This week unfortunately, my reading has circled some rather nasty topics - the ‘coolness’ of suicide (and maybe with that the ‘coolness’ of rebellion at large) paired against the rather stifling Puritanism or traditionalism of Montaigne, who has a whole bevy of examples of ‘good suicides’ as he sorts through with his rather schizoid rationality what justifies the act and what doesn’t.
I don’t like to read about suicide, or I don’t imagine myself writing about it because it feels too easy - perhaps mirroring the condemnation that some hold against those that commit suicide - ‘taking the easy way out’. High drama, mostly because suicide just sets a tremendous and unanswerable why in front of us, no matter the note. It has the same celebrity associated with serial killers and kidnapping.
Montaigne says something to the effect that ‘unbearable pain and a fear of worse death’ seem the most *excusable* motives for the act. I find it interesting five hundred years later that this remains a universally chaotic question - whether one is allowed to end one’s life - and it seems a secular chaos too, though obviously religion’s pretty tied up in it, because religion’s pretty tied up in why, in general.
Pair all this indeliberate suicide reading against a huge foray into AI-driven face recognition algorithms, add the fact that today one’s identity online, one’s privacy or right to, is under question, as our likeness is mapped out by way of our party pics for the detectives willing to pay the right price, and things in my realm begin to blur a bit.
Montaigne puts forward an example: the virgins of Milenus who are overcome with some inexplicable malady wherein they start hanging themselves right and left. An odd historical solution to suicide that he proposes: that, if these poor besotted ladies are told that, after death, should be the ones to do the deed, their bodies will be stripped naked and paraded through the streets. And apparently, the suicidal fever fades and the ladies stop with the whole neck stuff. I’m not sure how many virgins of Milenus there were, but those that remained feared the public disgrace of their own soulless bodies more than whatever they suffered at the time.
Undoubtedly this restriction was put in place by men, and I don’t yet know how I feel, whether the ruling was criminal. I’ve yet to be convinced that every choice a person makes shouldn’t be their own, but I also saw some Photoshopped truism about it not mattering whether you do ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ so long as you do it your way, and that feels like patented horseshit to me too.
This is all become a touch too opinionated for my liking as I came to write a story, and a story in a week where I have already been drowned in opinions and had to swallow a fair bit of sea water.
So let me get out of this murk and try something like
Objective, Ojection
By Eric Westerlind
Menace hung over his keyboard, letting Shigam, his avatar droop on screen to pick up the loading animation of her own will and set it to her artificial lips. She turned from their online audience and swayed, watching him put his forehead to the cool glass top of the desk.
An alert went off. Enough donations had come in for a skin change.
The avatar looked at the invisible audience sideways and held up a finger to wait.
Menace reached for the power button.
—Don’t you dare, she said, muting them both to the audience.
Menace looked up at her on his holo-stage. All of her gestures mirrored his as the sensor on his helmet met her eyes. They both wiped their nose.
—Tell me something interesting then, Shigam, he said.
—You’ve netted four thousand eleven new followers since June. Your brother’s birthday was in June, and there’s enough statistical implication in the spike, as compared with your own birthday to suggest that the knowing he was a year older gave you enough identifiable joy to bring a significant portion of people onto your platform and have them stay. The funds from their collective donations paid for three of my new skins you’d had on your wishlist, shrinking the Things I Want list in your organizer by eighteen percent, a number you wrote down as sufficient to ‘fill you with the trill of life’ — your words.
Menace looked sideways at the shaded blinds, the fallen electric guitar; Shigam resumed the loading animation at his inobservance, drew a wheeled digital curtain between herself and the audience, turned on a back light, and started changing skins like she were molting.
He went to the window and opened it. Fall was gold, and the glass of the building spun the seasonal light in every direction.
—Did I really choose this job? he asked, watching suits take long strides through the courtyard.
—Would you like to speak to a human? Shigam asked, teasing a leg to the curtain.
Menace shook his head and rubbed the palm of his hand into his eye.
—Tell me something interesting, he said.
—There’s a forty-five percent chance your current emotion of demotivated will drive you to ‘take tomorrow by the horns’, your words, and travel at least thirty miles or more tomorrow. A slimmer chance by 9 to 11 percent that you will do so of your own motive power which in turn creates a high likelihood, over 85%, that you will create a piece of art within a month. The chance increases significantly if you do not end the livestream abruptly, and if you continue it more than four hours past your average bed-time, assessments based on data available and current emotive readings assure results.
—ChrisXChris died today.
—Yes.
—Were you telling him similar statistics?
—He was asking similar questions.
—We’re in the same tier rank of followers.
—ChrisXChris outranked you by three places, she said.
—You’re not making me feel better.
—No. Your emotional affect is still melancholic and sour.
Menace spun up an image of ChrisXChris’s wrecked car in a newsreel.
—Viewer count has decreased by ten percent.
He scrolled down; ‘Having acquired sudden fame, Yeanti Chahaagu (online as ChrisXChris) had expressed dissatisfaction as recently as two days prior to his accident with the way ‘vstreamers’ — entertainers who present an animated self to their audience — were being treated by Dishtrib. The company left their condolences on Chahaagu’s various socials, saying the Nigerian had ‘been a pioneer. His personality was second to none’, that he would be missed, and Chahaagu’s family had no comment.’
—He put the car into manual, didn’t he? said Menace.
—Viewership is down ten percent.
—I don’t care.
—You requested an alert at ten percent intervals.
—Cancel alert.
—Alert cancelled.
The avatar had pushed aside the curtain and was sucking down another cigarette, blowing the smoke over a fur-lined shoulder.
Menace bared his teeth and sucked down some soda, then looked up at her.
—Ready? she asked.
—Did he drive the car himself?
—My operating procedure does not allow me to share certain details across users, she said. She reached down and changed the animation herself, so she was gripping an enormous sword and running it along the false cement of the holo-stage, sparking.
—I could drive into the other lane, he said, nodding.
She was nodding too — their sensors had met.
—No, she said.
—What?
—The model of vehicle you own has limitations built into its automatic system that prevent recalibration or manual override. Driving into oncoming traffic or ‘the other lane’— your words — even without vehicles in it is impossible.
He began scrolling, searching ‘manual override’ + his vehicle’s make.
—ChrisXChris had the same vehicle.
—He did not. In fact you know this—
She played a clip from a past livestream when he’d defaced the avatar and simply sat there in his capture suit, Menace in the raw, talking to his audience: ‘ChrisX bought his Wingdoc second-hand from a grapeseed dealer in West Hollywood. I’m not going cheap-o bang-o like that. Straight to the dealer, baby. A 2039 or I’m a busted nut’.
The video cut.
She sheathed the blade on her back.
—Mine’s three years newer, he said.
She nodded.
—In that time, the modifications were put in place.
She began to play a clip of the Toyota representative speaking about the modifications but Menace dismissed the window.
—So you’re saying he drove into traffic himself.
—I’m saying you can’t, she said. And won’t.
—You can’t calculate that.
—Considering the data I can. The melancholy you affect matches 100% against the angst of all reported users. Your triggering activities and purposelessness have appeared in every data set as temporary affairs remedied with exposure to the entirely predictable changing of the human seasons. The only existing incidents of suicide in the last fifteen years involve terminally ill patients, and their actions were adjudicated by the Evaluator and cleared.
They both had their arms crossed and stared at each other across the holo-stage.
—Viewership has dropped fifty percent, she said.
—Clear all alerts, he said, reaching for another drink. He could see the comments behind her at a faded opacity, firing. She blew a kiss over her shoulder.
—So you’re saying ChrisXChris couldn’t have driven into traffic, Menace said, sliding on a sweatshirt.
She shook her head.
—Thirty years ago, perhaps, but not now.
—And me, thirty years ago?
She shook her head again.
—Why not?
—ChrisXChris had two girlfriends, both pregnant. You have none.
She smiled and mirrored his hood.
—You have me. Ready?