The State of The Art

'I mean, what’s it all about, suit? What does it all mean?'

'What colour is the wind? How long is a piece of string?'

I have to think about that. 'What’s string?' I have to ask finally, suspecting I’ve missed something.

'Never mind. Keep walking.'

Sometimes I wish I could see the suit. It’s weird, now that I think about it, not being able to see who I’m talking to. Just this hollow voice, not unlike my own, sounding in the space between the inside of my helmet and the outside of my skull. I would prefer a face to look at, or even just a single thing to fix my attention on.

If I still had the camera I could take a photograph of us both. If there was water here I could gaze at our reflection.

The suit is my shape, extended, but its mind isn’t mine; it’s independent. This perplexes me, though I suppose it must make sense. But I’m glad I chose the full 1.0 intelligence version; the standard 0.1 type would have been no company at all. Perhaps my sanity is measured by the placing of a decimal point.

Night. It is the fifty-fifth night. Tomorrow will be the fifty-sixth day.

How am I? Difficult to say. My breathing has become laboured, and I’m sure I’ve become thinner. My hair is long now and my beard quite respectable, if a little patchy. Hairs fall out, and I have to squirm and pull to get an arm into the body of the suit to poke the hairs into the waste unit each night, or they itch. I am woken up at night by the pain inside me. It is like a little life itself, pawing and scraping to get out.

Sometimes I dream a lot, sometimes not at all. I have given up singing. The land goes on. I had forgotten planets were so big. This one’s smaller than standard, and it still seems to go on and on without end. I feel very cold, and the stars make me cry.

I am tormented by erotic dreams, and can do nothing about them. They are similar to the old dream, of walking on the ship or the seaship or whatever it is… only in this dream the people around me are naked, and caressing each other, and I am on my way to my lover… but when I wake up and try to masturbate, nothing happens. I try and try, but I only exhaust myself. Perhaps if the dream was more powerfully erotic, more imaginative… but it stays the same.

I’ve been thinking about the war a lot recently, and I think I’ve decided it’s wrong. We are defeating ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by winning it. All our statistics and assumptions mean less the more they seem to tell. We surrender, in our militance, not to one enemy but to all we’ve ever fought, within ourselves. We should not be involved, we ought not to do a thing; we’ve gambled our fine irony for a mechanistic piety, and the faith we fight’s our own.

Get out, stay out, keep clear.

Did I say that?

I thought the suit said something there. I’m not sure. Sometimes I think it’s talking to me all the time when I’m asleep. It might even be talking to me all the time when I’m awake, too, but it’s only occasionally that I hear it. I think it’s mimicking me, trying to sound the way I sound. Perhaps it wants to drive me mad, I don’t know.

Sometimes I don’t know which of us has said something.

I shiver and try to turn over in the suit, but I can’t. I wish I wasn’t here. I wish all this hadn’t happened. I wish it was all a dream, but like the colours of the earth and air, it’s too consistent.

I feel very cold, and the stars make me cry.

'Inside-out, inside-out, inside inside-out,
Inside-out, inside-out, inside inside-out!'

'Shut up!'

'Oh, you’re talking to me at last.'

'I said shut up!'

'But I wasn’t saying anything.'

'You were singing!'

'I don’t sing. You were singing.'

'Don’t lie! Don’t you dare lie to me! You were singing!'

'I assure you—'

'You were! I heard you!'

'You’re shouting. Calm down. We still have a long way to go. We shan’t get there if you—'

'Don’t you tell me to shut up!'

'I didn’t. You told me to shut up.'

'What?'

'I said—'

'What did you say?'

'I—'

'What? What did — who is that?'

'If you’ll ju—'

'Who are you? Who are you? Oh no, please… '

'Look, ca—'

'No, please… '

'What?'

'… please… '

' What?'

'… please… please… please… please… '

I don’t know what day this is. I don’t know where I am or how far I’ve come or how far there is still to go.

Sane now. There never was any suit voice. I made it all up; it was my own voice all the time. Some state I must have been in to imagine all that, to be so unable to cope with being down here, all alone, that I created somebody else to talk to, like some lonely kid with a friend nobody else can see. I believed in it when I thought I heard the voice, but I don’t hear it any more. Even at its most blandly credible it was just the flat calm of insanity. Temporary, fortunately. Everything is.

I don’t look at the stars any more, in case they start talking to me too.

Maybe the base is at the core. Maybe I am just walking round it and can never get any closer to it.

My limbs move on their own now; automatic, programmed. I hardly need to think. Everything is as it should be.

We don’t need the machines, any more than they need us. We just think we need them. They don’t matter. Only they need themselves. Of course a smart suit would have ditched me to save itself; we didn’t build them to resemble ourselves, but that’s the way it works out, in the end.

We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It’s all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working-out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder.

Going mad inside a space-suit, indeed.

I think I passed the place where the base used to be some time ago, but there was nothing there. I am still walking. I’m not sure I know how to stop.

I am a satellite; they, too, only stay up by forever falling forward.

The suit is dead around me, burned and scarred and blackened and lifeless. I don’t know how I could have dreamed it was alive. The very thought makes me shiver, inside here.