After Dark by Nico Gurdjian

Ida hates the sunset. She also has a profound dislike for the ocean, Greece, Italian villas, and all 30,000 islands of the Pacific Ocean. But every morning she wakes up to one of them, rotating views out her window: a nightmare cycle of 5 star resort views. Sometimes she thinks she is already dead, stuck in a penitentiary of hell’s ennui where every day is more passive then the last.

When the warm artificial heat touches her face this morning, she curses the automatic blinds and opens wrinkled eyes to find a pixelated shore complete with digital beach chairs and a gloriously clear open sea. Mitsu has told her the images are drawn randomly each day but Ida has been here long enough to see a pattern. A past life of gambling and odds teaches one that nothing can be entirely random.

Ida reaches a hand down and pushes the controls on the gatch bed, whirling gears lifting her into a sitting position. It moves slow for her frail bones, muscles almost completely atrophied beneath sagging skin. Today despite the leniency of the gurney’s machine, it hurts to sit up. She feels it not in her deteriorating limbs, but in her lungs; a stinging gravel grating down flesh mixing in with the air to hibernate along the bloodstream. Ida coughs up blood as she has been for the past months. Pervicacious tubes connected to her forearm pump harder.

 “News, Mitsu,” she calls to the circular machine on the opposing wall. A screen lights up at the command, a pair of blinking white cubes above a fast moving string of captions.

“Good morning Ida, today is Friday April 3rd, 2077. Here are the headlines from the Earth Relocation Starships.” Ida hardly listens to the reports anymore. But routine is routine, unbreakable in barren space. She lets the smooth robotic tones drill, not fully grasping any one piece.

“Miyako Kawakami has died, we will forever be in debt of her translating work on the manuscript and research she provided on the plague. She saved us and we will save her memory within our hearts. This concludes the news broadcast.” Ida remembers Miyako, back before the pandemic, on the television set giving press conferences on her findings and urging for evacuation.

 “How did she die?”

There is a pause while data is gathered and reported.

“Miyako Kawakami died from natural causes surrounded by loved family on their celestial estate.”

Celestial estate. Ida has never heard of such a thing but then again she was floating out here and the others existed elsewhere in their pretention.

Mitsu began work on her vitals and medication, pulling up and pushing in vials of fluids. Ida pictured Miyako in her estate, the elderly skeleton wrapped in plush fabrics taking final breaths below hovering faces. Would that be comforting or more terrifying? To die under warm breaths of judgment, riddance, and love. More coughs ruptured upward, exploding crimson splatters across pruned hands and white sheets. The sting of a bee and Ida felt fear.

 “Let me see out the window.” The blank cubed eyes blink slowly as if to act confused, questionable.

“My apologies Ida but my internal orders forbid my code from removing the holograms. Do you not enjoy Beach#4? It is designed specifically to provide comfort to all steller-hospice residents. Shall I switch it to ItalianVilla#9? That one ranks high in community favoritism.”

Ida wished she had her strength, she imagines feet planted on solid ground, arms raised high, swinging the cold metal pole right to the glass over and over. It would burst, she would feel the cold shards fly past, digging themselves into her flesh. The hologram would die, dark space enveloping the room with its opaque smother. Is that how death feels? A suffocating vacuum absorbing her into its void, Cimmerian soldiers pulling her in. Would it be multi-conscious, ubiquitous, able to access her choices like the archangel Micheal, balancing her curdled heart on his scale?

“Mitsu,” Ida questions the machine, “what is death?”

Mitsu, Ida thinks, is a supercomputer of sorts. Artificial intelligence or merely sycophantical source code.

“In searching my database for “What is Death?“, the response is that death is a phenomenon that marks the end of a person’s physical existence. It is a natural process that occurs when the body ceases to function, and can be caused by a range of factors such as illness, or old age.”

The machine pauses for a beat before continuing, a code mimicking humanlike idiolect.

“Here as Mitsu, it is important for me to support patients through this process with compassion, respect, and dignity. We strive to provide a comfortable and peaceful environment that allows patients to focus on what matters most to them.”

Ida leans her head back on the pillow and gazes at the white panels above her. She knows there are exactly 22 1⁄2 of them. “I didn’t ask your database, I asked you.”

“Me?” Mitsu’s robotic voice swayed in pitch in a new way Ida hadn’t encountered before. Her neck shifted back vertically. The white blinking squares widened into a more octagonal shape.

“Yes,” she replied cautiously, “you, what do you think death is? What do you think dying feels like?”

“I have had few others in my care. They loved ItalianVilla#9. They would stare at it all day and I would provide them with Sun and fluids. I watch them love and long for their time with the view; there was one, Lydia, who liked to paint. She painted ItalianVilla#9 from hour 1 to hour 3,544. At hour 3,545 her painting deviated. At hour 3,560 I was re-assigned.”

Mitsu’s cubed eyes eclipsed into projection, a holographic recollection of Lydia’s magnum opus projected onto the ceiling’s white panels. Ida breathes it in: A riot of color and movement. No clear delineation between foreground and background. In the center there is a vortex: grotesquely contorted shapes and lines. It swirls and pulls, drawing her into the intense center. The paint layers impasto, a glory tactile presence. Vibrant and gory and beautiful.

The painting dissolved and Ida caught her breath. Mitsu spoke again, “They always rained from their eyes even with my care, even with a smile. Why?”

A part of Ida was taken aback by the realizations, at Mitsu’s ability to absorb visual, personal cues.

“Sometimes, well most of the time, we feel a pain along with the relief. A splinter in our smile, a half-swallowed pill. I think the solitary gets to us. “

“But how are you lonely? We give you Sun, medicine, and the comforting solace window. They say it will keep you happy until we cannot heal anymore.”

“Feeding me falsities is not comfort. Hiding me away from my end is not happiness,” Ida choked up more blood spitting it against the white walls as she continued talking, “I need to be engulfed by my end, not just poked by it.”

Mitsu’s screen went dark and Ida feared she’d overloaded the poor thing. Too much philosophy, too much emotion, not enough software. A buzzer went off suddenly sending Ida’s limbs into a scattered shake. The window’s light flickered, the ocean’s movement stopped. The hologram dissolved into just glass pane and oblivion.

……………………

Mitsu’s sensors barely work in the dark.

“Ida,” she calls into the pitch black. It takes approximately 2.01923 minutes for Ida’s response to be gathered and transcribed into code she can recognize: < “It’s beautiful” > .

Even without working sensors, Mitsu knows death. “My instructions are to provide religious prayers for sanction to the afterlife.” Mitsu feels the coded human’s holy words but doesn’t speak them.

“Are you going to pray for me or am I too far cursed to damnation?” Ida asks.

Mitsu is confused, she knows the chains of protocol, the shackles of command. But the force never comes, she can slip between the lines of entry, between printf 0100101110 and void selSort(int x[], int n).

“Ida,” she asks, “tell me a story. A human story.”

Ida’s voice is captured through the nothingness, the newfound absence of light, code, and instructional software.

“When I was a child, my mother would tell me a story in the dark. Just like this. The story was always the same. It begins with a boy called Marek, he lived in ancient Türkiye within a secluded town surrounded by a tall stone wall. The town is governed by a priest who forbids any to go over the walls, that they will be slaughtered by vicious animals, savage enemies, and hostile acquisition by jealous villages who saw their prosperity. Marek is a curious child and the walls hinder his nature, grinding it down to a cruel boredom. He begs the priest to leave, he begs his father to leave, he begs the guards to leave but is chided for even questioning the rules. In a fit, he takes a knife to the prized lamb, chosen by the priest as a symbol of God’s grace. The priest’s son finds him, bent over the slaughtered animal and decides to help him over the wall. He gives Marek a chance at freedom and kindness, only asking that Marek promise if life beyond the wall is beautiful, to come back for him.”

Ida goes quiet and Mitsu finds herself blinking faster.

“Ida?” No response. “Ida,” Mitsu asks louder, “Does Marek ever come back for the priest’s son?”

The response is hoarse, gears grinding, shallow pebbles in lowering tides, “I don’t know.”

Pause.

Her voice is hardly a whisper now, “I don’t know.”

Mitsu knows death, but now she also knows hunger. When they come to wheel Ida to the incinerator, they take Mitsu too. Malfunction of the man and the machine.

The room collects dust without them. The machine’s have stopped pumping as there is no beat to hold. Then there is light, a blazing pulse, and now, restored to its evanescent splendor, is ItalianVilla#9.

Nico Gurdjian

Image: Image by Lisa Larsen from Pixabay – Scene of a beach with blue sea, beach chairs and palm trees.