Meet Us by the Roaring Sea by Akil Kumarasamy

Author:Akil Kumarasamy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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With Sal and Judith, you attend a protest about data surveillance. They both wear orange, the color of the resistance. You have improvised with a pinkish-red T-shirt that almost looks like a sunset if you squint. It’s a midsize gathering outside the Medallion building, owned by the richest man in the country. His company is responsible for the implementation of CSM systems. From his view the protests must look like an orange pixel dot.

Everyone applies a shiny powder to their faces, and rubbing it into your skin, you think of Breanna’s son, scrambling machinery. Someone standing on a concrete block reads out loud a series of recent data leaks. From one you learn that the government is lending citizen biometric data to a research lab known for its work in cloning. And you imagine that the Cheeze lying on your couch is a body double sent to a stabilization zone to star in a moderately popular reality show, while the real Dustin Creed is living on a farm in Minnesota, stocked with chickens, goats, and pigs along with the one and only Cookie.

Without much effort, you overhear conversations: Who should decide what’s best for humanity? Do you think AI has a moral compass? Yes, it’s based on the collective data of our fucked-up world. If you had a choice between our world and another world, what would you pick? Are you a proponent of the many-world theory? I think I can fall in love with another version of myself in the multiverse. That guy in the red tie is like a bajillionaire. In my parents’ village, there’s a joke that there’s no water to drink or to wash a butthole. Funny, right? Do you really think carbon score monitoring is going to slow down the melting of the glaciers? If the polar bears are screwed that means we’re screwed. Look it up, some scientist said if fiction obeys physics, then it’s fact. I’m telling you his remaining family was wrapped, packaged, and shipped off to some distribution plant in Idaho. Soon they’ll use our unique brain waves to identify us. Forget facial recognition and eye scans! Everything in our techy, carbon score collecting houses, even our brains, releases electromagnetic radiation, so is it so far-fetched to think that someone might shoot us with a wave that doesn’t kill us but makes us do it ourselves?

For lunch Sal and Judith take a break in the park across the street. When you wave to them, they flick their wrists, and you’re unsure if it’s an invitation or a dismissal. They don’t make further eye contact. Alone, you eat a handful of free almonds until you find yourself absorbed into a group. There’s Claire, a seventy-five-year-old veteran, with three spoiled grandkids attending pretech schools. Wenjun, twenty-two, a newly graduated coder who wants to do something else; and then Dominique, thirty-two and newly divorced; and Tina, fifty, married with three kids.

When you tell them you work at MLC, Wenjun gasps and stares at you keenly with enough curiosity and fear to make you feel like a specimen.

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