Conscious Designs by Nathanial White

Author:Nathanial White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781881163701
Publisher: Miami University Press
Published: 2022-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

She asked the Camaro’s computer to override the preprogrammed detour and take the faster route home, which passed her in front of the hideous glass monstrosity that used to be their marital home, hers and Eugene’s. The young couple she had sold the house to were sitting on the grass. Through the haze, she could see two small children, a boy and a girl, chasing each other around in a circle, neither gaining on the other. They were like two binary stars orbiting each other in perfect harmony. The car’s speed slowed for no reason, or maybe time itself was lagging, protracting uncontrollable envy and grief that the scene of innocence and happiness was arousing in her.

She arrived at her new home, a replica Victorian that she had purchased a few years after Eugene’s death . . . or his migration. Edwin was where he always was, sitting at his workbench in the garage, tooling with some engine parts, contributing to their collective attempt to rebuild the old gas-powered Ford Shelby 350, the car that had paralyzed Eugene eleven years ago. She had told Edwin that she bought the wreck from a collector, one of many untruths in what was beginning to seem like an entirely fictional life.

She and Edwin had met through their mutual interest in antique, human-driven automobiles, which had become illegal to drive just before she and Eugene had begun dating, having been deemed too dangerous to operate. Most had come to believe that humans were too prone to error to have that immense power. She thought about what Ashcroft had said earlier about death being eliminated from the ontology of Eugene’s world. Death, or at least premature death, was almost entirely obsolete in her world as well. It had become an unacceptable possibility. She remembered the arguments that she and Eugene had. She had claimed that it seemed life itself had become less meaningful without death.

For Edwin, the restoration of the Shelby was a diversion, something to fill the emptiness of his days. But for her it was something more subversive, an attempt to restore the threat of death to her world. She knew the restoration of this car could be seen as a blasphemy against her husband, but it was an exercise of penance, one that she knew was completely counterproductive to her ambition to eradicate Eugene from her memory and all the pain that went with him.

For Edwin, the machine was just an artifact, a hobbyhorse of some other forgotten time. It meant nothing. And as she regarded him working away, he seemed inert and predictable. Like he was just a flat character in her own little drama. A minor role.

“How was the lab?” Edwin asked, without looking up from the parts.

“As it always is,” she said.

“Dinner was already dropped off. I ate. Hope you don’t mind. Why so late?” This was the opportunity to let him into her past, into her reality. But no, he didn’t need to know about Eugene’s digital afterlife,

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