I drive down the I75 while a long dusk fades around me. The trees and hills are black, the interstate cutting a line of pale tarmac and traffic through the Georgia night. I pull the car up in Locust Grove, a quaint American citytown that does the best burger nacho fries this side of the Mississippi. Most of my remaining money I had made doing doing tricks in bars across the East Coast had disappeared. News had spread of my special talent and I had to find another way to scrape some money together. In the meantime I slept in my car, a 2009 Hyundai Sonata Sedan, Cherry Red, bit of rust spreading across the rear left door and the windows didn’t roll down. It had been the first day of a miserable heatwave, so I left the doors open and sat on the hood, listening to lofi jazz hiphop beats to relax to on Youtube Premium, sweat drenched my shirt tight to my back and I crack open a warm beer under the stars.
I couldn’t sleep. I had laid in the backseat for hours, feeling irritated, fidgety. I tried smoking a blunt but that just had the effect of making me incredibly stoned and uncomfortable, pulling off my clothes in the smoky interior of the Hyundai. I could taste myself in the air. Chemicals. I got into the front seat and drive away, very slowly. I navigate the streets of Locust Grove, creeping past the City Hall like some kind of spider. Rather than heading South as I had intended, I mindlessly scrolled on the map on my phone, trying to find some sort of meaning. The next town over was called Experiment.
I drove to Experiment, passing the Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary. The baboons kept there had already begun their morning hooting. The sun is rising behind me, colouring the trees on either side of the road a poisonous red. Dollar General, Chevron, white wooden houses away from the road and an empty sky. The raw dirt front lawns of the newbuilds gave way to bungalows, oak trees, little bushes. I drove to the middle of Experiment and it was a suburban ideal. I parked the car up and began to conduct my own experiment.
In the trunk I had several devices of my own design. In my spare time I fabricated machines, fit them with onboard computers running an OS I had coded myself. In the quiet morning I carried one of the machines out of the car and set it in the middle of the intersection at the centre of the town. The machine was made of steel, with its central body the shape of an obelisk, with two handles on either side and a control panel. I returned to my car, put on a jacket lined with foil and a helmet with dozens of tubes sprouting from the top. I fasten the tubes across the chakra points on my body, channelling the chi energy into a reflective soul shield. Now that I had made myself safe, it was time to turn on the machine.
The machine began to hum, with a throbbing blue light emanating from its base. It was an eerie feeling looking directly at the machine, as if you felt as if you were falling towards it. The morning began to feel like a dream. I went over to my car and sat inside, watching what would happen next, trying to resist the effect it was having on my body. As a precaution, I take 100mg of Adderall and 5 Benadryl’s, hoping that would steady my resolve. I start chanting quietly as lights come on in one of the houses.
Its front door opens and a man walks out in a night shirt and shorts. It was already warm enough that he was sweating, rubbing it away from his eyes with the back of his hand as he approached the machine.
“What in tarnation?” he says, crouching down next to it and stroking his white moustache.
“Don’t touch that!” cries a woman, running from the bungalow opposite.
“What is it doc? Some kinda bomb?”
“Harry, you should get back to your house. It’s not safe.” She says to Harry. I open a pack of Spearmint gum, carefully unfolding the tin foil and placing the strip of dusty gum onto my tongue and into my mouth. I had rigged up microphones in a nearby tree, listening to their conversation via a radio next to me. I tweaked some buttons, moved some sliders up. The machine was about to enter its second phase.
I found out later the woman was called Doctor Sally Wainwrightsmith, a retired experimental biologist teaching at nearby agricultural college, the University of Georgia Griffin Campus. She had worked for DARPA previously, her work on theoretical bioweapons was still classified. I thought it humorous that I would attempt to use the machine for the first time whilst one of America’s greatest scientific minds in the field of experimental biology just happened to be there, but there you go. Life can be a little silly sometimes.
More doors start opening as the neighbourhood begins waking up. They all start walking towards the machine, talking amongst each other.
“What’s that darn machine doing out here? Is it some kinda bomb?”
“Say, does that look like a gosh darn bomb to you?”
“Bomb.”
And so on. The Americans all wore pyjamas and night robes and the Mayor of Experiment even wore a nightcap that made him look like Papa Smurf. Somebody had even brought their breakfast with them, grits on a bacon cheeseburger and a coke, and kept having to stop to eat this calamity of food as everyone else approached the machine. Doctor Sally Wainwrightsmith urged them to stay back, but they were drawn to it in ways they'd never felt before. The machine was ready. A little door opened up on the side and a ramp came out. The neighbourhood all stood round it in a circle.
From the car, it didn’t look like much was happening. People had crowded round so thickly that it was hard to see what was going on. From the microphones in the trees, and witness testimony’s later, I was able to piece together what they had experienced.
A little tiger had emerged from the machine. It was more like a toy tiger than an actual one, with round arms and legs, walking upright, with its enormous head studded with two wet eyes that seemed to shine and blossom with every colour of the rainbow. The little tiger was about as big as a berry, though there was a strange effect when you looked directly at it. The longer you looked at it, the smaller it seemed to get. It seemed to shrink and shrink, as if the whole world had grown monstrously large, with the perspective continuing to warp and zoom in on the endlessly shrinking tiger. The psychological effect of witnessing the tiger was a mixture of fascination, wonder and the overwhelming sensation that you must protect the little tiger at all costs. It seemed as if it was the most precious thing that the world had ever seen. The strength of this emotion was so deep and sudden that many people began crying, collapsing to the floor and wailing at how small the tiger was.
It continued to run from the device, then noticed the people towering around it. Every time it made eye contact with somebody, they would begin to sweat and shake profusely, as looking into the tiger’s eyes had the strongest effect. Years later anybody who had gazed directly into the things eyes would feel shame at what they had been willing to do at that very moment, willing to sacrifice themselves on the spot so that the little tiger would be protected somehow. Then the little tiger started to dance.
It waved its arms in the air and started to hop around. The crowd began to scream and cheer as a car pulled up from the local sheriff’s office. The rookie got out, his eyes quickly focusing on the little tiger dancing and he began to weep and drool. It was as if the little tiger was dancing for him. Though the man didn’t have any kids, he felt as if this little tiger was somehow under his protection. The deputy went for his gun, struggling to pull it from the holster.
I had watched all this unfold from my Hyundai. I opened the driver’s door, rested the precision rifle on top and looked through the scope. The tiger turned towards me and I pulled the trigger. The creature was obliterated, its biomechanical guts smearing across the road like the insides of a slug dropped in metal shavings. It took a few moments for the crowd to realise what had happened, and the effect the little tiger had on them quickly subsided. Unfortunately, in that few seconds, each of them experienced such intense feelings of grief that there faces were screwed up into masks of agony.
I felt bad.
In the rearview I watch the doctor examine the remains of
the thing. I imagined most of it would have been destroyed with the hypersonic
armour piercing 7.65mm round, but maybe there would be some clue in what was
left. Down towards Griffin City Park, along Zebulon road, I wondered about the
ethics of my experiments, their capacity to cause pain and suffering. Yet any
object could cause pain and suffering. Does that mean a spoon is evil because
it can scoop out an eyeball? No. It was through testing the limits of reality
that we could achieve freedom, and if I was right, my experiments could show me
the way to save all of humanity and every living creature in the world. I drive
South, pleased with my progress. This is what the United States was all about.
