PART THREE: OCCHIOLISM
Occhiolism - (noun) the awareness of the smallness of one's perspective
Cyprus Little was seventy - and still aging. He’d been in his forties when he had signed up to have his consciousness programmed into a robot. When they finished, his original body was cremated.
Cyprus was wearing the shell of a twenty-year old. Robotic bodies were customizable - able to make you look however you liked. Cyprus had been born short with scraggly red hair and freckles, but he sat across from Dillinger now, tall, tan, and dark-haired.
Dillinger wasn’t even sure if the thing across from him was still his childhood friend. At what point were you still considered a person? The robot was programmed to act just like Cyprus and to know everything he did, but was he still a person? Or merely a copy?
It may have been foolish, but Dillinger refused to fully broach the topic. Call it denial, or hopefulness. If the Cyprus in front of him wasn’t Cyprus, then nobody around him was anybody and he would truly be alone in a world of machine.
“Look Dill,” said Cyprus, interrupting his thoughts. “What I don’t get, is why you haven’t decided to be turned, yet.”
“It’s not worth it,” Dillinger muttered, sipping some tea from his cup.
“Immortality, Dill. It’s worth everything. Imagine how much you could learn if you lived forever!”
It was exactly something that Cyprus would say. Dillinger still wasn’t sure if it was because the robot knew everything in his friend’s mind or if it really was his friend.
He thought about the photograph that he had un-creased yet again and placed on his nightstand. “Cyprus, immortality makes life worth nothing. Our lives are only valued if we know there is an end.”
⁂
Curfew was always at 10:00 PM, when the acid rain was most prominent. The city shut down the lightscreen and slid a protective sheet over it to avoid corrosion, plunging the entire area into an eerie gloom. The bulbs on the artificial flowers or the branches of the artificial trees glowed a deep yellow to compensate for the lost light. Sometimes, when the acid rain didn’t come, Dillinger got to see simulations of the moon and the stars.
That night, however, Dillinger woke up with a dry mouth.
It wasn’t unusual. There were many nights when he had to get up and fetch a glass of water.
But it was the first night he saw shadows moving outside past curfew.
Dillinger pulled the curtain back and nearly dropped his glass in shock, but his fingers spasmed and he remained frozen in fear.
A long line of people - no, robots - wove between the buildings. From his apartment, he could clearly see that the front of the line was the Head Center.
“Jesus.” Dillinger turned, wanting to head to bed and avoid the nightmare in front of him. There was light coming from under his door that led to the hallway. There were shadows crossing it - footsteps. His wheelchair would be too loud - he grabbed his cane and hobbled to the door. He looked through the peephole and his hand squeezed the cane until his fingers turned white.
There were people in his apartment building silently trudging down the steps. His fish-eye view made them look monstrous and distorted, but their eyes were blank - wiped clean like slates.
The memory of the long lines of people waiting for the new IPhone 22 suddenly surfaced in his mind. How they were so eager to exchange an old piece of technology for a new one. How the data on their devices was sifted through, transferred, and stored.
Dillinger felt like someone had struck him in the face.
One of the cameras in his room flashed, the white light disappearing just as quickly as it appeared. He stumbled into his chair and fled to his room, where he didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. He just stared at the photograph in his hands, the one with the laughing eyes while he tried to forget the empty ones.