Tag: writing

Life update (07/28/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve settled into a routine that fits me: wake up at six in the morning (even in the weekends, I wake up around seven), prepare for work, put on my earplugs, take the E29 bus that carries me to Donostia, read some manga on the way, walk through the hospital complex while avoiding looking at people’s faces, sit at my desk, put on my headphones, do my programming of the day, take the E29 that carries me back to Irún, do some more programming, go to bed. From time to time I lift weights, and on the weekends, when I have the energy, I walk to the nearby woods and play the guitar for a couple of hours.

Perhaps this is what being middle-aged is, after all: you realize your shortcomings and what you weren’t meant to do. I’ve thought back on my life and the relationships I’ve had. All of them were a mistake. I’ve hurt so many people without meaning to just because of how broken I am. I keep getting reminded, by my own brain, of this girl I knew when I was in middle school. She was likely autistic as well. Awkward as hell. Very lanky, generally plain looking. She used to write me elaborate letters. I doubt I ever read any of them. I don’t have them anymore. About a year or so after she last spoke to me, some stoner dickhead slung one of those big choppers of arts-and-crafts, and bisected the girl’s forehead, leaving a massive scar. I haven’t seen her since I was sixteen. I wish I knew if she killed herself, but I don’t remember her name. People only become somewhat real to me when they turn into myths in my mind. She’s now a girl I could have helped but failed to do so because I never had the means to. Stay away from people. There’s only hurt to come, both ways.

Due to my peculiar brain configuration, my memory is abysmal: I barely remember anything. I have stronger memories of the stories I’ve written than of stuff that has actually happened to me. And what I remember is almost invariably negative. Due to my daily intrusive thoughts, I’m usually reminded of, when not directly bombarded by, stuff I wouldn’t want to remember. Not worth the effort, the pain, the bother. It’s really simple: I wasn’t born equipped to live like a regular human being. Ultimately you just end up becoming yourself and discarding the useless alternatives you tried.

I recognize beauty, though, and I’m attracted to some of the young women I see on a regular basis. I don’t know if I wish I weren’t. On the bus, at the hospital. Nurses most likely. Most of my daydreams end up involving sex in one way or another. But in these daydreams I’m not myself. Perhaps my biggest regret is that I can’t redo it with fair odds. I would have settled for a body I wouldn’t have to be ashamed of. I think I have more things to say about that whole business, but I can’t figure out what that would be at the moment.

Soon enough it’ll be September 14th, when my current contract as a programmer will end, and I’ll have to either return to work as a technician, which terrifies me (the stress of that job landed me three times in the ER, two with arrhythmias and the other with a supposed hemiplegic migraine that I suspect was worse than that), or find myself a job as a programmer at forty years old, when programmers are on their way out due to AI (not complaining, I use it all the time).

It’s all a big whatever. I just want to be left alone. That’s what I think about most of the stuff I have to deal with on a regular basis: just let me sit in peace. Just let me program in peace. Just let me play the guitar in peace. I think my biggest aspiration in life has been to sit alone in a room without being bothered. I don’t think I ever truly believed I could aspire to anything more. I’m trying to get as much of that as possible.

Speaking of manga, the hentai-with-a-plot Parallel Paradise was surprisingly great. It’s about a high-schooler who ends up isekai-d into a world where he’s the only male, and every girl (they all die at twenty) gushes out food-scented slime from their nether regions after the littlest touch of his male fingers. One of the girls is a martial artist whose martial art consists on throwing grenades. Great sense of humor, compelling plot, and surprisingly touching at times. I’ve reread One Punch Man and found it more interesting the second time around. I’ve just barely started Atelier of Witch Hat, which I didn’t want to get into because it seemed girly and I don’t like Harry-Potter-like stuff, but it’s good.

I think I need more grenade-throwing in my life.

Life update (07/13/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’m in a transitional period: my current job as a programmer will end in September, and for legal reasons they can’t extend it (even though my boss would if he could). That means that the very day after, I could get called to work as an IT technician at the hospital, a job that has put me in the ER three times due to stress. I worked about seven years at it. It was a “frog sitting in heating water” situation; it took me working as a programmer to realize that I can’t continue working as a technician anymore. These days I don’t even greet the people at the office. I keep my head down, do my job, talk to my boss when I’m required, then go home. And it’s sustainable. I don’t want to search for another job, of course, but I will need to get another job before I’m recalled as a technician.

In my spare time, I keep programming my Living Narrative Engine app. I envision a future in which you could run Claude 4 Sonnet-level AI in consumer hardware, perhaps a dedicated mini-PC, and this app of mine would allow me to play through campaign-level stories with LLMs as the other characters. If I program it to that extent, it would be able to do so right now, but I’d have to pay for the LLM usage. It’s also great for erotica, which happens to turn me on more than any other stimulus.

I don’t really feel like writing anything. I’m extremely lethargic at the moment, and I only chose to write these words because I’m waiting for Claude Code to finish implementing something. Reaching my forties has hit me hard. I’m aware all the time of the monster inside me. There’s really no point in trying to relate to others. I keep to myself, hoping that nobody looks my way to annoy me. Can’t stop some strangers from doing so, though; this Friday, as I was waiting for the bus at seven in the morning, some woman in her perhaps late twenties berated me for cutting in line, even though I was there when she arrived, and I had been waiting for fifteen minutes. She seemed to believe I had gotten off a bus only to cut in line to enter the other arriving bus. I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, particularly due to the tone she was using, but ultimately it wasn’t worth it. Yet another instance of that fact that virtually every human interaction is detrimental to my life.

Anyway, I’ve been feeling like the following video for a while. Let’s see where the road takes us (apparently in circles).

Life update (05/26/2025)

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I’m back at work after two weeks of vacation that, as these things usually do, passed by way too fast. Most of my first week was spent in Barcelona, a trip originally intended for research but that caught me not caring much about writing. I’m glad I went, and I got some interesting experiences out of it, but when I returned home, I realized I didn’t really care to write about it. Right now, at about eight in the morning on a Monday, sitting at my office desk, I may as well point out a few things. First of all, Barcelona is a multiculti hellhole. I already expected it to be, but walking through Las Ramblas (don’t do that) exposed the multiculti dream, that as far as concerned has been thoroughly exposed: no “melting pot” (not that it was ever a good thing to begin with), but a fuckton of ethnicities competing for spaces, resources, and eventually, who rules. In a territory that was solely meant to be for the Catalan people, now increasingly less every passing day. Same thing is obviously happening throughout Europe, but it shocked me to witness it on such a grand scale in a huge city. I don’t know why anyone would want to live in such a city, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, they’re designed to drive you crazy.

Catalonia has a bad reputation for making most of its identity be about its regional language, which made me wary of going there, and while most things are indeed solely in Catalan, I had no trouble interacting with people in Spanish. That’s partly because plenty of the vendors I interacted with were foreigners, some of whom could barely care about Spanish, let alone the regional language. But anyway, walking down along Las Ramblas while Pakistani/Indian-type men (all of them were) constantly pestered passersby to eat at restaurants (that seemingly served regular food, but I have to assume they are Pakistani/Indian owned) was a chilling reminder that people from backwards places bring their backwards shit wherever they go.

Anyway, I visited churches, museums, the zoo, the top of the Tibidabo mountain… and instead of missing those sights, I found myself missing the attractive females I came across and whom I’ll never see again. The sporty, fresh-faced college-age woman who took the same elevator as me in the building where I briefly lived. The cute teenager wearing a cap and jeans who kept glancing my way with curiosity, for whatever reason, in the vivarium of the zoo, as well as at the mongoose enclosure. The woman who ran around the neighborhood wearing very tight, very short multicolored shorts. All those amazingly gorgeous tourists, isolated islands of blonde hair and blue eyes in an increasingly non-ethnic-European hole. Plenty of tourists who weren’t blonde and blue-eyed were also very attractive. Ultimately, attractive females are the most valuable “thing” in the world, and plenty of what any man (and some women) consumes on a regular basis, other than food, are substitutes for not having access to such a female.

The rest of my vacation was spent playing the guitar and programming. During this time, I was reminded of the fact that I don’t care about human beings or society in general. When I went out, I hurried to the mostly deserted wooded areas, while avoiding looking at anyone’s face. As I played the guitar, whenever any person approached, I got increasingly tense, which lessened as they left. It’s always been like this, but now, as a forty-year-old man going through some sort of middle-age crisis, it has become blatantly obvious that not only it’s going to be like that for the rest of my life, but that I’ll become increasingly crotchety about it as I grow older.

As the train carried me through the mostly deserted interior of Eastern Spain (about 70% of the country is unoccupied, mainly the interior plains, with the exception of the Zaragoza and Madrid areas), made me yearn to live in a quiet town somewhere in that isolation. I’m sick of having to share my spaces with so many people, even in a city like mine that isn’t remotely as fucked as Barcelona.

Don’t know what else to say. I hope I manage to return to writing my novel soon, but I’m not feeling it. I have been working hard at my programming project, mainly because it was a very compelling challenge, and just a couple of days ago, I managed to involve large language models in it, having them act as characters in a turn-based simulation. There’s a ton I can build upon that, but as the hardest part (by far) is already solved, I assume my interest is going to descend from there.

I’m tense about how I’m going to adapt to the office after this illuminating vacation. Working here as a programmer has illustrated that I absolutely do not, under any circumstance, want to return to working as a technician. I hate every aspect of it, and it’s completely ill-suited to my nature. But dropping that would likely mean having to find a completely different line of work at forty. But it’s not like I have any future here without knowing Basque; after the changes they made to the ranking system, I have been pushed down many places because of my lack of knowledge of that stupid language, so soon enough I would have found myself not being called for work anyway. Down the line of working as a technician, new visits to the ER await (three so far: two for arrhythmia and one for a hemiplegic migraine), and any of those visits may end up leaving me with permanent consequences. I suspect that at least one of them did.

Anyway, I guess that’s all for now.

Life update (05/11/2025)

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Two days from now I’ll be in Barcelona, on a days-long trip for which I’m not in the mood. It’s supposed to involve research for a writing project I’m supposedly working on, although I haven’t written anything in a month. Barcelona is a beautiful city. Unfortunately, it’s also a crime-ridden shithole. I expect to feel anxious from the moment I step outside of the rented apartment.

I haven’t been in the mood for much recently. I may actually be having a mid-life crisis, although I’m past the midpoint of my life; now forty, and very unlikely to live to eighty. I keep fantasizing about dropping everything and moving away to some cheap town, to a one-bedroom place near nature, where I could live in peace while working part-time at the most. If that ever happens, I’ll likely be in my late fifties, or sixties. Mainly, I want to get away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, due to my brain configuration, my intrusive thoughts keep reminding me of every terrible little thing that has ever happened to me. I can’t flee from that.

A song came to mind: Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game.” Jackson was a well-respected songwriter in the sixties and seventies. When he was twelve or thirteen, during music class in middle school, the school’s boiler exploded just under them. Jackson survived with half of his body burned. His girlfriend, Marlene, burned to death. In spirit, Jackson died that day, although it took his body decades to catch up. He wrote one song directly about his dead twelve-year-old girlfriend (“Marlene”), although obviously most of his songs are tinted by what happened. In the seventies, Jackson lived in England, and dated a then-famous musician named Sandy Denny. Shortly after they broke up and Jackson returned to the States, Sandy fell down the stairs of her home and died.

Jackson went crazy, likely out of PTSD and depression. He couldn’t find in himself to produce a new album, and he couldn’t get the first album reissued, as Paul Simon, who held the rights, wouldn’t do so. Jackson ended up homeless in NY. A fan sought him out and offered to house the songwriter and help him revitalize his career. As Jackson was waiting on a bench, some hoodlum shot out one of his eyes with a BB. Jackson died maybe one or two years later from a disease.

Here’s to you. Creating art can’t save anyone, but at least it captures what needs to survive.

Life update (05/05/2025)

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These days, my beloved guitar satisfies my emotional needs. I head to nearby wooded areas to play. This Saturday, I had walked to one of my favorite spots: in front of a huge tree, on a relatively unknown trail. As I was playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” suddenly I heard someone hollering. I tensed up, but didn’t look up until someone threw his voice at me, interrupting someone who unequivocally was playing an instrument. I raised my gaze to the grotesque sight of a topless gypsy holding a dining room chair over his head. Of course this fucking mongoloid had to talk to me as I was playing the guitar. He asked if I played rumbas. I told him I didn’t know what that was. He then said that it was flamenco. I told him no. Shortly after, he hollered back to someone to following him, then continued on his way, likely to drink and leave the bottles and other litter there. A couple of other people, presumably gypsies although I couldn’t tell, followed in silence. One of them was a young woman. I got the feeling they felt a bit embarrassed. I finished Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher” to the best of my abilities, and then packed up my things and left.

People don’t learn from history; a well-known fact. If we did, we would have learned from the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire, and would have realized that some terrible mistakes should never be repeated: first, don’t convert to Christianity. Second, don’t share your civilization with barbarians. You may enjoy diversity on your plate, until someone shits on it, and then the whole plate is ruined. As for me, I’m not remotely a diversity enjoyer: I want everything in its right place.

Anyway, I suspect that such an encounter with one of the locusts of society would have dissuaded me for a while from playing outside, but the very next day, at about half past three in the afternoon, I picked up my guitar and headed to the deeper woods (in the opposite direction from the other woods). First I headed past the Roman foundries (a reminder that we used to be the city of Oiasso), but the place I picked to play, close to the river, obviously interfered sonically with my playing, so I picked up my things and ended up setting up shop on a raised area next to the foundries. I had only come across a pair of women on my way there, so I thought the afternoon would be quite tranquil. However, I found myself playing songs for older couples and families with children, who stopped to record the foundries, and also ventured deeper into the woods. These people were civilized, so the only interruption I got was three tweens clapping at me as they walked past. Guitar-playing impresses girls, I guess.

When I was in middle school, I remember an instance in which I had to read some essay in class, and I was so nervous, as usual, about speaking in public that my hand shook to the extent that you could hear the rustle of the paper I was holding. Now I casually play the guitar in front of strangers. I’m not entirely comfortable in front of people, of course; I never am even in the best of circumstances. But my concern is that someone may mess with me or even attack me. I don’t feel any genuine connection with human beings, so it’s quite similar to how I’d feel if a deer suddenly stopped to listen. I’d also worry that it may flip out and charge at me, offended at some aspect of my playing. Sadly we don’t have deers around.

Well. Five more days to go, and my vacation starts. I’m heading to Barcelona. Not really in the mood for it, but it’s writing-related, so I’ll have to endure through plenty of aspects of that city that no doubt will infuriate me.

Life update (05/02/2025)

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This morning I woke up rattled from a nightmare. I suppose most people’s nightmares involve being physically attacked or pursued, but in my case, my worst nightmares are about ceasing to understand. As far as I remember, most of last night’s dream was like that, but the part I remember the most involved a meeting with my boss and two other coworkers. I wasn’t able to follow their conversation, nor couldn’t understand my boss’ icy attitude toward me. Then he asked me something about a suitcase (that may have been an expression, but the details have slipped through my fingers). I sat there trying to comprehend what he was asking, while my coworkers and my boss looked at me with a mix of disappointment and irritation. I asked, “What does that mean?” My boss looked pissed at my stupidity or ineptitude. Then he asked me if I had done the “context packet,” or something similar. I said that I had no clue what he was talking about. He became irate toward me. When I tried to defend myself, without getting particularly agitated, I was accused of being unable to control myself.

As usual, a mere recounting of a dream doesn’t properly transmit the experience, that of sitting there in that dream office trying my best to understand what was being demanded of me, and yet failing to do so. That’s not far from my every day experience living in the world as an autistic man. In fact, most meetings serve as reminders that my brain doesn’t work like other people’s, as most of the exchanges feel like non-sequiturs to me. I’m usually waiting for the part when someone specifies what needs to be done.

It doesn’t help that I have experienced such moments of my brain failing to comprehend the world, mainly through my experience with migraines. I’m still not convinced that my last one wasn’t a mini-stroke. Back in April of last year, my then boss put me in charge of organizing the replacement of about nine hundred printers throughout the hospital complex where I work. It was a fucking nightmare. Near the end of it, during a day in which I was also hit in the balls by the careless Gen Z worker I had to deal with at the time (he told me a couple of times how eager he was to get back home and play some more Fortnite), I suffered a hemiplegic migraine: suddenly, I started having trouble understanding what I was looking at. Then I smelled something like burnt dust. The right half of my face, and then my right arm to my fingertips, went numb. I ended up in the ER. Three weeks or so later I had an MRI done, but they discarded brain damage. However, I’ve read online that some strokes don’t show up on an MRI. I’ve experienced trouble writing coherently: I sometimes skip letters or mix them up, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t happening beforehand. Maybe it’s just part of the general decay. In any case, one of my biggest fears is suffering a stroke that renders me incapable.

I turned forty about a week ago, and that made me think back to my experience with people over the decades. Growing as a human for me has meant becoming increasingly aware of how much my brain lacks when it comes to social processing. I see myself back as a child, hunched over and drawing because I couldn’t relate to anyone around me, and couldn’t even keep a conversation going for a minute without feeling lost. Of course, when I became a teenager, the problems grew tenfold. My intimate relationships always ended up hurting others as well as me. And I lack the sense of connection with human beings that is generally referred to as “empathy,” so it would be unfair for me to try to get close to others, which in the past I’ve done mostly for curiosity or for writing-related purposes. I do fantasize about intimacy, and I don’t mean just sex, but I guess I’ll have to wait for reincarnation, or incarnated AIs.

Not much else to say beyond these semi-random thoughts. I’ve been busy programming my platform for text-based immersive sims, which is a challenge I’m eager to tackle every day. Whenever I go outside, it’s almost exclusively to delve into a wooded area and play my beloved guitar. If you’re into playing string instruments, you know how much your calloused fingers yearn to return to those strings, to immerse yourself in the emotions captured in the songs, each a unique spell. Playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” for example, puts me in a trance that snatches me away from this lackluster world into a better place full of meaning.

The wooded area I head to most times is almost unknown, located by the side of an incline road heading into the hilly depths of the province; in the Basque Country, the moment you start heading uphill, it’s like going back in time, and you’re bound to come across very few people, if any at all. The last four or five times I went to play at my usual spot, I only saw one person, and he freaked out when he suddenly noticed a guy sitting there in silence with a guitar (I was about to start playing a song).

Anyway, only six days of work to go, and then I’ll enjoy two weeks of vacation. I hope that along the way, I manage to snatch my one-track mind back to writing; the longer I stay away from it, the more unhinged I feel.

Life update (04/29/2025)

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I’m now a forty-year-old man, which is one of the things that happen when you turn forty. When I was in my teens, I thought I wouldn’t make it past eighteen. When I hit rock bottom at about twenty-one and I intended to exit this life through the emergency door, I didn’t think I would see that afternoon. And now I have gray hairs in my beard. It hasn’t been a “glad I stuck around” kind of deal; I’m not too happy about being alive.

Anyway, my goal for my forties is to become even more emotionally and physically independent from human beings. My thirties, that included years of working, showed me that all non-necessary interactions with humans, including listening to their grating voices and sounds, as well as their inanity, can literally send me to the ER. I had two episodes of arrhythmia, and then an even scarier hemiplegic migraine, the three of them triggered by stress. Around that time I also experienced a torn retina, although I don’t know to what extent I can fault stress or the health issues I was experiencing at the time. The point is, any extra interaction with humans can ruin me in potentially permanent ways, so to the extent I can get away with, I won’t look people in the eye, and I will wear my noise-canceling headphones to drown out the world’s nonsense. I have to respect my brain’s peculiar needs instead of conceding to other people’s.

Next month I’m going on a trip to Barcelona. The funny thing is that the trip is related to a story I’m writing; I intended to do some research. But I haven’t been writing at all these past couple of weeks due to my sudden obsession with developing a program. I hope to return to it soon enough; I have been feeling my mind deteriorating, becoming increasingly unhinged, which always happens when writing doesn’t ground me. Also, I miss hanging out with Elena.

Speaking of hanging out with non-existing people: I still have daily daydreams about going on time-travel-related adventures with a certain Alicia Western. Most days I don’t even open the ebook reader or my tablet; I just close my eyes and run scenarios in my head. In one of the most recent daydreams, I introduced Alicia to the wonders of augmented reality through a headset made in the 2030s. The headset comes included with an advanced AI named Hypatia, that helps Alicia with her mathematical research.

I don’t know if I intended to say anything else. Barely anyone reads my posts anyway, so this is pure self-expression.

Neural Pulse, Pt. 11 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

In an electric flash and crackle, my muscles seized, and my vision flared white. As I crumpled backward like a dead weight, my left arm and the side of my head slammed into the control panel. My brain thrummed with electricity. It reeked of burning.

In the whiteness, the silhouette of a spacesuit materialized, looming over me. Several shadows clamped onto my arms with claws. One shadow dug its knees into my abdomen and crushed my face between its palms. I tried to scream, but only a ragged whimper escaped my throat. The tangle of shadows obscured my sight, swallowing me. A shadow snatched my hair and pulled; hundreds of points on my scalp prickled tight. Another shadow smothered my nose and mouth.

When I could feel my arms again, I lashed out at the shadows, thrashing as I braced myself against the control panel and the seat. I lunged for a silhouette—Mara’s spacesuit—but she sidestepped, and I plummeted onto the cockpit floor. A blow to the crown of my head plunged me into a murky confusion.

My wrists were bound behind my back—duct tape, I glimpsed, as Mara, crouched by my knees, finished wrapping my ankles. She straightened and hobbled backward. She stepped on the electroshock lance lying discarded on the floor and slipped, but the oxygen recycler clipped to the back of her suit arrested her fall as it struck the hatch.

Gauges of different shapes bulged on her belt like ammunition magazines. The suit’s chest inflated and deflated rhythmically. Mara unlatched her helmet and pulled it off, revealing her ashen face: mouth agape with baby-pink lips; livid, doubled bags under her eyes; strands of black hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. She leaned back against the hatch, gasping through her mouth, the corners glistening with saliva as she scrutinized me with intense, glazed eyes.

The cockpit reeked of sweat and burnt fuses. The shadows had congealed into a mass of human-shaped silhouettes, their hatred addling my brains, boiling me in a cauldron. Mara’s outline, as if traced with a thick black marker, pulsed and expanded.

No more anticipating how to defend myself, because I have you trapped. Thanks to you, the station doesn’t know we came down to the planet. With the tools of the xenobiologist you murdered, I will rip out your tongue, gouge out your eyes, bore into your face.

Mara crouched, setting her helmet on the floor. Exhaustion contorted her actress-like features, as if some illness burdened her with insomnia and pain.

“I thought I was marooned on this planet. I could have just called the station for rescue, but they’d fire me for nothing, and my pride would rather I suffocated than admit I needed help. Now I know—when we found the artifact, I should have tied you up then. Because you, being you, would just stick your nose right up to an alien machine that, for all you knew, could have detonated the outpost. And to understand what drove you to kill that xenobiologist, I imitated you. I stuck my nose up to that thing, and I saw my reflection. Now I know. Unfortunately, I know.” She regarded me like a comatose patient and waved a gloved palm. “Can you hear me? Did I scramble your brain?”

“I hear.”

My voice emerged as a rasp. I coughed. My mouth tasted of metal.

“And you understand?”

I nodded.

The black veil obscuring the cockpit stirred, rippling. Concentrated energy, like the air crackling before a storm. With Mara’s every gesture, the shadows shifted. Their bony claws crushed my thighs, cinching around my spine through suit, skin, and flesh.

A bead of sweat trickled down Mara’s forehead. She rubbed her face, swallowed. Her pupils constricted.

“Is that what you think? That I’ve convinced myself I’ve subdued you? That you’ll fool me until I let you go? That then you’ll finally strangle me? And even if the station calls it murder, no one will bother investigating, because most people who knew me would thank you for killing me.”

“I’m not thinking. When I try, my brain protests.”

Mara hunched down opposite me, reaching out to study the blow on my head, but halfway there her features pinched. She drew herself up, crossing her arms.

“I heard you telling me to come closer. Because you’ll break free, dig your nails into my corneas, and rip my jaw apart.”

My guts roiled; acid surged up my throat.

“You think I think things like that?”

“I feel this second consciousness… it betrays your thoughts as clearly as if you spoke them aloud. Maybe I’ll never understand how the artifact interfered with our minds, not just our language, but it’s a trick.”

I pushed my torso off the floor, sliding my back up the side of a seat inch by inch, trying not to provoke her, until my stomach settled. My head ached where she’d struck me. The throbbing in my skull clouded and inflamed my thoughts.

“You saw him. Jing. What I did.”

“I saw someone down there. I’d need dental records or DNA to be sure, but I trust elimination. I thought you’d claim it was an accident.”

“It was. I attacked the shadows. You feel them, don’t you?”

Mara took a deep breath.

“They’re pawing at me, trying to suffocate me. Products of my own besieged brain, I know, but I can hardly call them pleasant.”

“I wanted to keep it from affecting you. But at least now you understand.”

“Make no mistake. That xenobiologist is lying with his face beaten to a pulp in the second sublevel of an alien outpost because you are you.”

I pressed my lips together, erecting a wall against escaping words. I looked away from Mara’s eyes, concentrating on deepening my breaths. The muscles in my forearms were taut. Pain flared in my constricted wrists. This woman had fired an electroshock lance at me, beaten me, bound me, and now she was assaulting my character.

With her boot-tip, Mara nudged her helmet; it wobbled like a small boat.

“Although the jolts in my neurons, the shadows, and this other consciousness intruding in my mind unnerve me, the effect isn’t so different from how I’ve always felt around people. The two consciousnesses will learn to get along.”

“If you’re not exaggerating,” I said gravely, “I am truly sorry, Mara.”

She pushed damp strands of hair from her forehead and scrubbed it with the back of her glove, smudging it with dust. The corners of her lips sagged as if weights hung from them.

“Thanks for the sympathy.”

“Were you afraid I planned to do the same thing to you as I did to Jing?”

“Can you blame me for removing the opportunity?”

She limped heavily over to my seat and sat down sideways. As she leaned an elbow on the control panel, a shadow shoved my torso against the seat I leaned on; my lungs emptied. I shuddered, sinking into black water.

Mara had said we imagined the shadows, even if they affected us. I writhed onto my back, pushing with my heels until my head touched the cockpit hatch. My wrists throbbed, crushed tight. A shadow pressed down on my chest like someone sitting there, yet no physical presence had stopped me from moving. The artifact had hijacked my senses.

Mara regarded me from above, pale and cold like a queen enthroned.

“I wouldn’t have killed you,” I said. “You’re my friend.”

“Am I?”

Between the pulses of my headache, I tried to decipher her expression.

“To me, you are.”

“I like you. I tolerate you. But often, being around you feels like rolling in nettles, Kirochka.”

“Almost everything irritates you.”

“You’re incapable of seeing people as anything other than reflections of yourself. What you instinctively feel is right, you impose as right for everyone.” She shook her head, then leaned forward, her tone hardening as if she were tired of holding back. “You insist you have to drag me away from my interests, my studies, as if imitating your actions and hobbies would somehow make me impulsive and reckless too. Admit it or not, you think the rest of humanity are just primitive creatures evolving towards becoming you.” She jabbed a finger at her chest. “I need time to myself, Kirochka. Solitude. Reading. Designing one of my machines, or building it. You think people need to be prevented from thinking.”

Exhaustion was crushing me. I imagined another version of myself laughing, suggesting a drink or a movie, assuming Mara’s mood could be cured by a few laps in the pool. But my vision blurred. I blinked, swallowed to make my vocal cords obey.

“We’ve had good times.”

“The best were when I was enduring idiots and tolerating awful music.”

“You showed them you’re smart. Got half the tracking team to stop calling you ‘black dwarf’.”

“Yes, because those morons’ gossip was costing me sleep. You think I need to prove anything to them? They can believe whatever they want.”

Shadows crouched nearby, focusing their hatred on me, clawing at my skin, crushing my flesh with bony grips. They tormented me like chronic pain, but while Mara and I talked, I kept the torture submerged.

“Things went well for you, for a while, with that man you met. I don’t take credit, but would you have met him dining alone?”

The woman, deflated, blinked her glazed eye, rubbing it as if removing grit.

“You’re right. I miss things by focusing on research instead of acting like a savage. But I assure you, Kirochka, we’re too different for me ever to consider you a friend. Sooner or later, we’d stop tolerating each other.”

“We can bridge the differences.”

“You talk to fill silences. You pressure people for attention. You live for interaction. I could never sustain a friendship with someone like that.”

“Do you use me to get things?”

“Everyone uses everyone, if only to feel better about themselves. I just refrain from feeding illusions.” She drew herself up, as if recalling an injustice, and rebuked me with her eyes. “Besides, I didn’t stop running because I was lazy. I barely eat, and nobody’s chasing me in my apartment. Running bores me to death.”

“I wanted the company.”

Mara shook her head. Her tired gaze roamed the cockpit, as if seeing through the walls.

“When you called a few hours ago, I thought you wanted to drag me out drinking with you and the other pilots. I considered pretending I’d fallen asleep with the sound nullifier on. I should have.”

I contorted like a snake, sliding my back up the hatch. I leaned the oxygen recycler back, resting my head against the cool metal. Judging by the ache, when I undressed, my arms would be covered in lurid bruises.

“I consider you a friend. You listen when I need it. My professional peers, the ones who think they’re my friends, even my boyfriend—they’d tell me to shut up for ruining the mood.”

“When have you ever listened to me?”

“I want to. But I have to pry the words out of you.”

“Maybe that should have told you something, Kirochka.”

“That you hate me.”

She sighed, the effort seeming immense, like lifting a great weight.

“I don’t like human beings. I would have chosen to be anything else.”

Flashes on the communications monitor distracted me. Though Mara was still speaking, her words faded to a murmur beneath my notice. The headache pulsed, reddening my vision. Why did the monitor alert snag my attention? I snapped fully alert. It meant an incoming call.

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Body Betrays Itself” by Pharmakon.

Neural Pulse, Pt. 10 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Paralyzed, I choked. I sucked in a lungful of hot air and collapsed to my knees before the xenobiologist. I pressed my hands against his suit’s chest. I pounded on him. No one would recognize Jing from what was left of his blood-drenched face. I stammered, repeating, “no, no, no,” while my fingers traced the helmet’s dents, the jagged shards of the broken visor jutting from the frame.

Pooling blood submerged the ruin of bone and flesh that was his face. When I tilted Jing’s body, the helmet spilled a tongue of blood onto the stone floor, slick with sliding globules of brain matter.

I staggered back, fists clenched, shuddering violently as if seized by frost.

Jing’s right hand was clamped around the handle of an automatic core drill. Perhaps the xenobiologist had approached to help me.

I shut my eyes, covered my visor with a palm. I pictured Jing standing beside me, an echo asking if I needed help. No, I hadn’t killed him. When I opened my eyes, the corpse lay sprawled on its side, the dented helmet cradling the ruin of his head.

Jing hadn’t known he was dealing with a live nuclear device. The flood of that feeling had swept over me. Had I seen the xenobiologist stop beside me? Had I decided to smash his face in with the crowbar?

I stumbled about, gasping for breath. My brain felt like it was on fire, seizing with electric spasms. Red webs pulsed at the edges of my vision, flaring brightly before fading. Before I knew it, I’d crossed the room that contained the construction robots, and was sprinting up the ramp. The oval beam of my flashlight jerked and warped, sliding over the protrusions and crevices of the rock face. My arms felt like spent rubber bands, especially the right, aching from fingertips to shoulder blades. Every balancing lurch, every push against the rock to keep climbing, intensified the ache.

I passed the first sublevel. My breath fogged the visor; I saw the flashlight beam dimly, as through a mist. My hair, pulled back at my nape, was soaked through, plastered to my skin.

I burst onto the surface, into the emptiness of the dome. I staggered, kicking through the sandy earth. I gasped for air and ran. I pictured myself training on a circuit—something that relaxed me at the academy after piloting, just as going to the gym with Mara relaxed me on the station—but now I was running from the consequences, from an earthquake tearing the earth apart like cloth. If I slowed, the fissure would overtake and swallow me.

I vaulted over the embankment to the left of the esplanade, where I’d hidden before, landing on my knees and one forearm. I scrambled backward, kicking up dirt, and pressed myself flat against the embankment’s exposed rock face.

The radio. I navigated the visor options until I muted my comm signal. When the notification confirmed I was off-frequency, I jammed my fists against my knees, my mouth stretched wide in a scream.

I drew a ragged breath. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead onto the visor; the material wicked them away, like water hitting hot pavement. Mara would have reached the cockpit by now, found me missing. Nothing could make Jing’s death look like an accident. How would my friend look at me? What would she think when she found out? She’d think… because I killed the xenobiologist… I might kill her too.

I buried my helmeted head in my forearms. I welcomed the dimness. How had I let this happen? I knew I should have destroyed the artifact—just as I knew I had to fight back when those shadows grabbed me, tried to rip me open with their claws. I’d struck the shadows with the crowbar before I’d even consciously decided to. On other expeditions, while waiting for scientists and soldiers to emerge from some dense alien jungle, I’d monitor their radio chatter, trusting my instincts to warn me if I should suggest aborting the mission. Just as piloting was like flowing in a dance of thrust and gravity, the way dancing came naturally to others, I imagined. Now my instincts screamed at me to flee, to run from this embankment away from the ship, to strike out across the planet, heedless of survival. My instinct had been supplanted by another. And I knew the difference.

I peeked around the side of the embankment. The scarred esplanade remained deserted. The crystalline dome watched the minutes pass like some ancient ruin.

If Mara found out the artifact made me kill Jing, maybe she’d understand the danger, agree to destroy it. I was counting on her reasoning, on that cold logic that had so often irritated me. But if I waited too long to face her, she’d suspect my motives.

As I straightened up and stepped, dizzy, onto the esplanade, an electric spike lanced through my neurons, blurring my vision. I stumbled around until it subsided. I stopped before the central crater, hunching over to examine its charcoal-gray cracks and ridges. Crushed bones.

I activated the radio. The visor display indicated it was locking onto Mara’s signal. She’d see mine pop up, too, unless she was distracted. In the center of my darkened visor, the arctic-blue star shone through the thin atmosphere like a quivering ball of fluff.

“Where are you, Mara?”

“Cockpit.”

The shadows intercepted the transmission, projecting their hatred at me. It distracted me from Mara’s tone—was there suspicion coloring her voice? I waited a few seconds. Would she demand an explanation? Why was she silent?

“Good,” I said. “Stay there. I need to talk to you.”

As I climbed the slope skirting the hill towards the ship, the reality of my decision hit me. I was about to lock myself in the cockpit’s confined space with Mara. Her shadows would envelop me, sink their claws into my skin, force themselves down my throat to suffocate me. I wanted desperately to rip off my helmet, wipe the sweat from my face. I needed a shower, a moment to think.

I located the ship’s tower. Several meters ahead lay three cargo containers and scattered tools. Inside the cargo hold, chunks of the robots and the materializer were heaped like scrap in a landfill.

I scrambled up the boarding ladder to the airlock hatch. Opened it, scrambled inside, sealed it shut. The chamber pressurized with a series of hisses and puffs. I unsealed my helmet. Holding it upside down, steam poured out as if from a pot of fresh soup. I gulped the ship’s cool, filtered air and opened the inner door to the cockpit.

“Mara.”

Empty. Indicators blinked. On the monitors, ship status displays and sector topographical maps cycled. Lines of text scrolled.

My seat held a roll of electrical tape. As I turned it over in my fingers, an electric jolt made me clench my teeth, squeeze my eyes shut. My neurons hummed.

The door to the airlock chamber clicked shut with a heavy mechanical thud. The thick metal muffled the hissing. Leaning back against my seat’s headrest, still clutching the tape, I froze. The air grew heavy. The cockpit lights seemed to dim, the edges of my perception closing in. A dozen shadows waited in the airlock chamber, their concentrated beams of hatred probing the metal door, seeking to burn me.

The door slid open.

I tensed, lips parting. What could I possibly say?

Mara emerged sideways through the gap, head bowed. As she stepped through, she shouldered the door shut behind her. The glowing diodes and bright screens of the control panel glinted on her helmet’s visor. She whipped around to face me. Her right arm shot out, leveling an electroshock lance. The two silver prongs at its tip lunged like viper fangs.

Author’s note: I originally wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.