Today I’m sitting in a studio watching my second ad (well, partly mine) getting filmed. Right now, we’re watching a woman, - Claire, only she’s really Loren - using our brand new app - only it’s a green screen, only it’s really a picture of a green screen on a phone. What’s real? Hmm.
Developers.
The blade of grass bent under the weight of the two squabbling insects. It was strong grass, sun-hardened, but these two had nudged and scuffled each other to the very tip, and they still rubbed their legs and barked barbs at each other.
“It’s very simple,” said the larger. “You stay on your side of the field, and I’ll stay onmine! ”
The blade of grass sagged further in support of this notion, and the larger pressed the attack.
“If you don’t, I’ll-”
“You'll what, you spineless loser?”
As it had done so many times before and after, on so many scales and in so many forms, a red button materialised in front of the larger grasshopper. It rubbed its legs together, sending a menacing sound round the field, the tickticktick of a bomb near its detonation.
The smaller grasshopper shook its head sarcastically. “So desperately dramatic. You’d never really turn it off.”
The larger one, the male one, had indeed never turned it off, but he felt sure that this time, some condition had been broken. The breeze shifted the grass around them, and he decided it had to be last breeze they felt.
The fact was now undeniable. He and she - for they’d discovered the terms in an amusing Urth book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and then spent many fruitful eons as Mars and Venus, perverting their orbits until they collided, killing the nascent bacterial life that continually struggled on the two planets - were bored. Bored of sharing a furtive glance across a crowded party in order to tenderly fall in love again, of her playing the black hole and him playing the dispersed cloud of matter that found wholeness inside her maw, and the reverse; of forming covalent and noncovalent molecular bonds in order to make pathetic puns about “having chemistry” in the afterglow, of leading two warring intergalctic emprires that only found peace through their stolen tryst; bored, simply, of fucking. Bored of rutting and sweating together across time, space, and metaphor, as dogs, proteins, stars, octopi, jelaphi, machines, phenozoa, soundwaves, apes.
They’d both experienced that same turning point, holding hands in the light of a supernova that they’d loaded. Not created - even that no longer held pleasure - just called up from the database. She’d looked at him, looked at the light, looked back to him, said:
“Bit pointless, this, isn’t it?”
He’d thought about the four trillion simulated beings in the path of the star, screaming, clutching each other with claws and fronds and tentacles, then having their ones changed to zeroes, and said:
“Hmm.”
For there was a second undeniable truth; they’d run out of things to say.
What bothered him most about the stolid silence of their conversation was that he couldn’t be sure if they’d said everything they could think of, or if the computer had some unknown limitation, like a short-term memory that’d they filled with platitudes and tedious questions and, finally, barbs. Even this scene had been played out so many times in different skins that he couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t slot neatly into this doomsday scenario subroutine, and so he stroked the button and tried his favourite thought experiment.
“You’re doing it again,” she said. “You’re trying to remember your body.”
“No,” he said, and wished he were some kind of grasshopper-eating predator, though that too would doubtless be some equally contemptible beast. Not like the forms they’d originally plugged into this great system. They’d been… they’d been…
He struggled.
“Nobody in this whole world but us, for an uncountable age,” she said, “and you still think that you’re an impenetrable mystery to me. Like anything you do is so unique.”
“Oh, go on then,” he said, and moved his leg from the button, still waiting to be pushed. “What do you remember?”
“Well, you were fat for a start.”
He laughed, or some equivalent, for they both knew that fat was a quaint relativism where they came from. They talked through the binary day-night cycles and gradually assembled a memory. They remembered being the last alive in a universe, with abundant raw materials but scarce little time and the two of them, whatever form they had originally been, piecing together another universe with volcanoes and magnetic fields and singularities as the hardware, and the collected knowledge of the all intelligence as the software, a perfect matryoshka universe that would last for ever, eternally stretching out the last gasp of its parent. He remembered them hauling an asteroid into a certain orbit to start the system, on the eve of the end of everything, and she remembered telling him that the software was missing one last thing.
“Us.”
“Us, yes.”
And then they both knew they were the x and y of this particular graph, that if they could ever truly get outside the graph there would no longer be anything there, that what they’d built was now all there was and all there is: each other, two fucking grasshoppers, scratching each others legs, the tictictic of animal friction falling on nobody’s ears but those of a simulated man in a garden whose eyes now rest upon some wiggling line with no correlation to truth and whose mouth says you, you shall be called a serpent.
