Look me deep in the algorithms. It’s as if the internet’s entire underground potential has vanished into their archives. The pull the internet has on me lies dormant, reduced to something unconscious and functional, memorised grips on metal frames and finger constellations on the phone case. I shape my body gently around the machines, hand resting like a soft pillow under my phone as I text. Even now, as I write this to you, my upper body hangs over the laptop like a cradling breast, or am I the one that’s held by it? Maybe we’re both suckling each other at the same time. All this time I’ve participated in a ritual where I extend myself into the machine, without thinking about it as an extension of me.
Through the evening darkness in our witches’ den, I see Venke and Terese behaving in the same way with their tablets and laptops in the kitchen, and together we watch the neighbours participate in the same patterns. They walk cautiously around their apartments, rocking their applications as if they were rocking children to sleep. This is probably how I’ve always wanted to be rocked and comforted, by the metaphysical place with the biggest arms, the arms of the internet.
Routine machine rituals aren’t magical, I say, still in the kitchen.
But they could have been, says Terese. They have potential. Imagine everything we remember now, everything we’ve forgotten.
Venke is deeply absorbed in an old sewing kit next to her laptop. She’s gotten excited by the image of a machine and man nursing each other. She sits cutting little bits of sewing thread from the kit and tying the threads around her nipples, where they press against her jumper.
Isn’t that image just a metaphor for the echo chamber? I say. Life in the self-referential circuit, and the dependency that keeps us there. When did we get to this place?
Even the echo chamber has potential, Venke argues.
Her nipples are now poking out beneath her jumper, and she ties them together with a new piece of thread. Now they are connected like an infinity loop.
They’re the same figure, says Terese, the echo loop. The little, anxious subject suckling its own body, all alone.
But the loop doesn’t exist in a vacuum, says Venke: imagine it as a movement, a feeling, a connection.
She raises a pair of scissors to cut the end of the thread that’s still attached to the spool, but instead cuts the loop right between her nipples. The threads fall away from each other, only to grow toward each other again. Down on the table the spool jerks. The threads around each nipple reconnect in new forms and loops from the thread under Venke’s upper body, and it starts to move, forming new bonds, weaving a steadily growing network of loops and figures around itself.
Our father, who art in hell, I say, and we all laugh.
The nipples poking out of Venke’s jumper are no longer just nipples, but also buttons, doorknobs, corks or the heads of plastic screws. Like characters on a keyboard, they can be pressed, held and combined, creating various syntheses. The strings twist them in different directions, and suddenly we hear this growing, piercing metallic sound, like what you hear on the underground before trains arrive in the station. Two thin metal threads then emerge, pushing their way out from each tip and flowing down her upper body like a set of glistening train tracks. Just as we understand what’s going on, they disappear again. The magical moment is over. But maybe the threads are still there, stretching around us, around me and Terese too, as if from Gus Gorman’s uncontrollable machine, the one that folded its thin copper wires around our faces. The atmosphere in the room is still electric. This is the extension, this tingle, and the glow we’re looking for.
This moment is the first we’ve seen of a different set of connections. We keep looking, in all the forgotten Wi-Fi connections, the ones that don’t make sense. In all the connections that don’t involve a lonely subject under God’s gaze. If we can hex Oslo, we can dig up whatever it is we’re looking for from the internet too.
What began as a mere sensation is beginning to take form, the form of another internet. We’re starting to hear the drone more clearly now, inside echoing sound effects and programs with compilation errors, far down the deep web. And we hear it from other places too. It calls to us when we water the tomato plants near the modem. We’ve started to notice little formations and signs in the steam from the teakettle, not so different from the threads growing around Venke’s jumper, as if all around us new life forms are emerging. We notice that when we see these signs, the ordinary internet becomes difficult to use. The router blinks yellow, is interrupted or made useless by a hellish mess. Spam flows unfiltered into the inbox and videos we didn’t search for start playing on the screen, like a poltergeist throwing things around inside our machines.
Terese, Venke and I christen this internet the cosmic internet.
Dear god, you can’t touch this, says Terese.
And then we switch the internet off. We imagine that the search will be easier without
