Work Text:
Martin Blackwood, assistant to Peter Lukas, Head of the Magnus Institute. Recording statement number 0061212. Statement of Cara Williams, given May 13th, 2013. Statement begins:
I was quite the tech enthusiast, you see. Well, maybe enthusiast is the wrong word, since I didn’t really have a choice on how much I had around, but I was certainly fascinated by all of it. I’m a digital artist, blogger, and software manager, and all three of those stay-at-home jobs required a hefty amount of electronics. I had a PC unit, microphones and speakers, two screens plus a keyboard, mouses and backup mouses, a hard drive, my WIFI router, a landline, and my phone, which was used quite often. Oh, and an old CD burner and large AM radio from my late father. He collected a lot of old tech, and one of my hobbies was restoring unused equipment, so I ended up having even more stuff around. I could’ve sold them, I suppose, but it also felt like part of my father was in those pieces. Do you get it? Like, if I got rid of any of them, I would be giving away the last memories of him.
It was safe to say I didn’t have the best setup. I ended up having to use three full power strips just to get each cable in evenly, but even then they still ended up tangled and a huge mess. I tried pretty much all of the organizers, like zip locks and those flimsy clips and boxes that break easily. Nothing worked, they all just popped out and would immediately wrap around each other like… magnets, or something. I eventually decided to just shove everything under my desk and hope I wouldn’t need to organize it one day.
It was a little creepy, nonetheless. I remember, once I was sitting at my desk and sat up too quickly, but the chair got caught on the carpet and was pulled out from under me. I fell, nearly hitting my head on the ground. Instead, I caught myself and ended up staring face-to-face with the… nest of wires. They were all shifting ever so slightly, almost like snakes curling around each other. It actually reminded me of those biblically accurate angels, like the ones from the Old Testament or something. And in the middle of the intricate web of cables, the absolute darkest, most tightly wound part, was staring right at me.
I began to feel this… sense of doom. Like, something terrible was going to happen, and I was just another observer. The wires- they were pulsing . Breathing.
I thought I was having a heart attack, and quickly stood up to go get some water. The feeling vanished as soon as I did, and I avoided the office for the rest of the day. I couldn’t stay away too long, though. As much as I hated it, I still needed it. I think it needed me, too. The nest of cables was living under my desk, and sometimes whenever I turned my computer on, I thought I could hear it… sigh … with relief or something.
I began to feel queasy, wherever I looked too closely at it. I kept imagining something terrible happening, but I couldn’t ever tell exactly what it was. Not that it was real, it couldn’t have been. This… feeling could have been nothing but paranoia, right?
I brushed it off and told myself I was hallucinating. Then it happened again, a couple days later. I was eating dinner, then headed to my office to grab a charger, and realized the mess of cords had somehow… grown. Originally, it had been around the size of a bike helmet and could fit snugly in a corner by my desk, but I swear , when I walked into that room, it had stretched across the entire carpet under the table.
I screamed, terrified. I thought they were reaching out towards me, so I shut the door and called one of my friends. I mean, who else could I have called? The police? A damn exterminator? Anyways, I tried explaining the situation as vaguely as I could, so she wouldn’t think I was crazy. I came up with a lie about my electricity failing, and even though I don't think she bought it, she still let me stay over at her house for the night.
I still tried to stay away from my office as much as possible, but it was hard without my work equipment. When I finally grew the courage to check inside, the wires had all gone back to normal. Typical. I tried to avoid getting too close to them, but they still… called to me.
I began to grow more frustrated with them, angry at the necessary mess I couldn’t clean. I found myself tripping more often, and sometimes accidentally pulling out a plug and having to set aside a whole hour just to find which one wasn’t working. You know, I started to really want to throw them all out. Unplug everything and toss it, my work be damned. Part of me worried though, because what if I did? What if taking it apart brought the inevitable?
It didn’t help trying to convince myself, in the end. I was still drawn towards it, finding myself wanting to learn more about whatever… disaster could be coming. Because maybe if I could understand it, I could stop it.
So one night after a stressful work day, I turned on all the lights and equipment, and stuck my hand into the maze, trying to find the end of a cord.
You know that feeling you get, like right before you… stub your toe or get cut? You don’t feel anything, just for a second, but you know pain is on its way. That’s what it felt like, when I dug my hand in. I knew I had made a huge mistake.
I tried yanking it out, terrified of what might happen. But my hand was stuck, tangled in the forest of cables, unable to tell which cord was connected to which plug, how deep my arm was, and where the power strip was. The wires began to… snake up my hand, up my shoulder, and to my neck. They slunk down, to my torso and legs, until I was completely frozen. They were climbing up the walls, blocking out the windows and covering the lights until I was covered in darkness.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been electrocuted. But you can trust me when I say there’s nothing else like it.
As the wires began breaking out of the rubber coating, the electricity was darting over my skin and into my body. Imagine getting shocked, like when you touch a piece of hot metal in the sun. Now place that feeling all over your body, sinking under your skin and flowing into your blood. I thought I was on fire, even as the cords wrapped tighter and tighter.
I was screaming, I think. A naked wire had begun to creep up my neck, and then seeped into my gaping mouth, leaking electricity.
You won’t understand what I saw. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of pure understanding, of omniscience. I could see everything , all the information that was ever placed online, all the private info people had so casually stored in their files. Anything that had once been on the internet was being fed to me through an information highway of sparks and wires and electricity.
You know, it’s funny how reckless we are when it comes to personal things. Almost 200 billion dollars in the economy is funded by people’s data scraped off of every site possible. Carrying a smartphone is similar to carrying a tracking device, just as putting your name into a random website is no different than handing it out to anyone for free.
Through all the facts, the numbers, the names, only one thing stood out. I could see where all the wires ended, where the electricity stopped and when the world goes dark. I saw the ending. The apocalypse. The great change. The Calamity .
They let me go a while later. It could’ve been hours, but it felt like days. I must’ve gone unconscious, because when I woke up, I was woozy. Disorientated, yet enlightened.
I still threw everything away, including my father’s collections. Whatever change is coming is too big for me to stop it. I’m in the process of moving houses, and finding a job that doesn’t require technology. My friends don’t believe me, but I can’t really blame them. Nobody wants to believe that the apocalypse is coming, because when it does, none of us are more special than anyone else.
Everyone’s death is singular. We die from different causes during separate times in diverse places. But our lives are no different than a bundle of cables or wires that feed energy to a laptop. So when the plugs are pulled out, when all of our bodies are shut down like someone flicked the ‘off’ switch on humanity, the laptop dies as well.
Only this time it’s permanent.