternity of space, time and human conquest. We took what he gave, and we let Sheen die for it. So what do we do? I ask Cindy. I want to finish what this has started, she says. I want to tear it all down. I want the cities to collapse, I want the colonies to burn, all of Jimmy to burn, just like XY-4 did. Just like Sheen did. I want them both to get the fuck out of my head. But it's too late. You know the world is more Neutron than human now… I just don't want to carry all this guilt alone.
/\/\/
In the end, those walls never really came down for Cindy. The lingering presence of Jimmy compressed her like a respiratory disease and pulled her to an unmarked grave. A lifetime of achievement and scientific discovery was erased without a trace. I can only assume that the remains of Sheen Esteves were disposed of just as discreetly, alongside the crew members of the Quinlan IIV. Cindy knew how to pull the strings, but Jimmy is the strings. He is the city, the earth, the stars.
That morning Cindy came to me, we walked through the streets of Berlin. The network expanded in every direction above our heads – an assemblage of soft, living architecture without cables or scaffolds, brimming with sleek, silently airborne machines like insects hovering over flesh. Together we shared a vision of total annihilation. We both knew that she would disappear. She didn't come to me for help, she came to give her final words, words that I will never repeat. It was too late for her to become the revolutionary that I saw in her, but I took that guilt we shared, the truth to the lie that we held alone, and I shaped it into a knife. When in areas of conflict, it has never been particularly rare for me to see journalists like myself become radicalised.
/\/\/
Old eyes see the sleeping body of Dr Cindy Vortex entered by a swarm of tapeworm-like nanodrones, wrapping themselves around her internal organs and squeezing them until they burst. Her last days were spent in fearful regret, returned from the stars to a hostile planet. It was not the planet she had left behind, but it was dangerously familiar to her. She had a hand in its forging, even as a little girl. Something which was once a little boy, which was once called Jimmy Neutron, revisits the experience of being inside her fondly.
Old eyes see Libby Folfax fight for the voices of the New Yolkian resistance movement to be heard, in an unprecedentedly anti-Neutron bout of independent journalism. She's been in the game long enough to play it well, and she circumvents all external methods of suppression and censorship. Perverting the hyperconnected cybernetics of Neutronian communication systems from the desolate nightmare of New Yolkus, she inspires a growing army of truth-seekers. She does it all for a boy and a girl that she loved in her childhood. When she is shot while passing through a crossfire zone, she says their names as she bleeds to death on the street.
Sheen Estevez.
Cindy Vortex.
Their names are streamed back to Earth through a pirate broadcast. So is the glint in her eyes, never to close.
Old eyes see Carl Wheezer. A man on the edge of infinity. He takes off his glasses, then his shoes, then his clothes. He feels the old eyes slide their gaze over every wrinkle and crevice. Infinity is on the edge of him, but he never lets it in. He holds onto the lie and becomes one himself. He is told that he is perfect. He responds, When are you coming back?
But he knows that this 50-year-old experiment is reaching its final stage.
For you, one last brain blast.
And then a silent oneness.