The Future (Four Puppets)

The first one came to him at night while he was trying to fall asleep. When it arrived it told him that it was from the future, and that what it wanted to do was help him get there. When he asked where, it said ‘the future’, as though this was obvious; it wanted to help him get to the future. It was not immediately clear how it was speaking to him because its body seemed to be absolutely inert. It appeared next to his bed somehow; he closed his eyes and opened them and it was there, sprawled out on the floor. Its voice came into his head like telepathy. It laughed when he said this and agreed that yes, the way that it spoke was very like telepathy, functionally indistinguishable even. The body was lying on its side on the floorboards, turned away from him, a pale, naked thing, the face and gender invisible, the flesh shining white in the moonlight. He thought that he was dreaming, and this made him unafraid to ask how it planned to bring him into the future. It said ‘by pedagogical means’, which was specific enough that he didn’t know how to respond immediately. He laid there and stared at the pale thing with his mind racing through the possibilities. As he watched he became sure that it was a corpse, something dead that had appeared spontaneously in his tiny bedroom and with which he was now engaged in this strange dialogue. There was no movement at all. A feeling began to rise up inside him; the slow, rising horror of the certainty that comes sometimes in nightmares.

Trying to keep any panic from his voice he asked what is it that you think you can teach me? The answer came back in the same modulated, pleasant tones. 

How to be still, how to be inanimate. How to lie back and surrender all motive force in your limbs and torso, how to stop speaking, how to stop involuntary movements and expressions on your face, how not to respond, to pain or other stimulus, how to be perfectly at rest. This is what you are like in the future.

He says I’d like to go to sleep and it says yes, you should sleep, what I have to teach you will not happen tonight, this is simply our first meeting and my chance to introduce myself. Don’t worry, go to sleep.

-

When he woke up he was horrified to see that the body was still there, still lying in the exact same position, but now covered in bright sunshine instead of moonlight. It was quite a different thing now. He could see that what had looked like naked skin was actually fabric of some kind, and that the human form was only rough— it was like a doll the size of a human adult, stuffed with rags or cotton to swell it out into a series of approximate forms. When he went over to touch it he could see that it was not even fully coherent; pieces of the manikin-thing fell apart as he shifted it, and the stuffing tumbled out, deflating the object, which no longer resembled skin at all. This was how he dispersed the power of the first puppet, which in the end was a weak power, scarcely more real than a nightmare, which was what he mistook the encounter for, willing a forgetting or rationalisation of the body that remained in the bright morning light. 

Its power was in its telepathy/voice, and in its honesty and transparency: it wanted to teach him about the future that he would be taken into. But honesty by itself, without movement, without a face to attach to, without a life against which it can be thrown it into a type of relief; honesty denuded and abstracted this way, into bare enunciation, is not much; certainly nothing to be frightened of. He never even understood that what he had been told that night was exactly correct, because he had no way of contextualising what had happened to him.

-

The second came to him looking like a person, and his encounters with it played out over almost two years. This whole situation was much more ambiguous, because the second puppet never said anything about the future, or about pedagogy, or about immobility, or surrender, and also because it revealed itself through another human and not a random collection of fabric and stuffing. He only realised that he had been visited at all in hindsight, after his third and fourth encounters, when he was already well and truly inside the future, and at liberty to think back on how he had arrived there. But the lessons were much more to the point, and also much more painful, because they came to him naturally as his relationship with this other played itself out over the months and years. 

What he learned was that you could be made still and pliable by something as innocuous as the way that someone changed the intonation in their voice; by someone placing their hand on the base of your spine; by their breathing while they slept; that these things could be enough to induce disembodiment, enough to leave you incapable of movement. The horror of these realisations was always mixed in with a pleasure that he found it difficult to speak about, even with the people closest to him. When the second puppet left what remained were a series of learned behaviours that were no longer attached to any trigger, since they had all been developed in relation to this other who was no longer present. He set about trying to manufacture the triggers artificially, using medications, massage, hypnosis, and also a string of other more or less interchangeable bodies to try to induce those same states— all of this with varying and mostly shallow degrees of success.

His thoughts during these years progressed slowly, very slowly, sharpening and narrowing until eventually they had acquired an extreme and blinding lucidity. They ran like this:

Some people will bring you into the future; they are able to do so. Some people can’t, or won’t, or have forgotten how to; have forgotten what the future looks like, or are afraid of it; are afraid especially of what the future means for you, for your agency, for your body, with its powers of movement, speech, reaction, agency. 

They are afraid of it exactly because of what your body is like in the future.

-

The third one came to him as a set of realities about how he was able to live his life. His body was becoming less animate over time, and he was less and less able to work. Eventually he lost his access to basic necessities like shelter and food. He was laid out first in a room without visitors, and then in some brightly sunlit place. Here he tried hard to become invisible, since he had not yet been able to divest himself of shame. The voice, or the intelligence; the telepathic connection (which he had not heard since his first encounter), said to him: this is the future, this is the future. You are in it, you have arrived.

-

The fourth puppet was one that he built himself. It was made from language.

Bjarne Melgaard

This story will be published later this year if all goes well (don't fret edit-heads, it will be copyedited first). If you enjoyed it you might be interested in my first collection of short fiction (here for UK delivery, here for everywhere else), which I am told by the distributor is close to selling out its first printing.