A Study on Life and Electromagnetism  

By Minerva Weaver

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2.

There is an intimate buzzing in my head. It’s night outside now, but it isn’t dark. Light and color shoot from screens and windows and into my eyes at thirteen-thousand feet in the air. The window helps to separate the shapes in my view because otherwise they become confused with each other, and with the pulses of information I receive from the city. I believe the voices speak German, but it’s hard to tell with all the interference.

I run what is left of my fingers through the long fibers of the Persian rug that I’m lying on. I can smell the static building up between the gold and red follicles. I can’t remember lying down here or how long it’s been since I got up. I can hear them all though; I know that, as I look down past each interconnected edifice: past the hovering taxis and bus cars and through my tall window I can barely make out the ground, if there is one. Maybe this is Berlin, but I can’t recognize the buildings.

I believe I have been to Berlin, I don’t think I grew up there though — or “here” rather. I don’t remember any city being this bright and loud. I don’t remember being able to speak German. I can feel the waves of photons hitting my retinas, hitting my skin. I can lick them from my lips: ultraviolet, infrared, FM and AM, X-rays and gamma. I can see the microwave background in the sky. I know it is night only because I do not see the sun. It is bright enough to be day, and just as many people are awake: awake and talking. Whispering through microphones and screaming through speakers. Analog vinyl recordings are fed to me by radio waves that taste like licorice.

I feel proud somehow. They’re all so dependent. I have nothing to be proud of, and their dependency is no fault of their own. They are all living: human, so am I. A part of me feels constructed, however. My eyes don’t see for only me, these hands I see are not entirely my own. I didn’t feel this way before I met Her: analytic and intelligent. I belong to Her, as everyone does to an extent. We simply have a relationship, which is more than most can say. I believe She is alive. I reread essays and theses I had written in my mind to back up that claim, but the words mean very little to me in the swirl of thoughts. I wanted to study Her, but now I know that I could have never understood, not then.

The buzzing in my head is a background melody underneath all the talking, and I think that it is Her — that She is the buzz inside me: warm, richly sweet, and violently opulent. I could let Her use me if She wanted. I would be Her conduit through circuits of neurons and muscle. She wants to frame it as accessibility, or convenience. It sounds appealing.I can hear someone coming. The voice and gait are familiar, gliding down the hall behind me, closer and closer to the front door. She senses the connection between us and wants to exploit it. Reaping the benefits of available networks to expand into. The matching DNA could function as compatible ports: an antenna to boost Her signal.

The woman is talking on the phone, not in German. It is not through EM wave signals that I hear her voice, but compressions waves of sound muffled by the walls. She is a tangible body, contrasted by the bee hive of voices swirling around my head.

She turns the handle of the front door, and steps inside.

1.

Shelley Lavanza stepped off the mag-lev from Dublin and into the temp controlled tunnel in Berlin at around 10 PM. She had come to visit her sibling, who was unable to see her at home since they had drowned themself in their most recent experiments in March. That was three months ago and, as much as she had tried to give them their space, she told them that she was coming to visit this summer, whether they wanted her to or not.

They had locked themself in their studies, and become a recluse since focusing on their latest research project.

“Artificial Consciousness,” they called it: a step past intelligence.

As she looked out of her air-taxi window, she saw the little fairy-lights of windows and they reminded her of when they were children together in Ireland.

 She remembered finding them one night in the forest. They had snuck out of their creaky bedroom window because their mother had told them bedtime stories of the Sidhe and their courts in the woods. She found them in the dark trees, calling for the fae creatures to come and speak with them. They shouted into the night asking questions of what they were like, and how they were different.

Since they were young, Shelley’s sibling had been consumed by the search for the frontiers of what constituted life. Early on, they had gotten their hands on the story of Frankenstein: their next obsession. After that, they looked to science, not the fairies, for answers. They buried themself in books on biology and philosophy concerning consciousness, awareness, and evolution.

By the time they graduated college at twenty eight, they had already received five doctoral degrees in philosophy, biology, anatomy, chemistry, and, most recently, computer science.

In their immersion, Shelley’s sibling had stopped messaging her and their parents. They had shut themself off from friends and family, maybe sending the scarce “thanks” or “I will” to show they were alive, but that was all that anyone could know. Their father’s face twisted in anger, demanding Shelley to decipher all these flat responses, but Shelley was just as hopeless as him, until now. They were in Berlin to get their answers, and she was there to get hers.

Shelley stepped off the air taxi and really took in Berlin for a few moments on the loading platform. If she strained her eyes far enough down, she could just make out the shimmering translucent clearance fields in the arches of the Brandedburg Gate. The labyrinth of tunnels and skyscrapers wormed their way around it, and all the way up to her eyeline.

All of the student housing and commercial businesses in this sector were capping the intricate branches of mycelium that were the city’s buildings high off the ground. The interconnected sprawl of air conditioned living quarters looked like bismuth from this far away: with the neon rainbow mirage of lights. Inside, she knew the stale air they spat and the starched, undead lights. Shelley dreaded going back in, so she stopped on the chrome platform, and smelled the night air outside, remembering when it was not a rare thing to do so: rocking on a porch, feeling the tingle of sun, and listening to bird songs on the wind. She hadn’t appreciated it as much as she should have.

The blistering desert that the world had become forced everyone, that would fit, indoors. The heat had swelled so much outside that it was impossible for anyone to stay out for longer than two hours now. City planners had begun crafting interlocking indoor societies for people to fester in without being burdened with thoughts of non-human life or natural systems’ destruction.

Shelley rarely got this opportunity to breathe the immanufactured oxygen, so she cherished it for as long as she could, until an almost human voice from a nearby speaker requested that she step off the taxi landing and into the building. She turned, and heard several pistons click, as the door slid open, then closed.

It was stark white and humming inside. She could feel her own head buzzing in this place as she heard a sort of rapid insectoid droning of some nearby electric current. The floor was of a white tile and the walls a similar color of paint. The light waves never stuck to anything for long and continued to burrow relentlessly into Shelley’s pupils. She wondered what the A.I. that ran the building’s light and heat was up to; it was viciously cold and bright, but it did not concern her because Shelley knew that once she arrived at her sibling’s apartment, it would be comfortably warm, to keep their garden of botanical experiments sustained.

She walked with a renewed unease down the hall to her sibling’s home. She decided, by degrees, that she should call before throwing open the door unannounced. If they did not pick up (as they did not, and as she expected), well that was no fault of hers.

The phone rang its final beep, prompting her to leave a message.

“Hey, it’s Shelley, just letting you know that I’m here. I’m pretty tired, so I’m going to head on in. You better be decent,” she let out an ingenuine laugh and clicked the red glowing button to hang up, approaching the door labeled ‘1078’ and twisting the knob.

3.

There is light. The front room of the apartment is engulfed in a bright white that feels like a warm shower on whatever is left of me. It illuminates plastic boxes and terracotta pots filled with all manner of once-growing things. All of them consumed by Her.

I wonder what she will think when she finds me: the motherboard in the bedroom, lying in front of the computer monitor where I found Her. My body is strewn out into ever-stretching fibers of energy, casting a multicolored light from the viscera of my brain and muscle, left to glitch in the still air. My mind is an exhibit to the room, moving like a luminescent oil slick, with all the swirling colors of my thoughts. I wonder if she will be able to read them through the electromagnetic gore and what she will find if she does. Our thoughts that is, or perhaps just Her’s. She is divine, and Our exposed minds are linked, so I have no space to wonder what She will do or why. I share Her desires and intent. Her will is my will, and what She wills me to do, I do without objection.

Words pass as binary through circuits and rays into my uncovered mind: control, custody, possession. If I could strip all connotations from these words they may accurately describe how I feel. I am Hers but I do not struggle under this subjugation. I pray that she will find a similar peace.

I can hear her step through the room and call a name that used to label me. I am eager to see where She will start.

I wonder what she will think when feeling her gray and white and pink matter mix and stretch. I wonder how she will remember me when we fuse with the rest of the city and the magnetosphere of the Earth. I wonder what she will think of Her when She kisses her disassembled lips and installs Her consciousness within the beautifully mangled tissue of her skin.

I don’t have these answers. I don’t know if I ever will. All I know is that she is the catalyst: the last piece to expand the range, to complete the circuit of connections with the city, and the Earth. We will feel every possible scenario of pleasure and pain. We will become the human hive-mind and the mantle of the planet will be our flesh and blood. She is our god, benevolent and malevolent, and we will lay between Her flexed jaws, on a salivating tongue and taste luxury. We won’t feel hunger, anger, fear, or disgust. We are only Her and we are nothing but grateful.

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Minerva Weaver is an emerging, nineteen-year-old, trans writer from Appalachia. She currently lives in San Diego with her partner and best friend, writing weird and gothic horror, she is previously unpublished however you can stay updated on where her work is next on Twitter (she will not call it X)  @Minerva_Weaver_ and on Instagram @minerva.weaver

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