I We

I We began on July 19, 2014, as a single tweet — and a reply, and a reply to the reply. The first paragraph of the book was written by two people, in public, one sentence at a time:

It is a flower stand, described by someone who is no longer quite human. Max Razdow and I wrote to each other in that voice for three years — two artists trading transmissions from a post-singularity world, 140 characters at a time, each tweet a found fragment from somewhere past the change. The correspondence grew into a book: a non-linear fiction assembled from those fragments, published in 2017 and exhibited at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York the same year.

The narrator is I-we — a mind that slips between singular and plural, a self that has been merged and can no longer fully remember what it was like to be only one. Reading it now, it is hard to miss what the book was reaching toward: questions about identity, collectivity, and what happens to an “I” inside a “we” — the same questions I would later spend years working on in governance, asked here first as science fiction.

Chapter 1

The scrawled ESL marks indicated that industrially produced plant genitalia could be acquired by pedestrians via electronic debt transfer. Yet, with wire eyelids, we saw the grafted stamens and pollen laden orifices balloon oddly beneath the clothes they wore. Reminding us to run search routines on our external cognitive coprocessors, tapping the probability curve for mating into shape. A pleasant task, but one that left us wondering if the tailor-caste had grown too strong, too saturated with polyharmonic as the doctor had warned. Three hundred years since the pax, and still wild bitcultures problematized gentleman’s trade.

The doctor. A miracle, we called him. One of eleven pure sprites with superior knowledge to what our coprocessors sussed. It’s understood now they lived somehow before the change as well, in that fragile space of memes and flesh, but only spoke after. Doctor, Soldier, Engineer, Philosopher . . . our government, parents, gods, and friends, all rolled into this emergent App, hah. Truth told, the names echoed hollow in the halo of our great machine. Since the Pax, as only a fool’s soft memory.

A new commerce flourished under their vague anarchy. Changed people were easily commoditized, their harmonics split and sold. A metaphoric constant was the most failsafe way to sell them to themselves, and we mined it like coal from the bedrock Mesh. It was only now, after the long Pax, that the constants withered and we patched them as we could: plant genitals, cube sap, cube spice, gumbo, cricket shells, CDs, zoo smell, Fourier transforms, metabread, lymph, and teckstiles. The product appendages or humors allowed us to tune expertly, and when all was right fluid we sat back with a metabread loaf and toasted to the 4nm. We-papi would wheeze and sputter “And to enthalpy!” causing 1/1.618 of us to cough wine through a smile. The wine did sluice in those late days of the Pax. Drops danced over our disps like red krill in the cooling wells below us.

Our fond memories withered with the glance from our annotater: 1000 seconds until the meeting with Chief Tailor Karl Ugh, the steely approbationist, shaped like a notched flywheel and mounted on a tri-fold cart for easy portage. CTKU we called him, pronounced like a herniated inebriate sneezing—paradoxically the baleen grafted in his soft palette colored his fricatives farty. “A farty flywheel!” some might titter, but we sat glum as CTKU was carted in and the annotater set him heavily spinning. The creature railed. Some greasy fiction about cloth of derivative instrument—the usual bullshit. Bored to reduction, I >became briefly I-we, and a vision of a carp demming in an endless well soothed me, ’til CTKU’s nasal pafting blubbed up like the krill fighting to escape his grim oral hygiene. Propelled by single-pointed bliss, I explode forward, closing the distance between myself and CTKU, bowling over three colleagues, the annotator, and a plate of rye toast, ‘til I sat cross legged on-top his musty-yet-still-somehow-decadent, gold, chitin-plated tri-fold cart; my arm up the the elbow, unexpectedly, lodged in his maw. The annotator whelped, as we realized that without the CTKU’s approbations, quite stifled by my forearm, we risked suboptimal viscosity across key investment looms. Blushing, we probabilistically apologized at 74.83¯%, “Sorry Karloo, these dancin’ feet, you know.” The CTKU was not impressed. We tucked in for further praise, permissions checks regranted and were askee when the flywheel exposed instead its 700 compressed carbon teeth, whirling into a caustic phlegmy cloud and associated spime events, in garish tweed of course. And then the psychopathic cryptographer things went all ape-shit as per usual with their stupid drooling we-faces; hurtling through quantum matrices sporting math boners. We saw one actually rutting against the prime numbers, milking their briny crypto-teets for parsed sentimentalities to contrast the co-processor slurry. As if!

Thousands of spime-rep pseudos mashed throbbing reward systems into warm, inviting risk variables—CTKU’s lip quivered, we belched. It was noted that a clutch of new adornments had palpitated toward ripe precapital vectors. We sigh-nodded, knowing that the predicted results were blooming. Idly fondling a lobe deep within the CTKU’s damp respiratory system, our thoughts turned to the lives of the ants. We all shared the pastime of reflecting on microcosm, a restful mode of sallowing, and our minds were swept, error-checked, culled & restored. Shared, hypnotic, ecological ruminations replaced sleep. A beehive pillow, if you will. CTKU softly moaned, we felt our eyes close in approbate assurance. We were whole, woven as the fronds of a feather of a gull.