Not if I see you first

A Story by DM Court

Controlling people through beauty.

“See you in three hours,” said Katy.

“Not if I see you first,” joked Gary. He always said that.

And like that - Gary and Katy were enveloped satiated state - wirelessly connected to a black box that sat in every room, of every house, of every village, in all the world. People that walked into a room without one almost immediately felt anxious or a noticeable sense of vertigo.

They also tended to feel anxious without the existence of a Vitamin-D emitting environmentally friendly globe, which bathed everything in a monochromatic shade of yellow, like a sickly old leaf that used to fall from the trees that lined the streets; and conspicuous black boxes, insulated by bulletproof glass and which were of critical function to every home, and thus populated every room.

The rooms were filled with a low inconspicuous black hum.

Gary took pride in his black box - it’s cleanliness and omniscient glow. The way it would hum at just the right volume conducive to sleeping " it would emit the same sound frequency as the hum of a mothers body would emit to an unborn child. He would maintain it like a child, and always ask Katy to check it correct operation and functioning.

Ever since she could remember, Katy found the black box unsettling. Whenever she went too close to a deep, resonant sound, a far too familiar frequency clouded her subconscious and forced to aimlessly bat away an invisible swarm of flies. Katy felt nervous in and around it, and despite the bitter leaf-colored cold, she preferred it outside among thing that were very nearly dead rather than something that had never lived.

“Is it still running, honey-pie? Still humming along?” Gary would ask.

“Like a locomotive dear, like a relentless torrent of hate,” she said.

She inched ever closer to the end of her tether - the box, its permanent, pervasive existence was becoming so burdensome that every thought she had was peppered with the knowledge that it existed, and it would be waiting for her when she got home. But more than anything, it was the humming, the low frequency base, that she couldn’t stand. It would vibrate up her spine, through her bones and make her feel the presence of her own marrow.

Gary and Katy sat catatonically making their way through their first of two mandatory entertainment sessions for the day.

The globes, which made everything look like Autumn, were owned by private citizens, and it was their personal and environmental responsibility to change them when they dimmed, even though the environment had been damaged well beyond repair.

The boxes, gifted and owned by the government, were not allowed to be damaged or removed, but few tried. Few even wanted to. Once Katy had tried to remove it in a moment that Gary later described as “less than clarity” and spent six months in solitary confinement, sleeping day and night inside a black box designed to make her forget why she would want to take it out in the first place.

She did not remember these six months, but bore two scars on her left arm, which intermittently itched whenever she felt guilty about something.

Towards the end of their session, while Gary sat there satiated and grinning, Katy would become increasingly irritable. In the last five minutes it felt like she had accidentally rested on an ant hill, and their soldier ants were running up her arm, bend on causing her pain and agony.

Then, in the last two minutes, she would get a burning headache, one which wouldn’t subside until she drank the medication they gave her when she left the facility. She couldn’t remember why she drank it, except that nothing else would relieve the migraine that undermined her sanity.

“Ah,” Gary would proclaim when it was all said and done, “that was a particularly pleasant one, I think. Did you still have those problems, sweetie?”

“After I got my drink I was ok,” Katy said.

“Good " I always find it bizarre that you react so negatively to something so beautiful.”

“Me too.”

Gary always felt unparalleled elation after the entertainment sessions. Roughly fifty years before Katy felt ants crawling up her arm, a group of entertainers and scientists developed the purest and most condensed form of entertainment the human race had ever seen.

According to government studies, 99.7% of people found it to be the most satisfying aspect of their lives, and held the dispenser of this fine service, their black box, to be the most important aspect of their lives. Indeed, that 99.7% found it even more enjoyable than procreation.

The first time Gary heard it he said it sounded like someone had discovered a language he had been speaking, inside his head, his entire life. The government scientists and entertainers discovered some layer of resonant frequency that made all other art forms and creative expression redundant.

Gary had never read a book, or a magazine, heard music, seen a film or appreciated a painting.

Instead it would a polite, anesthetized malaise that would wash over him after every session. Different to Katy, who would feel bewildered, tired and emotionally vulnerable.

After their morning session Gary and Katy departed for their jobs. Gary sold insurance, which was a hard job because people were more logical and happy than they were at the height of the insurance industry, and Katy sold jewelry, which was also hard because on the whole, people were satisfied with their physical appearance. 4It was there more as a mechanism for husbands to apologize or commemorate different actions with their wives.

Katy used to work as a researcher, but she didn’t remember that. All she remembers is the buzzing in her ears. All she thinks of is the buzzing in her ears, and her next period of satiation.

That night Katy decided that she would not log on this time. It hurt too much, their machine must have been defective, and she wouldn’t put herself through it again. Instead, she would pretend to log on and then simply go for a walk over those three hours. Gary wouldn’t mind, he was, after all, catatonic.

So Katy went through the usual procedure, she sat down in her chair and kissed her husband on the cheek.

“See you in three hours,” she said.

“Not if I see you first,” joked Gary. He always said that.

Katy then sat back and closed her eyes, holding tightly onto her arm to remain viscerally conscious of everything around her. To log on, people had to remain absolutely still and willfully surrender to the black box. She dug her nails into her forearm, right where those scars sit and where it usually itches, and remain cognisant of the fact that the world was about to fall asleep, and she was not.

She watched Gary gradually fall into a submissive subconscious slumber, she watched the malaise gradually fall over his eyes, and into his mind. She watched a smile grow on his face.

A melancholic luminescent blue took over the streets. The incandescent glow of Vitamin D bulbs, for once, did not colour everything a sickly yellow, but instead the streets were flushed with a brilliant blue, emanating from the various black box devices peppering the houses of every person in the country.

The town that Katy lived in was small, she knew every nook and crevice, every back street and Vitamin D lamppost. This new light, this brilliant glow, gave the streets the grim specter of possibility. The lingering ghost of opportunity.

She followed the shades of blue, down streets, past the small shop her husband sold insurance to people who didn’t need it, past the jewelry shop whose beauty wasn’t appreciated to a big dark monolith that sat on the edge of town.

She could feel its power - it vibrated its way up her spine. It made her marrow anxious. It made it bubble and spit inside her bones, like water on the surface of a hot skillet. This is where she needed to go. Her bones told her.

She did notice the building, perched high on top of the largest hill in town, but each time she saw it the buzzing in her ears started and she began to itch and ants began to crawl up her arm and it was so distressing that she often let go and forgot the experience.

Katy forgot a lot. It wasn’t her fault. So Katy moved up to the buzzing, humming building, which was unusually quiet. It was working.

She approached the monolith and looked for an opening. She walked along its smooth edges, climbing up and down the jagged rocks that sat around its base until she came to a gravel path that had footprints coming in and out of it.

She walked up to the wall and put her ear against it. She heard two things. The humming, which she heard all the time now, and gears shifting. Large, strong, metallic gears crunching and pulsating.

Something clicked. And just like that, a door opened, and there stood a man whose name was Ian. He wore excitement all over his face.

“Hello Katy, my name is Ian, has it been six months already?” said Ian.

Katy didn’t say anything and followed Ian into the bright blue monolith. The world had been asleep for an hour now.

******************

The monolith was dark inside, except for a blinding blue light coming from the very top. The humming was immense inside " Katy could feel her organs twisting and turning inside her, wanting to escape her body just so she could get away fro, this noise. They wriggled and writhed, the ants began to crawl up her arm. She shivered and sat down.

Ian placed a pair of earphones over her head, and it helped a little. Ian seemed excited to see her, like a brother or father would be exited to see a member of their family. A tepid familiarity.

“Look! I got your favourite tea, we had some left over from last time, it’ll be ready in a few minutes, you sit there, and I’ll sit here, like always, and we can talk about what is beholden in the next six months.”

“What are you talking about?”

His mood became darker, frustrated. He shifted in his seat and looked at her tea for a second. His gift squandered on incompetence.

“No, no, no,” he coughed. “You’re not asking the right questions. I don’t want a ‘let me tell you my plan, Mr Bond’, oh, actually, you probably won’t understand that, also that would make me the criminal. See-- there’s a sequence of questions and answers, ones that you need to ask, for me to share this,” he gestured upwards, into the shadowed ceiling of the dark monolith, “with you.”

“What is this place?”

“This, my dearest friend, is a testament to human interventionalism. The target " your mind, well, everyone’s mind, really. This is a control center and radio tower, to beam revelation to the entire world. To deliver your three hours of entertainment,” said Ian.

“What?” The noises were getting louder.

“It all began when we noticed that musicians and writers and artists could induce behavior in people, simply by bringing them some level of human emotion. It didn’t matter which emotion it was - these people who would create things could make people riot, or cry, or make love or make peace. With enough beauty, and with enough resonance and appeal, these people could make people do just about anything.”

“So the government, flushed with technology that we didn’t understand, began research on distilling this perfect mechanism, this method of behavioral control, into a product that was succinct and could be distributed to the most people possible.”

“We had experimented with behavioral control many times, but nothing was as effective, and as sedative, as this. It was perfect. Well, not perfect, because it only yielded positive result in 99.7% of the population. The other experienced other, less desirable symptoms.”

“Like what?” Katy asked.

“Symptoms like headaches, irritability, pain, discomfiture. We had reports of hallucinations, of lack of appetite of memory loss. Some of the symptoms we encountered have been integrated into our broadcast, like memory loss, for instance, and some we have attempted to remove, like loss of appetite and nausea, which doesn’t really help anyone.”

“But it’s you! You are the most reactive to changes we make. This entire town was built around you, so that we could track your progress and make changes to our message accordingly, to help reach more people with our mandatory entertainment. If you react negatively, we know we need to make a small adjustment. The entertainment message doesn’t always work on you, for some reason or another, so we know you are an excellent measurement of its effectiveness,” said Ian.

“Then why do I get memory loss?”

“Well, we need to moderate your behavior in some way, so we medicate you after every session.”

“Those headaches…”

“Are an unfortunate byproduct of a highly calibrated system, but yes, it’s convenient that you get migraines so we can medicate you then.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?”

“Because, Katy, we work together, I don’t find logging on entertaining either, so I live and maintain this great salutation to our society. It’s beautiful, Like an invisible lighthouse, a guiding beacon to the masses, and it’s time again, to spend your six months inside a black box, because you’re the most important person in our world. You’re our thermometer.”

“What?”

“It’s time for you to recalibrate our machine.”

******************

Gary and Katy sat down in their favorite chairs. Gary first, and then Katy second, as always, and awaited the beginning of the days first mandatory broadcast.

“See you in three hours,” said Katy.

“Not if I see you first,” joked Gary. He always said that.

Gary and Katy placed their arms by their sides and waited to be logged on. The room had a low, conspicuous hum. It came from a black box.

“Is it still running, honey-pie? Still humming along?” Gary would ask.

“Like a locomotive dear,” said Katy. “Like our locomotive.”

Katy’s left arm itched a little, and then the whole world went to sleep.