The Psychotron
Isaac Nakone
Ten.
Seconds to the jump.
Checking their rifles. Wait. Chopper blades woofing above. Below, the chasm of jungle. The beepbeepbeep-ing of controls. Scaredsoldier, parachute prepped… Two full-fingered hands at the ready.
Nine.
A mathematician masquerading as a conformist type walks past the bakery on Square St in the Melbourne CBD with a look of nominal arrogance. In his top pocket he holds a sketchpad containing succinct sketches of abstract algebra’s central notions and his own ground-breaking ideas. The academy fellows are waiting in the foyer, sanguine in temperament.
Eight.
Taciturn trigger. Inside the soldiers are freakin’ out but their faces are calm –
“Ready Omega?”
“Yeah, do. We’re dropping in...”
Seven.
Last look at the photo of his wife and daughter. Helmet girdled, ready omega.
“Yes. While you can,” troop next to him says.
Six.
The inside shudders. The way opens. Hear the… whispers of that deathly wind… The yawning. Some clenching inside. Splayed out over the bio-apocalypse.
Five.
His eyes sweep out an arc from a homeless woman hacking dribble on the other footpath, across the cars moving identically at the speed limit, and right over the strict clean edges of the store window. Every two metres he steps over a line between the pavements. He keeps good regular cadence in his walking and breathing. He wears a blue checked shirt. The Geometrical Man slouches, making a thirty-degree angle with the wall. His arm is kept at a ninety-degree bend as he taps the soot from his smoke. His fingernails are perfectly well manicured.
Four.
Jingo, mango, jungle…
Keep Flowing.
Three.
These S-ops were looking for an equation. For the mind? Maybe… Highly trained to work off almost no intel. Philosophers of the military. Government: undefined… The data’s everywhere. That’s all he can say. Just look…
Place and worldhood, closeness, immediacy, and time. Certainly.
Two.
Time, time, and time again –
One.
…Hell…
“Life can be a little Psychotronic sometimes...” A resurrected message in rising randomness…
The helicopter blades are screaming out. It’s going to need some trees to dampen this – and there are – bulk waves, negative k-states, a slice of quake, dirt, and earth.
His ears are sizzling. Our Geometrical Man hears the guitar twang from a city storefront and shudders. The store window is precisely as tall as him. It is as if he’d stopped there for that reason exactly. But the noise drives him away. He clicks his left hand every half a second, counting the movement of pedestrians in the city street. He sees his reflection on a mall window on the opposite side of the road, rectangular, no perspective, well kept. He turns his head right towards the sun beaming down the throughfare. The city is designed in a grid which runs North-South and East-West, parallel to the path of the sun across the sky.
He flicks his cigarette with precision through a parabolic trajectory into the circular bin standing next to him. A camera takes stroboscopic snapshots of him as he walks by. Each still frame captures the man in the striding position. This is carefully compared to a rendered model of the ideal stroll. Perfect match. When he gets on the bus, an empty seat appears after an old man in a suit dismounts perpendicularly through the sliding door. The Geometrical Man weighs up the prerogative to be assertive against the necessities of politeness, moving in after a one point five second wait. The bus slows down to a speed bump ten minutes from the Penelope Academy of Advanced Studies.
From a floor plan view of the bus, each passenger’s head is tilted in a fanning action looking outwards, beginning from the forward position all the way to ninety degrees turned. The man is at the geometrical average of the bus length, having rotated his head at the academy a comfortable forty-five degrees from the driver. He presses the red stop button using muscle memory, gazing at his destination fixedly.
“Textures and colours. Dreams recall places and locales from our life. Doors closed conceal other spaces which can only be accessed after some time. Textures and big concepts, hues, various grades of phenomena, analogies, outlines,” some contemporary collage-type monologue is playing from the bus speakers.
“Thinking about the phenomena, the will to communicate language: symbolism. (Gahaha!). What is the meaning of a sign? Quantitative. Thought content. Is my language a structure to overcome or can I operate within language? I must. But, to any avail?”
He looks over his life’s work condensed into that notepad. Was it an equation for the Fall? Of men? The drop? Plane? Helicopter? Why were these miscellaneous thoughts arriving in his mind?
The radio trundles on in raspy voices for the postmodern sensibility. “The sun… The faraway mountain lifting from its tectonic origins like a spirit rising from a deadness. Those people. Miscellaneous. Unimportant. They were standing around the damn book, as if – I love you – pecans, Priscilla. (Proven wrong! Was that the Geometrical Man’s own thoughts mixed in) Why do you want to create this… fluid…?”
“It’s like I’m painting, but it’s all impressions of expressions of impressions… Far removed, you know?”
“Why don’t you just… Shut up and calculate?” an American voice actor. “…You can at least add a beat, a motion, a purpose to all your suffering… all your sins.”
Now for the obligatory suicide prevention message. The Geometrical Man wears a dead-inside look.
“I’m not happy,” A quaint voice. “You’re not meant to be happy all the time… You see the sunshine on the trees in that distant memory…”
“A place where we can all coexist peacefully. Attend the aquarium sessions if you want fish as well…’ These last vestiges of retirement home advertisements in the wake of the new anti-aging technology for the rich. He found a note on the steel floor which couldn’t be described mathematically. Odd handwriting, curly but formal.
“I carried your love-letters into the night, and I hurled them into the rushing river…”