Lullaby for the Vacant Residency
Goodnight to the bots, bless their iron hearts and wiry arms. Goodnight to them, and let their circuit board souls rest to the digitized lands of algorithmic dreams.
The enhanced version of a song long forgotten roamed throughout the silent cityscape of New York. All around, life was mechanically transitioning. From the power generator of the Empire State, to the material reception site of the Statue of Liberty, machines flowed in and out of their eternal positions. If the bots of the day had emotions, the song may have eased them into their recharging stations after a productive session. And if the bots working the night shift had ears, then perhaps they too would be calmed by the simplicity of the coming shift. Gears clicked and boomed during the changeover, as the sun surrendered to stars more dark and hollow than ever. But when the bots were finished and the song had ended, nothing was left in the city but a vacant silence. Everything was peaceful, until something fell out of place.
It was in one of the apartment citadels which lined the empty roads of New York City that the sandpaper sound of a headset chafing off human flesh echoed throughout the metropolis. From a turquoise cot, a dazed face rose and blinked rapidly, as if blunted by a weapon. The warm suit around his body opened to the frosty oxygen of a room he could not exactly distinguish, but knew he had seen before. Around him, 49 other cots were entrenched in this empty space, filled with bodies dozing under virtual lights above a carpeted floor. Each bed had a name printed on a sheet of paper attached to its oak frame. His: Landov Drifivian.
With awakening came a startle, but it was soon snuffed by thought, as Landov tried to remember with melting eyes where he was. He forgot that he was once an immigrant and had unearthed great success for him and his family. Instead, his mind was overflowing with different memories invented by his imagination. It was hard to recall the past when five minutes ago Landov was killing a giant. Nevertheless, he kept trying, until a frail digital voice severed his thoughts.
“Client Landov Drifivian, you have accidentally pressed the exit button of your personalized simulation. Would the client need an oral tutorial on reconnecting their Lucid Reality Device?”
Instinct demanded Landov listen to this machine. But in these circumstances, instinct somehow failed. For there hung a toasty mist in the air that soothed his beating heart, and was also familiar to his senses, as if he perceived a faceless ghost with the shape of someone he once loved. Somewhere here something was waiting. Landov felt it, and was curious.
"No, I think I want to roam about for a bit,” Landov muttered.
“I will always be here to help,” the bot reassured.
Landov slid out of his cot and felt a vibration in his legs when his feet touched the carpet, shocked by the rotation of the Earth. A grueling minute was sacrificed just to relearn how to stand. After recovering his balance, Landov marched to the edge of the room. He found a corroded elevator waiting for a new visitor.
Landov fell into stillness. He had forgotten how to use this archaic device, and was worn by inaction. Rogue thoughts of distant fantasies made him hunger for his virtual place. But the elevator sensed Landov, and the doors to a velvet interior slid open. Into reality he plummeted.
***
The first thing Landov saw in the city was the green cybernated flash of a sign that casted him in a shadow: “Lucid Reality District of New York.” New York. Something about those words ignited a humbleness within Landov, and his mind felt one with the asphalt beneath his feet.
Down below the building, lemon-colored street lamps encased Landov in a meager bubble of illumination amidst the darkness. All he could see were indiscriminate parts of an endless pavement, and the bases of bleak gray rectangles which impaled the visible sky. Nothing far above could be observed. And everything, aside from the aroma of oil and brass, had an uncomfortable coldness to it that almost caused Landov to retreat back into his fantasies. The cold was bitter; the headset was moderate enough to at least dull the chills. But regardless, the warmth from earlier was still present, and seemed to radiate somewhere from the heart of this cold. Landov detected it, and dared to move deeper into this dreary realm.
The first mile crushed Landov, for he thought nothing was here he had not already seen. He missed the more subtle details, though, such as the crumbles in the concrete and the steel murmurs of laboring machines, for he was immersed in only utopian images of himself, as if his desires dismissed the universe.
Indeed he was silent. Silent- until something that looked like a crude clump of garbage on the distant pavement startled his mind. Landov jerked when he witnessed such a ghastly thing, for the bots--as had been advertised long ago--were programmed to maintain a standard of cleanliness that resolved the savage crisis of misplaced garbage. A pang squeezed his blood in the presence of something this harrowing, and his stomach felt as if it was being stirred by a molten spoon. Could this be a sort of sedition by the bots in the absence of their old controllers? Or perhaps there was a mistake in their programming, a coincidental mathematical error of the robot’s zoning? Icicles froze along Landov’s spine. This dread did not stop his curiosity, though. It instead further encouraged it.
Closing in, Landov found that garbage was not what sat on the pavement. Rather, it was the skeletal remains of a squirrel.
At first, Landov was petrified. The jangle of the creature’s bones was audible in the soft breeze. But as air oozed back into his muscles, memories projected in his mind. He remembered seeing such a creature before, on a day whose warmth felt like a massage, running across the charred sands of a beach with scores of faces passing by, each in their own current guided by the sun. Faces. Some were abstract, some were full; some were hollow, and all had their own distortion. None of them were like anything he saw nowadays in his headset.
But when Landov tried to probe deeper into that memory, to find the very essence within the image, only something that felt like cotton grazed his mind. The event was isolated among memories that, although Landov knew were paddling somewhere in his consciousness, had been long forgotten, leaving the image of the squirrel to scramble in and out of a void. The thought sat submerged beneath where he stood, as if in the darkening depths of a hazy sea.
And so Landov was hasty to permit defeat in his efforts to remember that ancient moment, and retreated to his empty waltz beneath the stars, expecting the world to behave like his headset, where if he imagined it, a dragon would soar down from atop one of the dark spires for Landov to gloriously defeat. That did not happen. Only his feet became sore from walking.
***
The barren city extended. Mile after mile, lurch after lurch, there was nothing here for Landov to encounter but the endless line of gray buildings. They kept him in the shadow like great trees blocking the moonlight, and the world grew increasingly cold. But the worst part was the absence of people. Landov considered awakening a few other souls to make exploring the world less excruciating. Yet he did not act against the technology, as not only were the headsets designed in a way so that only the user may be able to exit them from inside, but he was a bit apprehensive to bother anyone anyway. For what may he even be able to say to them that would not merely irritate them, make them hiss and reconnect to their machines immediately? There were no bots to alleviate his loneliness either; they had been programmed to specifically work in areas humanity would rarely roam, so to encounter them would demand a sharp concentration. And everytime Landov tried, his mind grew bored and slipped back into fantasy. There was nothing left in New York but hollow artifacts and a frigid vampiric breeze.
In a final desperate attempt to do something, to find what his intuition felt was here, Landov meandered back to reflecting on his own memories. He returned to that spot on the beach, and wondered if finding its physical place in New York would illuminate the broader context. Forget it. The endeavor was not worth it if he had no idea where it may be. Besides, it was far more undemanding to stand still here- to stare into space and hope what he wants would come, rather than embarking upon such a futile search.
Then, Landov paused. He thought he could hear laughter. Familiar laughter. The laughter of a rainy Wednesday morning in a lofty apartment building, sizzling eggs for two figures joking around a kitchen table. Enthralled by this vision, Landov concentrated on the vague projection. Soon enough, smiles bloomed upon the two faces in his head, and from there, features began to spread. They developed fully: a boy and a girl, his kids. His kids! Landov tried to remember the names he long ago used to distinguish their young faces, failed, and continued to fail. It began to stress him. He tried and tried, but in the lack of recollection crept a displeasure he had not felt in years.
Meanwhile, the pain in his foot he developed from walking continued to increase. Oh the pain of worn out bones! He mechanically attempted to think away the soreness, but in this world, the mind may not simply scrub it away. And the city was so linear, that although initially, it felt sweet and organized, the uniformity developed a fickle taste after not so long, and the nothingness stirred something wicked in one who lived in the pleasure of illusionary control.
He wanted out. He wanted out!
The roadway began to peel in half. Two tar walls rose parallel to the sidewalks, and concrete dripped to Landov’s feet. Then, as if puppeteered by an ethereal cord, a steel robotic claw rose from the ground, so shiny it blinded Landov as street lamps refracted against it. When the claw fully emerged, it rebelled against the city’s twilight with a divine glow and settled a red couch in front of Landov.
A soft metallic voice cooed: “Our sensors have detected a discontentedness in your disposition, dear human. Would you care to return to your VR headset? Should your answer be yes, please sit on the couch in front of you.”
Landov did not hesitate to think. He rolled upon the couch, sprawling out with his eyes closed and his mind drifting to the dreamlands infinitely distant. He was going nowhere, but retreated everywhere to hide. A firm but cushiony rod strapped Landov into the couch. Soon after, the claw lifted his cradle into the sky.
During Landov’s journey home, the moon bled a blank whiteness into the far sky. A song stored in the robot’s memory played to ease Landov’s stretched nerves:
Goodnight to us all, bless our mighty hearts and labored arms. Goodnight to you and I, and let our cluttered souls rest to the mystical lands of pensive dreams.
Nathaniel Barrett is a writer from the state of New Hampshire. His work will be published in the online magazine, Bewildering Stories, as well as the print magazine, Dark Horses Magazine. He primarily writes fiction, particularly in the genres of Science Fiction, Magical Realism, and just plain Realism. Whenever he is not writing, you will find him either reading, running, or spending time with his friends and family.
