This Weightless World by Adam Soto

This Weightless World by Adam Soto

Author:Adam Soto [Soto, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House


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WHILE RAMONA HELD her meeting with leadership, Sevi took a bus to a nearby campus gym to swim. He crawled the pool in Google swim trunks for over an hour, entirely alone in the natatorium save for a group of teenagers playing an odd variation of the game Marco Polo in which they screamed the words Ibn Battuta in place of the Venetian’s name. Exercise, it was said, especially swimming, with its return-to-the-womb physics and sensuality, cleared the mind. But efforting his body through the water, Sevi did a tremendous amount of thinking. About Ramona. About the future. Of the future, he realized he would never be ready for it; it would undo him and destroy him. He was the creature in the fable who neglected to store food for the winter; not because he was lazy or careless, but because he’d never heard of, much less experienced, winter. All the while, people like Ramona were building the containers storing the nuts. They called it the cloud. He stubbed his toe on a word in his brain. Luddite. And for the first time he understood it was not only a frame of mind, but a class and a prison. He could have Ramona teach him some things, programming, coding. He, too, could essentialize his life and take charge of his own fate, he supposed. But how would he know when to stop? Hitler and Stalin claimed cutting the pudge of personal liberty from society made for faster, stronger, and more productive systems than fat-ass liberal democracy. What lean visions were the automated internet age conjuring?

He swam and swam. The cold, blue water a dizzying monotony. Air and the blaring natatorium lighting overhead, a white wash of breaking water, the concussed blue of the pool floor, the water breaking in a wash of white, the overhead lighting blaring through the air. The exercise was carnage against his lungs, he could feel them shredding apart, but the rest of his body was streamlined and perfectly repeated, algorithmic, and he felt the need to get away from something. When it wasn’t Ramona and her AI historian chasing him like Jaws, it was Eason dragging his cello across Humboldt Park in search of him, calling out his name and knocking on doors. He tried to remember what he’d said to Eason the last time he’d seen him. He hoped it wasn’t something stupid about Bach. He hoped it was something real, having to do with the living, but he was pretty sure he’d left him with Schopenhauer’s line about all other art speaking of the shadow, and music speaking of the essence. It was a good line, but what had it meant in that moment? If music was its own object in the universe, indistinguishable from raw will, it should do more than stand for something. If Schopenhauer was right, music should be able to stand in the way of things, ward off spirits and flag down cars and convince aliens the human race was worthy, but it hadn’t.



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