Meditations of Jimmy Chu Part III

by Rabbi Ben Newman, the Bronx, NY, USA

Manendra Applebaum glanced around the tight space into which the slightly unhinged Mayor of NYC had led him. The room was a world of dust and artifacts of a lost age. An Obama-Biden '08 pin was displayed in a mahogany japanese china cabinet next to a bottle of '08 Macon Villages Chardonnay. Next to the chardonnay laid an unboxed ipod holo, and several other rarities. All of the furniture followed this pattern. Japanese tansu chests filled with treasures from decades past aligned the walls. The floor was covered with tatami mats. 4 zaisu chairs surrounded a small japanese chest which served as a table on which sat a bottle of '09 Aberlour scotch.

The Mayor gestured to one of the zaisu and Manendra sat down uncomfortably and cleared his throat. Mayor Chu bent down over the chest and picked up the bottle of scotch, pulling two glasses out of the china cabinet. He poured one for Manendra and one for himself.

"Here." he said, handing the glass to the awkward looking man, "it looks and sounds like you really need this."

Manendra accepted the glass.

"Nice chest." commented the young technician from IHS, gesturing toward the piece of furniture in between the 4 zaisu chairs.

"You have nice taste, kid." the Mayor remarked, "you wouldn't know it, but its Karakuri tansu, traditional Japanese shit. The Mayor pulled open a drawer in the chest and took out a box of cigars. He took one out, lit it, and took a drag. "Such a chest of drawers, of tansu, in Japanese might look like ordinary Japanese furniture," he blew smoke in the IHS tech's face, "but, it has a trick drawer which can hide what the user puts inside as if by magic. The trick is for security, to keep valuables safe." he tapped on each of the sides of the chest, and a secret drawer popped up. "It took enormous amounts of time and effort to develop and manufacture these chests," he said, "and I keep only my most valuable secrets here. My inner sanctum, or something." he smiled at Manendra, who took his first swig of 49 year old scotch.

"Better than Lansky's '50 Talisker, that's for sure." he said, "Now Mr. Mayor, I'm sure you didn't bring me here to your inner sanctum to share 49 year old scotch.

"They got some smart ones at IHS," the Mayor spat out in a plume of smoke.

"You're having problems with SOPHI?" he asked.

"Does the Buddha shit in the woods?" the Mayor farted and took another drag, followed by a sip from his glass.

"Like I said over the phone, I only talked briefly with SOPHI, but she seems fine to me. I mean, what do you expect from a simulated intelligence?" the orange hued skin on his face seemed to sparkle with an enigmatic smile.

"Well she's not! She's been spouting Buddhist proverbs at me indiscriminantly, and..." the Mayor of NY blew up like a puffer fish.

Manendra raised his glass to his mouth, "Well that can't be all bad,"

"You have no idea. I just want you to program her, it, with a different philosophy" replied the Mayor.

"Oh, you mean to reprogram the Beliefs Subroutine..."

"Yeah. Whatever. Just do it."

"Well, it might be a bit complicated. I mean all of her systems are connected. It'll be like untangling a big ball of string..."

"Can you do it?

"I guess so, sure..."

"You assholes at IHS have been dicking me around for years. If its not SOPHI, its glitches in the security system. All I can say is, if you don't do this, the city's going to just have to find another contractor, and you, Mr. Applebaum, are going to have to find a new job."

"Do you enjoy intimidating people, Mr. Mayor? Because its totally counter-productive to actually motivating your people to get the job done. I developed the greater portion of the programming for every piece of technology you use." Manendra reached for the box which held the luxury cigars.

“Then why are you doing high-end plumbing?” the mayor opened the box and gave Manendra a stogie.

“Touché, Mr. Mayor.” Manendra lit the cigar as the Mayor held out an ancient Zippo flame.

"So you can do it?" the Mayor held up his glass as if to toast the new endeavor.

"Of course." Manendra said, raising his glass to meet that of Jimmy Chu. "So what do you want her new belief subroutine to be, once I untangle it?" He began to suck on his stogie.

"I don't fucking care," the Mayor was slurring his words through scotch scented lips, "just make it something that works."

"What do you mean 'something tht works'?" the technician asked, enjoying the unique situation that he had found himself in. "Mr. Mayor, you need to be specific, so that I get it right next time and you don't end up calling me in again." He took another drink of his ’09 whisky.

"Something that's practical, that gets the job done." The Mayor gestured inquisitively with the burning tip of his cigar.

"So... you want that I should program it to be a Pragmatist?" Manendra drawled.

"I need something with a little more umph. You know, SOPHI does give me advice on a day to basis on matters ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. I thought Buddhism was the thing when you guys first installed her, but now I'm thinkin' Buddhism's too tame, too dove-ish. A castrated tiger...I don't wanna machine that's gonna make me feel uncomfortable about my choices, my lifestyle, if you know what I mean." he took another deep swig from his glass, and then a long drag from his cigar, inhaling the smoke slowly. "I don't need a conscience or a fucking mother or a fucking wife, I need a trusted adviser. An Intelligence that will give me solid, practical advice that I can act on...." he paused for a moment, reflecting... "How about Sun Tsu?"

"Who?" Manendra asked.

"You know, the Art of War guy. Could you program her using that book?"

"I mean sure, in theory. But why bring me all the way in here to ask me? Why all the secrecy? I mean, I appreciate the scotch and the cigar..." a puzzled look scrunched Manendra's face.

"Fuck, you really are fucking dumb for an engineer. If 'she' knew what you were going to do, she'd try to defend herself."

"With all due respect, Mayor, I do know my business. She's not programmed to defend her ego. I should know," he said, "I'm the one who programmed her."

"Yeah, but I live with her." the Mayor remarked, finally relaxing down onto his zaisu.

"You're the one whose in charge, Mayor." Manendra said.

King of the Californias Pt IX

by Monk Eastman, New York City, NY, USA

I am pleased to wake up without my throat slit. No warnings painted on the wall in my own blood, no severed horse's head laid artfully at my feet. Just the warm, familiar smells of roasted coffee and steaming plantains. For a moment, I am almost fooled into thinking I conjured Cecilio Goncz from the bottom of a shot glass, and that I am actually hungover in my bed back on Pitt Street, Mississippi lapping a lazy tattoo at my door, Althea in the kitchen, preparing chickory and mofongo. Smile faintly, thoughts of sunning in my garden, watching the river roll by, maybe going to the French Quarter for some afternoon shopping.

Then I see the amber bedposts, the crennelated diamondine doors, great blue emptiness where Althea should be beside me, and the smile fades.

This is not Pitt Street and I am not in New Orleans.

This is Oakland. It is not my home.

The room knows my favorite smells, music, and foods; the room knows my news habits. So, before I'm even out of bed, I've seen Northern California's armies continue their police action on the East Side, because Sgt Enrique Pernil of the Golden Bear Republic Guard is broadcasting, with attendant maps and footage dancing across my skin. I listen to Khaled Bhargouti snark New York City's mayor for his latest public cocaine-and-ladyboy binge, bug-eyed mug-shots spinning three-sixty in the space behind my eyes. I chuckle as Eiko Orizumi's scathing assessment of Alaskan President McMenniman's foreign policy trickles through my left cochlear. That chuckle dims when my other ear echoes with news of sabotage on the Minneapolis SonicRail en route to Chicago (still counting the dead, aerial view of the disaster splayed beneath the skin of my right thigh). Above the chorus of morning news, word from the east, where The Voice of Free Sacramento declares his insurgents' victory over Prime Minister Pivens, images of the gutted city rolling across the palms of my hands.

Having met the Benny Pivens, I have a very clear vision of the tantrum he must be throwing right now. He had planned on parachuting into the wartorn city from California One, make a media event of it, sound the horn of the Golden Bear. After all, he made reclaiming Sacramento a keystone of his domestic policy; the whole 'Project: Normal' phase of his Golden Bear Initiative, ending in a single, functional government. Given the resources he's thrown at it, Sacramento's continued disobedience has become this terrible hemorrhaging gut wound in public perception. A Padanian commenter whispers seductively of regime change as the quick fix. His counterpart in Bogota cackles that regime change implies swapping heads, leaving some kind of system intact. As all his opponents have been dispatched with russian efficiency, Benny Pivens is the only system left. Somewhere in the chorus, I hear an economist moan of the next global contraction. Guandong's investment in the NoCal peseta, she says, hangs around the economy like a lead weight. Others hope at reconciliation with America to offset the creeping chaos. Or some kind of deal with Canada. Or Alaska. Or even Federal Mexico. A thousand geniuses light the dark with their brilliant analyses. It is, after all, the age of the prodigal amateur, and we are only too eager to engage.

I rise, shower, let the sonics flow over me, through me, shaking the filth off like a shaggy dog. It's not the same as a water shower, where there is at least a loose sense of baptism, renewal. The soundbath just insures no one gets me by spiking the pipes. Paranoid? Not after Ottawa, where the subject of my story tried to very politely shake me off his track with a tailored H-621 virus in the plumbing. I reason that if you're running among wolves, why tempt them with an exposed throat?

I throw on a simple white kaftan and orbiter boots, grab my gobag and let my luxury quarters go about cleaning and sealing itself from prying eyes. Once I'm out of range, the newsfeeds slough off like dead skin.

This morning, the lobby is a vaulted cathedral of white Italian marble, its streetside entrance a psychedelic animation embedded in diamond doors. Tomorrow it could be an angular ice palace made of sharp crystal and topaz. Or a replica of Napoleon's Court. Or a kitschy remix of Katz's Delicatessen on New York's Lower East Side. The whimsy of the Palma de Baía is legendary.

Onward to Oakland and a day without the specter of Cecilio Goncz and his pall of rape camps and genocide.

I hope.

King of the Californias, Pt. VIII

by Monk Eastman, New York City, NY, USA

The walls of my room pulse with Turkish ouds, soft bassline from a Tijuana garage, and Gregorian wails. Latest from Ç1Q, my favorite band. Of course my room knows it, and at the Palma de Baís, it even has access to the pirate tracks from the legendary Gastown Sessions. 'Rare' is not the word. 8 Feather and Rafiq Angeles took Ç1Q's first release (arguably the most listened-to album of the past fifteen years) and battled each other with it, remix for remix, in front of a live audience in Gastown, Vancouver. Ç1Q's stuff is normally like scented oil poured over silk. Kind of music that starts baby booms. At Gastown, they inverted it, turned it into godclash: what was in the Lord's ears when He razed Sodom. I thought data sieves at the venue meant no recordings made it out alive. Somehow, though, my room plays it, at a volume that accents my foul mood without exacerbating it. My elevated blood pressure, eye movement, personal kinetics, and listening history give the room just enough information to strike such a vital balance.

I'm reminded, very acutely, how little I like this sort of thing. Being under a microscope. Dissected without a single cut.

And I find myself desperately missing Chicago.

Wandering aimlessly along the green belts of Englewood. The great glass ziggurat of Kennedy King University, where I spent my latter days cultivating this (almost) useless mobile journalism degree. Countless midnights at the Tibetan food kiosks of Archer Avenue, served warm pockets of momo with volcanic, greasy red sauce on my way home from the artists' lounges of Bridgeport. Whisper of the Orange's Line's maglev trains sweeping past, kiss of ghostwind as it twisted into the night, snakelike and graceful.

But mostly, the Appleville Quiet Zone. Lone concrete tower, sanctuary from the continuous avalanche of a world where a song listened to on your way to work is logged in the depths of the nebulous Network, alongside your love of lung-scorching Central Asian cuisine and snarky Lebanese newsfeeds, odd collection of vintage '40s footwear, and baffling predilection for 20th century rap music. All there, always updating. Only private in the sense that you don't know who else is looking at it. Your tiny vein of personal data, mined endlessly by faceless, nameless things, scattered across the globe, feeding on the minutiae of daily life. Masticating the delicate ephemera of your life with great insectoid jaws and expelling it out over vast, intersecting planes of data, picked through by shit-merchants, sold to the highest bidder.

All so the Palma de Baía can play back the music I lost my virginity to, in the witching hours of that sweatless, fog-breathed Gastown night.

Now, as then, Appleville was the only place that felt real. Substantial. Single telephone per floor. Voice-only, hardwired into Chicagoland with copper-and-spit. Newsfeeds replaced with passive content. An actual hard library, where I read Upton Sinclair for the first time in print. Analog music, on antique standalone machines. An oasis of silence in a world of endless, low-intensity chatter. All right there, on W. 24th Place, just under the Dan Ryan. In retrospect, my nineteen months there was a gift. To live in such blessed antiquity...

And all because Chicago is the holy land: unique as a city that cherishes cloistral peace almost as much as the wild howl of its own progress. A place where tranquility is sown with the practiced hand of a Zen gardener, in Quiet Zones just like Appleville. Or Dalton. Markham. Bronzeville. The Low End. Modern day ashrams in the financial capital of North America. Such peace I'd never known...nor have I since.

And I compare it now to Oakland, where the night screams with attack drones, and the hills crash with artillery thunder. From Chicago to Toronto is a two hour trip by SonicRail. Here, it takes just as long to travel from Jack London Square to San Antonio Park, because the old 880 Freeway has been bombed to its component molecules by so many overlapping armies. Federal Unionists. The 321st Nevada Counter-Insurgent Insurgents (U.S. Volunteer Irregulars). The Alameda Independence Army. The Northern Aztlan Front. The New-New Wobblies. White Power Militias (Orthodox and Reform). The Golden Bear Unity Party. The Party For the Dignity of Angeleno Refugees. All of them mixing in the flats of East Oakland, trading shots with Prime Minister Pivens's choice assortment of heartless eye-gougers and ear-pullers. A fellow mobile journalist made note the other day that the Republic of Northern California proudly advertises itself as a nation without POW camps.

That is because the NoCal army is no longer taking prisoners.

In order for Prime Minister Pivens to give Los Angeles' expatriate war criminals respite without embargo or censure, he must provide the Hague at least an illusion of respectability. He is crafting that illusion with ashes of the dead and the blood of dissidents.

And my mind keeps wandering back to Chicago. To Appleville. Where I slept at night wrapped in the sweet impenetrable cold of anonymity. Ignorance. Perfect disconnectedness. Back in it now, tangled at the center of a burning web, (perhaps not surprisingly) threaded of all the weird, bad moments I'd sought to escape in Chicago; tied together to create this poor, weary author, eking out his literary pittance to a mixed soundtrack of Californian massacre and Ç1Q's remixed ouds. And I sadly recall this web has always been, and I always at its center.

And I wonder for the first time if I will ever enjoy the blessed silence of Chicago again.

Or if that silence ends here.

In Oakland.

The Man Who Couldn't Look You In The Eye

by Nicolas Papaconstantinou, Southampton, UK of elephantwords.co.uk

"Seriously, though, look," your partner said to you, pulling down bookmarks and selecting the site in question. Within seconds, there was a guy on the screen, mid-twenties guy, an everybloke with a classic cut-and-goatee. Right there, looking out at you both, smiling, eyes flicking to one side.

Nothing much was happening, and you started to ask her "what?" But of course, you knew exactly "what?" - it was all she had been talking about for that past half-hour. Details started flickering into view, almost at the same pace that the everybloke started an accumulation of flickers himself, lids heaving, lips licking... low murmurs bubbling up to his mouth from the general area of his off-camera libido. You saw that his hair was flat against his face, he was hunched oddly, and, of course, it was because he was on his back... the camera, your eyes, looking down at him from the ceiling.

You and your partner, sitting there on the corner of the bed, fixed to the screen but not really, her casting nervous but not really nervous glances at your face every few seconds, trying to get a sense of your reaction. Both of you, stuck in place, for the five minutes and eleven seconds it took the unfamiliar man to reach orgasm.

"Like I said," she said when he was done. "Isn't it strange?"

"Isn't it though?" you replied.

"I mean, that this has been out there all this time, all these people, and we didn't even know?" she clarified.

"Hm," you said, but you weren't really sure that you felt it.

You never really considered yourself kinky, but really, what counts any more? You sense that the strangest thing about your sex drive is that you have to pretend to be turned on by the ever more complicated pornography that your partner nightly finds for you both. You haven't had the heart to tell her that for the last six years of your seven year thing, you've found sex with her to be quite arousing enough without it.

But that video, what it signifies, and the conversation following it, has stuck with you down through the weeks since.

"All those people, just... wanking themselves silly. For no reason other than to do it. As if they needed to prove that they did it."

Maybe back then, you suggested, they felt that they did.

"True. And... this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is from thirty years ago - people are still doing it now!"

Your partner was pretty blown away by the rush of discovery. The two of you watched seven more videos that night. You spent the next day at work red-eyed and vestigially horny. More than that, you were preoccupied with the thought that this was something out there, something that so many people must know about, and yet you'd been oblivious all this time.

Not kinky, no, but one thing you are, you are queer for patterns. And data? Data breaks you.

Since the turn of the century, people laying it all out on camera, slipping under the radar simply because they weren't naked on screen? What, how many, a hundred odd that first year, three hundred the next? And that's before the surface tension broke, between it being on the sub-cultural boundaries and it becoming vogue. Historians talk about the 'net being the beginning of the end for societal attention span, but one thing you notice, you notice patterns, and as far as you're concerned, on the 'net, no trend ever dies. Between the bleeding edge and the place where your grandparents are over it, an idea can last decades.

Your guilty secret quickly became that you were watching the vids sans partner. She wouldn't have minded if she knew, but she might have started to question the fact that they were no longer turning you on. You were becoming obsessed, and you knew it, but you figured, hell, it's supposed to be a valuable quality.

The men in your family, two or three generations back, had what would have been called hereditary mental health issues - OCDs out the arsehole and an attention to detail at the expense of all else that bordered on autism. In the new England of the early century, though, where nobody really knew what they were supposed to do or who they were supposed to be, your smart old grandad gift-wrapped his dysfunctions and became a vocational data-miner for one of the hot-shit new corporations coming out of London-as-was.

This is how it is and how it always has been in this country, as far as you know - one person does it well, they're made employee of the month. Just one of their offspring does it too, suddenly it's a family tradition. The English don't have much to offer the world these days, but we do have an ingrained willingness to become really very good at doing jobs that nobody else wants to do.

So you watch and watch and watch these videos of ordinary people orgasming, you've got them running in the background while you're at work, while you're brushing your teeth, and pretty soon you've seen thousands. You daydream about millions of these noisy, silent, wet, shy, invigorating cumfaces, gasping and crying across the 'net.

Then one day you're in a meeting with your supervisor, this dour old lady, in her fifties. And you realise that you've seen her cum - that she kept sweeping her then-long and flowing red hair out of her eyes as tears rolled down her face, smiling at you the whole time.

Once you notice her, you start to notice them everywhere, the familiar faces. Really, everywhere. But no one mentions anything, like they filmed their own, but never watched anyone elses'.

So now you're the man who can't look people in the eye. And they are starting to find it strange.