Hikikomaurice

 

I can’t remember the last time I spoke with someone in person. I don’t know why I thought about it today. It was a lovely day, simply the best. The weather in my little dome was set for 67 degrees with just a touch of moisture in the air for my pores. I had my espresso by the pool, and projected a livestream from the Great Barrier Reef on the bottom. I love watching the colorful fish when I’m not yet fully awake. I played a little Mozart app to try and measure my mood from my biometrics and play Mozart music to promote calm. It was playing the Magic Flute, which is generally a good sign for my day. I was supposed to clock in and work today, but the company network was down, so all we had was an insecure Zoom meeting later to update on the fix progress. Really, I could have done anything. I was safe in my little dome, and my food delivery was yesterday, and the garden boys were making perfect tomatoes for me that would ripen later in the afternoon. I could walk among them, if I liked, and pluck them myself, or set the bots to do it. I thought I might like walking around a little. The fitness app encouraged it, and I’d need less time on a treadmill later. It was nice to take a break from the treadmill, if I could. I had a virtual meetup with a nice young lady in Borneo scheduled in two days and maybe she and I would click and merge our habitats and make babies. I was looking forward to our scheduled session. Everything was perfect today. Really, the best and only getting better every day.

And I had not spoken to someone in person since…

Obviously, I had family. I had a mother and father that divorced when I was fifteen, and I went to the city school after so I had to be there in person with all the rest of the kids who couldn’t afford the network. I made lifelong friends there, didn’t I?

Didn’t I? The last time I had seen Jack and Hakeem in person was… I think it was a drifter job in college. We were paid peanuts to go use metal detectors in old cities and pull anything metal we found for scrap that hadn’t already been pulled. Mostly it was for cleanup. It was hard, sweaty work, and the suits were heavy and terrible and I swore I would never have to work like that again. I committed myself to school. We still met up, Hakeem and Jack and I, to play this cool spelunking game, and sometimes we had poker nights, but I think Jack uses an app to cheat so we kind of stopped playing poker. Co-op only. And we just had a session, didn’t we? We did. We did last weekend.

Right, but it was virtual. I looked around my beautiful little dome house designed like an Ancient Roman bath. I could slip into different temperature pools in every room. I could ship in different scents and salts and soaps. It was a very popular model. All that elegant travertine and water filtration. It broke once, early on, but it was under warranty and the repairmen got to it and he worked only on the outside pipes, beyond my little dome, so I never actually met him in person. 

When did I last meet another person in the flesh?

Was it college?

I was nearly thirty. It couldn't have been that long ago.

It bothered me. I don’t know why, but it did.

I was eating avocado toast for lunch and wondering when I last saw someone in person. Yesterday, I didn’t think of it at all, and today it just hit me out of nowhere.

My neighborhood was pretty exclusive, so there weren’t a lot of people who qualified for it. Most of the plots were still vacant. My closest neighbors were about half a mile west. I had their number somewhere. They were an older couple, with great-grandkids and their photo on the HOA website had two cute dogs. I didn’t know if the dogs were real or not, but they looked real in the pictures. I thought about calling them, but they wouldn’t necessarily take that as a reason to come over just because. It wouldn’t work. They would be confused why I was asking to see them inside their house, all of a sudden. I had to come up with an excuse, some reason. I went outside because I was curious. I got lost. How could I get lost? My batteries died. I needed a charge and maybe some tea before I left and walked back home. Something like that. Perhaps I cut my leg near their dome when I’m out for a stroll? I’ll lose a shoe in the bushes. 

I was pushing through a densely brushed drone trail when I realized I didn’t bring any water or food. I may not need to invent an emergency when I arrive.

The sky was the color of wet concrete, and cool and damp. The drone trail was made of crushed rocks and it sounded hard under my expensive shoes. I was undoubtedly tearing up the rubber. Mud clumped in the treads. At home, I’d need to wash them or throw them away. My soft linen pants were already scraped a bit in the long fingers of undergrowth that reached into the thin trail’s pathway. No drones were scheduled today, I thought. It was a special order day only. And tomorrow was a trash and maintenance day, when the machines came through our HOA to clear out our bins and cut away any grass or weeds in the crushed rocks. The path was the width of the widest drone, which wasn’t much wider than I was, and the branches that reached in had been stripped and stripped and stripped of growth until they were just sharp, hard fingers. Not even spiders bothered to nest in these bent branches. I felt like an idiot. I should simply go home, forget my little strange impulse. I could turn around and return to the reality of my life, my job and travertine baths and espresso under a clean , Tuscan sun. I turned around and looked at my house from the outside. It was a hard, round thing. It had been built in a factory and delivered by helicopters to this far corner of the world, where crime and beggars and scavengers were never to be found. The hard black metal was coated in reflective materials to keep any stray heat from the outside sun, keep any birds from nesting. A perfect black ball of home. Along this trail, I knew there were more like it. We were a community of neighbors that only talked on a message board about trash collection, trail maintenance, and stormwater runoff. We did not know each other, in person. 

I heard sounds in the trees: the rustling of birds. They did not sing, just flutter through. I looked at them; they bent their heads towards me as they alighted there and there. They were brown and black things, only curious at most about the man that walked where drones usually rumbled through the rocks. I called out to them like the birds in my house. “Sing for me, birds. I would like to hear your quiet, lovely songs.”

They flew on, their scattered herd of hunters and seekers always moving and moving, since the age of the dinosaurs, they stopped only long enough to make an egg. And I, a cryptid to them, a forgotten thing, out among them on these drone trails. They will whisper about me later, perhaps. They have a language in their songs. AI had decoded parrots and crows and rooks  already. Farther on, the trees dropped away. Signs of burned earth, and a cracked tree that once towered high above the others. I think I remembered this from a newsletter. There was a forest fire here, but the HOA’s safety protocols put it out before it could spread. Emergency drones dumped extinguisher all over this place. It would take decades to fully heal, but it wouldn’t burn. It was larger than I thought it would be, and much closer to my house than I realized. I sat down on an exposed rock, and rested. My feet hurt. I was feeling some blisters. These were not shoes for loose gravel trails. They were for treadmills and exercise equipment. They were waterproof, so I could just jump straight into a pool without removing them. I removed them now. I checked my feet for blisters, and found them pooling around the edges of my heels. I rubbed them and frowned. 

Into the clearing, a deer walked out without fear. Behind it two more deer followed, all does. One looked younger than the others, still with an echo of spots, but this late in the season, she was almost grown. I marvelled at them, in the real. They did not know me. They sought the leaves that pushed through the edgelands, where the brush was easier to reach. It was probably poisonous for them, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was a slow poison. They would have many seasons to let the chemicals from the extinguisher swell in them. The coyotes would be hurt more. They might eat enough in one season to truly die, but that was fine. Coyotes were a menace. They wrecked trash bins and water lines if given a chance, and sometimes struck the grocery drones. 

I almost wanted to pet a deer, but I knew they had ticks. I knew they had diseases. Already my nose was leaking a little snot from the dust and pollen in the unfiltered air. Imagine, touching wild animals and getting sick and finally meeting people in person at a hospital after an airlift.

I had no water, and I had already come so far. 

I got up, and walked on down the path. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and a few thin drops of rain struck for just a moment before passing. I hadn’t even checked the weather before I took my impulsive stroll. That’s how long it had been since I had been regularly outside. I had forgotten the importance of checking the weather.

As I approached the dome, I heard the dogs barking at the door. I rang and stood back where the cameras could see me. The house was indistinguishable from mine on the outside, but who knows which model they chose. Jungle paradise or mountain cabin or any city skyscraper were all nearly as popular as the Roman model I chose. Mine was the most expensive one, so I chose it. It was hard to imagine dogs around all those open pools of water. Their hair would clog the filters, and their wet fur would stink everywhere. They probably didn’t have the same thing I did. I rang the bell again. The dogs kept barking. They didn’t sound very large. I rang the bell one last time, and there was no answer. I waited.

The rain started again. And it was going to get worse. The thunder and lightning were crackling hard. I pulled up my phone and tried to call them, but there was no answer. The rain was starting to fall in long sheets. I rattled the door handle, and it opened. It was unlocked. 

Inside; the dogs barked and barked. They jumped all over me. These tiny puffballs of tan and poofy and claws nearly knocked me over with their barking and jumping. I sat down with them and let them check me out. One was wary and aggressive. The other was curious. I called out. “Hello? Anyone home? The door was unlocked. Sorry for barging in like this. I’m your neighbor, and I got caught walking in the rain. Hello?”

There was no answer. 

“Hey, this is Maurice from one house over! I’m not trying to be an intruder,” I shouted. “I was ringing the bell and knocking. I found the door was unlocked, and I was getting soaked outside. I just hope I can dry off a bit and get some water to drink before I head back home. Hello?”

I stood up. The dogs had calmed a little. One still didn’t trust me, but the other was my friend. They looked nearly identical. They were just tiny things with flattish faces, and big, expressive eyes, and fur that was soft and silky smooth and a little long. I followed them into the house. It was a mountain model, with vistas and horizons of pine and snowcapped peaks. The floor was a hard, slate, into softer woods past the entry. It was cooler than my house, but perhaps that was just the wet clothes. 

It was a strange thing, standing in someone else’s house. They had more furniture than me. There was two of them, so it made sense, I guess. I didn’t know where things were. The mountain cabin had a yard and there was a garden, there, with flowers that looked real. I walked out to their flowers, calling out for them. I didn’t know where the terminal interface was. I used my phone to call them, and see if anyone answers, but no one answers. I just want to dry off in the sun a little, and get a glass of water, and maybe go home, to my warm salt pools and Tuscan sun. I could be fined for this incursion. I could be arrested and marked a criminal for this. I just wanted to meet someone in person, and now I’ve broken into my neighbors’ house.

I called out that I was going to get a glass of water and just check the weather and see if the storm has passed, if that was all right. 

In the kitchen, the refrigerator was hanging open. Confused, I walked over to it and sought to close it, but I couldn’t.

One of my neighbors was knelt down inside, with their head planted into the machine, cold and dead and surrounded by food the dogs had been tearing into. There was too much mess and trash for me to tell which frail elderly neighbor it was with their head face down on a shelf.

“Oh,” I said. I looked around, then, to try and find out what had happened here. I started searching through the rooms, looking for the other one, but no one else was there. I found mail piled up in the package receiving area. One of the boxes was from a funeral service, and it was heavy enough to be something to carry ashes inside. I put it down. I looked over at the dogs.

“Well, pups,” I said. “We have a problem, don’t we?”

The friendly looked up at me with a big doggy tongue-loose smile. The other one was sideways, with their tail tucked in.

“I see one of you gets it,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss, both of you. You didn’t deserve this. I don’t know much about dogs, but I know you can’t care for yourselves. You can’t be set loose, or the coyotes will get you, if you don’t starve first.” I looked up what to do. I didn’t know if they had any children willing to take the little creatures in. I sighed. “If you’re even real. Are you real, or part of the house?”

I petted the friendly one. It felt nice. It felt real enough. I had forgotten how lonely I was, with just people on screens. I had forgotten what it felt like to hold something that was alive.

Authorities would need to be called, and they’d ask me questions, but if I didn’t steal anything, I doubt anyone would care. A glass of water. A moment out of the rain. The door was unlocked. I found the body in the kitchen, and the poor dogs.

Rummaging around a bit, I found some leashes and collars in a coat closet. The dogs knew what they were. I wasn’t going to leave them here, with the dead. I would care for them until someone claimed them, and hope no one did. I put leashes and collars on them. I didn’t know what their names were. I called one Grumpy and the other Dopey, like the dwarves, and set out for the door. I pulled up the authorities on my phone, and thought maybe I could just have the house do it, and I don’t have to be involved once they see I didn’t take anything. But I was taking something. I was taking the dogs. I sighed.

I called the hotline, and the agent asked me my emergency. I said I discovered my neighbor’s door was unlocked, and found him in his kitchen, dead. I was going to take his dogs with me until someone could come to take them where they need to go. The agent thanked me for the alert and informed me that they were sending a unit to investigate. 

At the door to the outside, the dogs stopped hard. I scooped Dopey up in my arms, and tried to scoop Grumpy, but he pulled and ran off too well. Still, I had the leash, so I could pull. I pulled. I pulled. I crossed the threshold of the doorway, and… The dogs froze. 

They weren’t real.

Maybe the animals were based on dogs they had owned, once, and loved, but they were part of the house. I took the leash and collars off the dogs. I held the old, worn-in fabrics to my nose. They smelled real, like real wet, dusty walked dogs. I guess the dogs were dead, too, and these fabrications were there to keep a lonely man company close to death. I put it all back inside the house. Once past the threshold of the door, the dogs were barking and alive again. I left them there, and pulled the door closed. In the distance, I heard the rumble of approaching authorities. I did not want to talk to them. These were not going to be people, just drones driven by people, so no emergency worker gets hurt in an emergency.

I walked home, alone, miserable and empty. My whole body hurt and I got rained on again when I got home. Inside, my perfect Tuscan sun greeted me, and I stripped and fell into a warm salt bath and ordered the kitchen to make me two burritos and a pitcher of iced tea.

The sky outside was gray and sad, and this projection of a place and time was not real, and the ocean was not over the hill, and the vineyards were just a figment. I knew the comfort I felt was so far away from the harsh rocks and brush outside my little dome. I had forgotten, hadn’t I? 

 The machines that ran my house did not like to be turned off, and told me it was not good for them to be turned off. 

Alone, the empty screens all faded to black. The water went still and calm. I breathed and waited and tried to remember what it was I was supposed to remember before I forgot even that which would guide me to the hole where an unknown thing was absent.

I hadn’t been in the same room with a living thing for such a long time.