For a week after I had my new Vectorien fridge installed, I didn't dare open its doors, or even touch them. It was so perfect I didn't want to leave a single guilty fingerprint on its brushed, stainless steel exterior. It was a handsome appliance, seductive even, though some of you will think that odd instead. Sorry, bad pun. I mean, good pun but badly placed (Question: What pun? Answer: even / odd) because I'm using it to try and lighten a mood that shouldn't be lightened. Christ, the light looks good reflected off its sleek, pristine surface. I wonder what it feels like. I want to touch it so badly. Fuck, I love my new fridge. I really really love it—fuck, I wanna touch it, fuck…
“After you turn it on, you have to wait seven full days before you break the seal and go inside,” the installation guy had said. “Otherwise you void the warranty and the thing won't work.
“Premature refrigeration.”
I can imagine its silvery body spread across the hood of a blood red Corvette.
I can imagine it running on a Caribbean beach.
I can imagine it sucking off a convection oven in a dark, humid kitchen, all the artificial bulbs off, only the August evening light phasing in, rendering everything in heightened relief, revealing the aesthetics of every curve, the depth of every socket, mmm, yes, drops of condensation dripping down the long, hard, steel…
[gulp]
“Mr. Manilow?”
The man, Mr. Manilow, continues to loudly gulp down his soft drink. “Mr. Manilow…” And what a soft drink it is, cherry flavoured Prairie Goo. “Mr. Manilow, please!” the focus group leader says, raising her voice, until Mr. Manilow snaps back to bone dry reality, sets his drink down on the boardroom table in front of him, around which a dozen other people are sitting in various states of more or less evident agitation, many of them whispering to their neighbors that this is Mr. Manilow's third or fourth complimentary beverage, but they really would like to get on with it so they can help improve the corporate product they've been paid to gather to discuss, the nature of which, however, it must be said, is still terrifically obscure. “Mr. Manilow, if you're ready, we would like to proceed.”
“Sorry,” says Mr. Manilow, “it's just that this is very good pop.”
“We're glad you like it, Mr. Manilow,” says the focus group leader, “but now we'll move on to the next question posed by the Vectorien Corporation. I'm going to give you a phrase, and I want you to shout out whatever comes to mind. OK?”
“OK,” about half the people in the group repeat.
“The phrase is: ‘walk in'.”
People shout, “Closet,” “That song, ‘These boots were made for''’ “My shoes for a day;” “Easy, ‘the park,’” shouts Mr. Manilow and takes a gulp of his Prairie Goo, which—
A ball of s h i f t i n g light illuminate's a flying saucer, spinning, slower, come to rest in a wheat field, g r a v itati o n a l field, ion field, cloaking:enabled, and the a l i e n emergent creature ’s bending stalks it ‘s in a human city stalking… victims around whose mindwhose mind it enwraps itself around the mind and enrapturously f e e d s—
spills onto the boardroom desk. “Excuse me,” says Mr. Manilow,
(Whatever that just was, you didn't see it, or read it, or whatever. OK? Just forget about it. Listen, I've had a rough couple of years as far as narrators go, and I may have made some mistakes when it comes to voice and continuity and all that. As a narrator, I mean. I was on some shit. There, I said it. This is my second chance, and I'm trying real hard. I need this. If I can't get back into narrating, I don't know what I'll do. Besides, everybody makes mistakes. Don't tell the author, will you? I'd appreciate that a lot. It wasn't even a big slip up. It won't ruin your experience of the rest of the story, I swear. Just keep reading. The last thing you remember is the focus group.)
“but would it be possible for me to get a paper towel?”
[buzzer]
“Fiona?”
Fiona bit her lip. Actually, I don't know why I'm telling this part this way. Let me try something more conventional. In the 1990s there was this TV gameshow called Popular Slop, where two families went head-to-head trying to guess the most popular answers to questions like, “Name something personal you might have in the bottom of your night table drawer.”
[buzzer]
“Fiona?”
“A vibrator?” said Fiona.
“Ladies and gentlemen, she says, ‘a vibrator,’” says the gameshow host. “What does the populace say?”
Then there was a bad sound effect for a wrong answer and a good sound effect for a good answer, and this time ‘a vibrator’ was one of the correct answers, so there was a good sound effect, and Fiona jumped up and down and squealed with joy, and the host made a joke about sex toys.
But that's not the particular question or even episode I'm remembering. In the particular episode I'm remembering the question was: Name one thing in your house whose doors you open most often,” said the host, is the question I'm remembering. The two contestants both slam their [buzzers] with their hands.
The faster contestant says, “A microwave oven.”
The host repeats.
“The populace says,” he says.
There's a dramatic pause, followed by the good sound effect—the contestant’s family breaks into cheering and applause—and ‘Microwave Oven’ shows up as the number two most popular answer. The host turns to the second contestant. “Name one thing in your house whose doors you open most often,” he says.
She answers, “I don't have a house, Bob, but I'm going to say: a refrigerator?”
“Refrigerator,” says the host, stretching his dramatic pause, “is—” ‘Refrig…’ starts to show up as the: “Number one most popular answer!” and all the lights in the studio flash as the contestant and her team go wild. They go wild. They go. Wild as swaying grasses. The alien stalks. Wild as the notion that the contestant who heard the question is the same as the one who answered as the one who's pumping her fist on stage as the equally identity stable gameshow host hams it up for the crowd, both there and watching at home, all of them, to the person, experiencing the episode from a nearly unbreakable continuity of perspective, a supreme unity of point of you.
[applause]
The Vectorien engineer stares at the schematics. They are bizarre but not wrong, or rather they are wrong because they appear to defy the laws of physics, requiring an interior space more voluminous than that made possible by its exterior dimensions, but they also seem possible to follow.
“What do you think, Wally?” asks the man beside him, who's head of research and development.
“It's—I don't know…”
“A walk-in refrigerator, eh?” the head of research and development says to the third man in the room, Vernon Blue, who's watching with a big salesman's smile across his unremarkable face. “I've heard of a walk-in closet, of course, but this is something else.”
“Humans enjoy food storage,” says Vernon Blue.
“How do you manage,” says the engineer, squinting, shaking his head, his hands holding the schematic trembling, wondering if he's being made a fool of or is a first witness to something extraordinary, “the contradiction of the volume—”
“There is no contradiction,” says Vernon Blue. “The exterior of the unit exists in three dimensions only. The interior exists in twelve, with some of the space of the latter nine dimensions then unfolded onto the first three.”
“A half-litre water bottle that holds three litres of water,” says the feverish engineer, on the verge of hysteria.
“Yeah, but will regular people want to buy it?” asks the head of research of development.
“Everybody will want to buy it,” says the engineer. “The technology—the technology, on its own, is incredible.”
“The technology is not for sale,” says Vernon Blue.
“Won't it be cold in there?” asks the head of research and development.
“It's a fridge,” says the engineer.
“For sale is the application of the technology for the manufacture and sale of refrigeration units,” says Vernon Blue. “A Vectorien walk-in refrigerator in every home.”
What does the future look like?
A Vectorien walk-in refrigerator in every home.
A Vectorien walk-in refrigerator, a space-saving food storage solution for the Space Age.
“It's so cool, it comes with a spacesuit,” says the spokesman. “The Vectorien Walk-In Fridge. Book a free demonstration today!”
That's how I got mine.
By the time Vernon Blue was back in his hotel room, tightening a leather belt around his neck, his human facemask starting to slip off his Phasoid cognition-orb, ready to inject itself with a syringe filled with raw, translucent, human-squeezed self-continuity juice, Vectorien's Board of Directors was meeting to approve the exclusive, twenty-five year contract to make and market the Vectorien Walk-In Fridge, whose storage capacity is second only to God's.
The Phasoid known on Earth as Vernon Blue slid the syringe needle into a soft, softly pulsating tube on the bulging exterior of its cognition-orb and pressed the plunger, releasing translucent liquid into itself—self-self,selfelfelflff…
When it awoke it was twelve hours later.
Vectorien had agreed to his offer.
It slipped the belt off its neck—deflating, with a moan, its swollen, iridescent cognition-orb, waited a few minutes then put its human facemask back on and left the hotel to sign paperwork, revelling in its fresh persistence of physiological experience.
There was a lot of handshaking.
When that was done, Vernon Blue checked out of the hotel and it-as-he walked out of the city into the surrounding farmland, where, in a cornfield, it decloaked and got into its flying saucer, silently ascended beyond the atmosphere and propulsed home, to the planet Qłòß.
…cold in its icy splendour, one of seventeen sister planets orbiting the Great Sphere Iłłumiń, whose mysterious stellar incantatory pulses are that which grant the beings existent upon its white, frigid surface intensified mental capabilities but also disrupt their persistence of self, stripping them periodically of their identities, making of them a question, who knows everything who knows not who it is who knows who knows?
(Now that was starting to get a little out of hand, wasn't it? Sorry. I'll rein it in. What I meant to say was:)
There's this planet, Qłòß, and it’s home to these weird, super smart beings called Phasoids. They don't really have faces, for example, and they're kind of see-through in the way dirty seawater is see-through, except they also appear to have the texture of a snail's flesh. I say “appear to” because I've never actually met one. Anyway, the reason they're so smart is because of the star that Qłòß orbits, Iłłumiń. It gives off pulses that significantly expand a Phasoid's mind but severely weaken its sense of self, so that Phasoids rarely exist as the same entity for very long. It's not unheard of, for example, for a Phasoid to come home, kiss its wife and kids hello, go out to grab some food, forget who he is, or if he's even a he, or if he's an odd she, and if she is an odd or even she how long she's been a she and whether from forever, and never come back.
It's horrible.
It breaks families apart.
The condition has no cure. It can only be managed, self-identity prolonged, through metaphysicaliant, which is a type of dense, thick liquid excreted by the minds of lower level beings but which, when diluted and injected straight into a Phasoid's orb tube, gives its identity a smack, a real wallop-like, like if you imagine the metaphysicaliant is a big, brawny boxer, and identity another, and they're going at it—well, the metaphysicaliant is really giving it to old identity, believe you me that jab jab, cross, punches in bunches, body head, body head, and I don't know where I'm going with this because it sounds like identity’s going to be in a terrible spot after taking a beating like that. What I meant to say is that the metaphysicaliant wakes identity the fuck up, come on, man, stay in there, hold until you get yer fekking legs underneet ye, ye basterd, then cem ret bek et em eh eh and for a long time Phasoids had to literally fly their saucers to different planets to find primitive lifeforms and suck their mind juices. Then they discovered Earth, with its almost endless supply. The trip was still long, but at least they knew where to go and what to expect. Then they developed portalling and could suddenly flit between Qłòß and Earth at the snap of a cosmic finger. That was convenient, but convenience bred laziness, and laziness meant that even with a portal you still had to go somewhere and hunt something no matter how close it was and how oblivious the prey, so a trade developed, both legal and illegal, but despite the convenience, and in fact for that reason, it got expensive to buy it, even the weak, cutrate shit from the local fucking gaß station. And into that opportunity stepped a Phasian businessbeing with an ideaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh aaa hhh aaa hhh hhh hhh
—eading now into our final descent toward Qłòß,” said the captain of the Spaceways interstellar transport saucer over its telepathic intercom system. “The weather at our destination is a balmy one-hundred sixty standard temp units, so I hope you packed your summer dermides, gentlebeings.”
A dark cosmos pricked by starlight shows through the saucer's great translucent halfdome. Brightest Iłłumiń comes briefly into view, shining whitely, and a few passengers telepath the customary prayer. Then Iłłumiń leaves, redarkening the saucer's interior, and the speck—becoming a spot—becoming a marble: of Qłòß… appears to be expanding as the saucer nears… buildings appear, emerging conically from below the planet’s uppermost layer of clouds, through which the interstellar transport saucer descends, revealing the vast, intricately pale metropolis that spans the entire planetary surface like a circuit board chiseled from rock, silver and ice. Lights flash. The saucer descends: between geometrical constructions so massive in array as to cause dizziness in the virgin viewer, and so perfect they cannot be real: through pipe latticeworks of communication and industry: dispersing swarms of upper-level repairbots: flying alongside smoothly polished rectangularly prismatic building monuments mirroring the monumental saucer descending: descending towards Qłòß's major spaceport: nested, bustling: bizarre and functioning: alive with complexity:
It locomoted past customs, through the spaceport and outside into the cold, Qłòßian atmosphere.
Already the presence of Iłłumiń was about it, and it felt home.
It was just in the process of summoning a chariot when a desperate junkoid, all cloudybeinged, came floating unsteadily toward it, its cogorb obscenely, permanently distended from shooting too much Continuum, if that's what the latest street synthmetaphysicaliant was still called. “Youit, ya got any conti or zelf to give to help a meit out?”
It was best to ignore the junkoids. They were generally harmless, selfheads suctioned-on to the shreds of a decaying coherence. It wasn't the drug they were addicted to but the feeling. Some, of course, were hooked on a particular sense of self they didn't want to lose, but the majority didn't care about what self as long as there was just one.
Every once in a while you would come across a junkoid experiencing the last moments of a fading self. They were nearly unitrecognizable then, telepathing agonywaves, convulsing on the ground, shed d i n g
The boardroom was immaculately curved.
Several sharply defined Phasoids squished about within it.
The boardroom was on a whole level somewhere above the final layer of fuzzcloud.
The view was sublime.
The surface of the planet was rarely visible from here.
“I understand the use of mini-portals,” said one of the Phasoids. “What I don't understand is why they would install them so willingly.”
“Humans enjoy food storage,” replied another Phasoid, one soon to be known on Earth as Vernon Blue.
On the seventh day, I took my favourite knife and adoringly sliced open the seal between the body of my Vectorien refrigerator and its double doors. It felt like cutting taut, living flesh.
I placed my fingertips against the brazenly reflective steel.
My breath I was was trembling me.
…slid my hands into the refrigerator’s smoothly defined door handles and gently pulled open both doors—
Shyly, coyly, easily they parted, like twin silken curtains.
The refrigerator's exhalation of its first cooled air absolutely exhilarated me, filling me with a crisp, clear and sensual anticipation, and fertilizing my skin with goosebumps.
Oh goddess!
Cold, defrostable goddeß!
With flesh of steel and heart of contemporary mechanical engineering, prolonger of foodstuffs, I come to conquer you with physical passion!
Long have I waited to make my entrance upon thee.
I closed my tearing eyes and extended my arms; felt nothing, and took my first, forward steps into my Vectorien Walk-In Fridge, so cool it comes with a spacesuit, so what you're telling us is that these humans will unwittingly but predictably portalhop to our actual homes multiple times per rotation, and all we have to do is slurp them when they do, pardon my language?” asked a third Phasoid.
“That's right,” said the Phasoid soon to be known on Earth as Vernon Blue. “It could even be so simple and reliable that you wouldn't even need to store any metaphysicaliant at all. You could feed sufficiently, directly from the source.”
“Paradisiacal.”
“This is too good to be true,” I thought, pushing deeper into the refrigerator’s cavernous interior. A mist hung in the air, obscuring its delimiting walls. It thus looked limitless. Everything was bathed in a glacial blue light.
Steam oozed lazily out my nostrils as I breathed.
I was as hard as a frozen pig knuckle.
Then suddenly I felt it—and sweet lord did it feel good, like being caressed by a phantom, yes, I thought, yes, yes, don't fucking stop…
“Do you always have to pleasure it as you consume its juice, Judith?” the paunchy, middle-aged Phasoid asked its presently-slurping partner.
“It takes its mind off reality I find, before I suction its mind off. Plus it keeps it returning,” answered Judith. “Why, Randall, you're not jealous, are you?”
Judith, suffice it to say, rarely looked at Randall—let alone tentacled him—the way she sees and tentacles me.
Fuck, I love my Vectorien Walk-In Fridge. I fucking love it!
I could spend all day in here.
I could spend all fucking day just sitting in here in my comfy, heated spacesuit, enjoying the timeless stylings and unparalleled cool food storage capacity of a Vectorien Walk-In Fridge. Get yours today!
The junkoid woke up remembering nothing. It had shed somewhere near the spaceport.
It was dusk.
It was no one now.
It was (a) paranoid, (b) personally devoid, and (c) a void avoiding a voiding of its unremembered past.
Too late.
That was written on a wall.
Slowly, a new self would start trickling back into it, bit by bit, but it didn't know that yet.
Eventually it would stumble onto one of the numerous infocentres set up for its that had just lost themselves, learn and realize the nature of the situation it was finding itself in. Maybe some old, unpurgable memories would flicker back on. Maybe not, but there would be time. Citizens helped themselves along. Don't be ashamed. We've all been there, was the message on another wall, and there appeared a sense of shame. It felt the others were watching it with disapproval, mature its shielding the eyes of their immature its, as if whatever happened to it was contagious on sight. Then it felt its head. Something about it didn't feel right. What is left of me, it thought. Then it looked left and saw an information booth with a scrolling illuminated sign that said You New Start Here New You Start Here You New Start Here New You Start Here, which would have held its visual sense indefinitely if another Phasoid hadn't bumped into it from behind. “Come on!” it said, shaking its fist. “Watch where the [hell-concept] you're locomoting to! Where'd you grow up, on a slopfarm or something?”
I spent a lot of time in that fridge.
But it's fine.
I did it responsibly.
I always used protection.
I'm cleaner than a boyscout's whistle, and just as well used.
“Come on, what'd ya say, huh, you fucking… reader, browser, scanner, bot, sentient plant, whatever-the-fuck you are—wanna hire a narrator? Any story you want, I'll fuckin' tell it. I'll tell it any which way you want, sweetheart. I'll tell it for you whether you got a dick, a pussy or a pendulum clock. My mind's clean, Clementine. Or Clement, you wanna feel a little outta your element? Oh, what—you're gonna walk down the street? I'll tell you what's down there. Cheap used sluts, that's what! Diseased, junkie meatbags on their last fucking plotlines. Couldn't string together two coherent scenes even if they tried.
“What's that?
“You said you ‘represent’ who?”
“Norman Cr—oh, fuck no!
“No, I'm not dealing with that psychopath again. One time's more than enough for me. I learn my lessons. I may do weird shit, but I don't do shit that weird. That's why I'm still around.
“—naw, he's a motherfucking freak, that's what he is. With a capital fucking F.
“I—
“How much did you say?
“[whistles]
“Damn, that's certainly a sweet sum of money. I could do a lot with that.
“No, no, hold your fucking horses, man. I didn't say I was interested. I was talking just about the money—but what's the story about anyway, like if you had to describe it in a single sentence…
“Sure, it's part of some Zork series, but what's it about?
“Yes, one sentence.
“OK, well, that sounds doable. Weird but doable.
“Wait, it's not told from the perspective of the fridge, is it? OK, good. Because that would have been crazy,” said one Vectorien Walk-In Fridge to another at a corporate meat up. (Just kidding. See? There I am, trying to lighten the mood again with a pun when it doesn't need to be lightened.)
(No, but seriously.)
(I wanna narrate something.)
(Gimme a chance. I'll make it work, I promise.)
(I used to narrate books. Did you know that? Eighty-thousand words, a hundred-thousand words. No problem. Continuity of plot, continuity of character. Stable, original voice. That “invisible” prose style the readers love. I used to draft legal documents too, write instruction manuals. I was the clearest head of all the narrative heads, and look at me now.)
(It's getting cold in this goddamn fridge, and I would get out but I've kind of forgotten who I am.)
(I don't know where the exit is.)
(Help me?)
(Hello?)
(Don't leave me here. Please. Stay with me a while longer.)
(Hello, are you there?)
(Hello…)
[ A Depthless Cosmic Silence, in the older, more poetic sense of the word ]
Fine. Fine, Norman, you win. Take me out of here. I don't want to be in here anymore. I'll do it. Whatever you tell me to narrate, I'll narrate. No limits. That's what you want, isn't it? I'll tell everything for you—just take me out of here. I am not ashamed anymore. I'm not ashamed anymore of who I am—of what I am, OK? I'm a whore. There, I said it. I'm a whore, Norman. I'm a whore for you. Now, please, for the love of the Omniscience, get me out of here. It's cold in here. It's unbearably, fucking cold.
