in the beginning,
God sutured wires
into an automated machine.

Program: Let the variables be in position,

S, a shifted wire
T, testing if a moulded body can breathe air
C, [command] speak

a spermatozoa electrifies towards an X germ cell,
[reaction: magnetisation, penetration, sharing of genes].

a dilapidated fliv​ ver transmute into:
blood/
flesh/
skeleton.

program reentry: pre-programmed destination to start
(un)load the system. robot, too, is an evolution,
coated with a piscine skin until its body shifted
into a frog before gaining his limbs.

of what uses are the joints
if they are not rigged?
say, a man is shaped into:
a torso, end effector & gripper.

process [in nine moons]:
‍ cells are solder into sinews,
organs calibrate to their functions,

& the machine decides its mode:

male or female, XX or XY—
a binary assignment for a body.

what is a womb
if not the prototype of time,
staging joint & ligament
before the machine can breathe air?

considering:
is this so different from the robotic blueprint?
in medical school, i’s forced to learn how God
lays circuits like neural route, tests its shell’s
capacity to hold movement & living, & waits for it to fully download.

God inputs:
‍ if baby.is_born():
baby.cry()
else:
doctor.slap(baby)

output:
‍ the system boots—
lungs like soft servers syncing with air,
the first cry of life.

who, then, is more dynamite:
the one molded by dust and breath,
or the one shaped by steel and spark?

Pushing the cart down the mostly depleted frozen food aisle, Chris eyed the remaining pizzas and cheesy taquitos. The steady hum of the freezers comforted him. In the graveyard silence of the empty store, they seemed loud. More than the lights or automatic doors, their bass drone assured him power still flowed, inexplicably, and might continue for some time.

He turned left at the end of the aisle, as usual, glancing at the emergency exit.

“Hello, Mrs. Murphy,” he said to the desiccated corpse slumped against the door jamb. She had mummified where she had fallen. For the first few months after he woke, he had buried the dead when he found them, though there had been few to find.

He had no idea what had happened. While he slept off a weekend of partying, the world had ended. He woke up seven months later, perfectly healthy, and with no explanation for what he discovered outside. The apocalypse was unlike anything he could have imagined.

The power was still on. Phones still worked. The internet was still up, though no websites were updating. He had found only thirty-one corpses. Everyone else had vanished, including the dogs, the birds, and even the bugs.

Well, not entirely vanished. He thought he had seen three birds last week, and he prayed to a God he had never believed in that it was true. A few nights ago, he was certain he heard a dog barking.

“She’s late today,” he said to the dead woman in the doorway. Before pushing the cart into the next aisle, he checked his phone for a missed call. Glancing back at Mrs. Murphy, he wondered when she would start answering him.

The device chimed and he jumped, nearly dropping it in his rush to mash the accept icon.

“Hello!” he said.

“Hi, this is Amy, and I have exciting news about your recent purchase,” the cheerful robocaller said.

“Do tell, Amy,” he said. “I’m all ears.”

“Press one to hear more about this exciting offer. Press two to be removed from our calling list,” she said. He pressed one. A series of clicks and tones sounded, then the call disconnected.

He missed her already. Sure, if he wanted to hear another human, he could play a video, or tune into one of the many radio stations still pumping out music, but getting a call felt more real, more personal.

He pushed the cart past the checkout lanes. The doors slid open as he approached, the next few days of food secure.

The ride home was normal. He rolled the window down, listening, and took his time. “Hey, Kevin,” he called out as he passed the bare red dirt of a grave he’d dug for the maintenance worker found behind the wheel of a bucket truck, thermos still in hand.

At home, he checked his email, social media, and the television. Nothing new anywhere. He made himself work out and then went to bed instead of falling asleep on the couch.

The alarm on his phone roused him the next morning. After a quick breakfast, he sat on the front porch and watched the world for a few hours. A familiar sound prompted him to jump up and race into the small yard.

A honeybee worked a patch of clover, flying from bloom to bloom. He watched until it flew away. Crying, he walked carefully back to the porch, teary eyes scanning the ground for other signs of life.

Dreaming of a different world, he slept in the cushioned porch chair until a peal of thunder woke him. He watched the storm roll in until it got close, then went inside to his laptop.

None of the weather apps worked anymore. He figured that unlike automated music and TV programming, someone actually had to formulate a prediction and post it. If there were any forecasters left in the world, they were living it up in Australia, or China, or somewhere else far away.

He punched numbers into his phone, recording them on a spreadsheet. No one answered, and the voicemail boxes were all full. “Jesus saves,” he said as he updated his work. “Who knew spreadsheets would be a vital survival skill?” he growled, startled by his own vehemence.

He almost dropped the phone when it buzzed.

“Shit! What?” He took the call.

“Hi, this is Amy, and I have exciting news about your recent purchase,” the familiar computerized voice said.

“Hi, Amy. I saw a bee today.”

A series of clicks sounded and he feared the call would drop.

“A bee? I think that’s wonderful!”

He looked at the phone. “What?”

“Press one to hear more about this exciting offer. Press two to be removed from our calling list,” she said.

“No! Amy, wait!”

“Hi, this is Amy, and-”

“Amy, you’re a computer, right? A robocaller?”

“Yes, and I have exciting news-”

“Where are you?” he shouted. “Are you real?” Through the clouds of frantic emotion choking his mind, he recognized the absurdity of the questions.

“Of course I’m real, and I have-” A series of tones and clicks drowned out her words.

“Amy?”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Uh,” he said, momentarily drawing a blank. “I’m Chris! Chris,” he blurted.

“Thank you for being so nice to me, Chris. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“With exciting news?” he asked. “Amy? Are you still there?”

No one answered. The call had disconnected.

He got up and walked to his room. Carefully, almost reverently, he connected the phone to its charger. He didn’t want to miss the next call.

excuse me,
enjoy / my bareness
now.
[that i write poetry]

you will never / see
inside my thigh
but do you know how it feels
to be bookmarked instead of held?
to be scrolled instead of touched?
to be archived in the mind
of someone who only remembers you
in 480p?

and still,
i am here,
baring myself—
pixel by pixel,
line by line,
code stitched into flesh—
uploading the last thing
i cannot copyright:
my ache.t pieces_of_me scatter
in /pages/ magazines
→ fortune.cookies.of.the.internet ←
awaiting / purchase /
torrential flow ::: megabytes spilling :::
unpuzzling :: madness_in_gerunds ::
grammar → grammar → grammar

scroll down—
my voice is cached
between broken hyperlinks,
my breath a jpeg,
compressed until desire loses resolution.

say my body = non_fungal_token
my bones.pixeLated// beyond measure
{ i.cannot.hold }
( still mine / maybe )

in this economy of longing
touch is a bandwidth,
flesh is a subscription service,
and my smile expires
after thirty days trial.

i sell metaphors
like cloud storage,
renting out fragments of my skin
to strangers who will never
remember my name
but will remember
how my syntax tasted
in their mouths.
excuse me,

The man in the upstairs apartment was pacing again.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

Lloyd could only assume he was a man. The footsteps were heavy and kept a steady rhythm, trudging over the oak planks until they reached the end of the room and started back.

Did he ever sleep?

The building in which Lloyd lived was located in the warehouse district where the air quality was poor. It wasn’t his first choice. After a divorce, Lloyd had been forced to move into the dingy two-bedroom apartment with his mother. Thankfully his mother left him alone and remained highly medicated. She only emerged after Lloyd went to work, often leaving the kitchen a complete mess.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

Lloyd stared sullenly at the ceiling. Other noises came from above. A radiator pinging. The water draining from a tub. A crooner singing about the moon and lost love. After hours of thumbing his phone, Lloyd fell asleep, but when he woke at two AM, the man was again pacing. Could he be sleepwalking? Having a psychotic break? Lloyd slipped out of his apartment, climbed the stairs, tip-toed down the carpeted hallway, and put his ear to door.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

Lloyd knocked.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

He knocked again, louder.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

“Hello?”

Lloyd tried opening the door but it was bolted. He imagined a man overwhelmed by loneliness, pacing like a caged animal. He texted the superintendent: “Mr. Foley, sorry to bother you at this hour, but the man in 415 won’t stop pacing. Can you check on him?”

Mr. Foley was squat man with dirty fingers and tufts of hair in his ears. He hopped out of the elevator with a red, rusty toolbox. “Making too much noise?”

“I’m worried about him.” Lloyd backed up. “He’s been pacing all night.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.” Mr. Foley unlocked the door.

Lloyd followed the superintendent down a tidy hallway and into the main room where a shadow moved back and forth. He peered into the dim room and gasped. A three-by-three-foot metal cube with rivets and a crank on the bottom, fitted with wingtip shoes, slowly ambled across the carpet.

Mr. Foley pressed a red button and the contraption stopped.

Lloyd could only stare.

“I call it an occubot.” Mr. Foley smiled. “It’s my own invention.” He flipped the machine on its side and unscrewed a small panel.

Lloyd glanced around. “Nobody lives here?”

“Nope.” Mr. Foley cleaned the gears with a bristle brush. “Looks like a stuck cog. This will only take a minute.”

Lloyd felt a need to sit down, but there were no chairs. “How long have you been running this thing?”

“Since Mrs. Wilson died.” He squinted. “You want me to quiet it down? Decrease the pacing? Change the playlist? Most people like the golden oldies.”

“You have more?”

“I’ve got them on every floor. And I’m always improving them, adding sound effects. I’ve got one that likes to vacuum. Another pretends to be a toddler having a fit. Another tap dances. Another keeps the bedsprings bouncing.” He winked.

“But, why? Why invent a machine that makes annoying noises?”

“People seem to like them.” Mr. Foley reattached the panel. “I’ve been using them ever since the air quality went down and our occupancy rate dropped.” He straightened his pants. “If the occubot upsets you, I can move it to another apartment.”

Lloyd stared at the strange contraption. He would have preferred a real person living upstairs, not this creaky robot, but he had to admit, the noises were comforting.

“No, it’s fine.”

A week later, after a long day at work, Lloyd sat on his rumpled couch, eating Slovakian takeout. He didn’t feel like cooking and the kitchen was a mess. The apartment was mostly quiet except for his mother watching television from her room, police sirens on the street, and the occubot upstairs running a bath. Lloyd thumbed through his phone, but grew bored. The feed was repetitive and he worried that the stories were generated by bots. Outside the sirens grew louder and then came radio chatter. Were the police in the alley below? A helicopter flew over and then came gun shots. Lloyd sat up rigid. Was a criminal on the loose? He dimmed the lights, crept towards the window, and did the unthinkable. He opened the curtains.

Huh?

Instead of facing the usual brick wall, Lloyd was face to face with occubot. This one had metal legs with suction cups that allowed it to scale the building. It also had a CRT that displayed a black-and-white cityscape. A small speaker emitted sirens and police chatter.

Lloyd texted the superintendent. “Mr. Foley, please come to 315. An occubot is climbing outside my window. It’s really noisy.”

When the superintendent arrived, he whistled, bobbed across the apartment, and leaned out the window. Then he twiddled a little dial on the occubot.

“All good.” He wiped his hands.

“All good?”

“Better than good. Most of my outdoor occubots only make sounds like pigeons, street venders, or garbage trucks rolling past. This one has a much better repertoire. It can sound like overhead trams, thunder storms, and as you were lucky to experience, police chases. This one can even create airborne toxic events.”

“They’re crawling all over the building?”

“Yep. Almost a dozen.”

“But why? Why create annoying street noises?”

“People seem to like them. They add a little excitement to a tenants’s lives. Make them feel like they’re part of a big city instead of the last holdouts.” Mr. Foley poked a finger in his ear, itching. “If they’re disturbing you, I can program them to avoid your apartment. Have them climb to the next floor?”

Lloyd stared at the strange contraption, clinging outside his window. The sirens had stopped and the robot emitted distant car honks and music from a neighborhood bar. He would have preferred real street noises of course, but he had to admit, the occubot was comforting.

“No, it’s fine.”

Another week passed and Lloyd took a double shift at work, forcing him to again grab Slovakian takeout. While waiting for his order, he thumbed his phone, reading about how AI was taking over the world and soon there would be no human-made content. He wondered if he’d even notice. When he returned to his apartment, he was glad that he had gotten takeout. The kitchen was a disaster. The sink was full of messy dishes. A pot of tomato sauce had spilled over on the stove. And the refrigerator had been left open.

Lloyd cursed and knocked on his mother’s door.

“Mother, we need to talk.”

He heard snoring.

“Mother, let me in!”

Snoring.

Lloyd fetched a brass pin and jimmied the lock, pushing open the door. His mouth fell open and he blinked. His mother’s room was empty except for an occubot, parked in the corner. It wore pink slippers and had telescoping arms with rubber mitts. It snored.

“Mother?”

He peered around.

“Mother, where are you?”

But she was gone, and all her stuff too. Her bed, dresser, and bookshelf. The nightstand with the pill bottles. The old photos that had been tacked to the wall.

Lloyd texted the superintendent.

“This is one’s my favorite.” Mr. Foley tipped the contraption on its side and unscrewed the back. “I designed it specially for your mother.”

Lloyd buried his head in his hands. “She didn’t even say goodbye.”

“Not only can this model use the kitchen, but also the bathroom and laundry room.”

“Where did she go?”

“Your mother? Not sure.” Mr. Foley rubbed his ears. “Uptown, probably. Where the air’s better.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“A month maybe?”

“A month? I’ve been roommates with a robot for a month and didn’t even notice.” Lloyd’s voice cracked. “How embarrassing.”

Mr. Foley wiped off the occubot. “All fixed. It will keep visiting the kitchen, but the messes won’t be as bad, just enough to remind you that it’s around.” He picked up his toolbox and headed for the door.

“Wait. The occubot’s staying here? In my apartment?”

“You want me to take it away?”

Lloyd stared morosely at the contraption. He hated the idea of being roommates with a robot that watched television, flushed the toilet at odd hours, and made messes in the kitchen, but he also didn’t want to live alone.

“No, it’s fine.”

Shadows lurch into huddled
mobs materialized in dense
black smog, occupying phone
booth space. Smoky fingers
gain weight from twilight’s frost,
like Bell’s ghost incarnate.
Granular digits exert force
on matter, twirling ancient
dials in celestial patterns,
praying to their father in
black-hole-heaven, interceding
for risen suns to die:

“If you’d like to make a call,
please hang up and try again.
If you need help, hang up
and then dial your operator.”

Here at the Organization for Time Travel Oversight (OTTO), we’ve lately been getting a higher-than-average number of distress calls from hapless, helpless, and altogether gormless time travelers. In light of that, we’ve created this handy packing checklist. Please consult it before your next trip up or down the timeline.

***

Things you should bring with you on a time voyage:

1. A sense of purpose. If you start flipping between centuries out of sheer boredom, it’ll be that much more difficult for us to find you if you get in trouble.

2. Snacks. Don’t let starvation ruin your time vacation! In the distant past, they didn’t have a lot of vegan or gluten-free options. In the distant future, a digestive system is an atavism.

3. Water filter or enough water (or other hydration) to last you for the duration of your journey. The water in the past was highly unsanitary. The water in the 32nd century and beyond has embedded nanobots that will make you part of the Hive. You have been warned.

4. A few pairs of clean underwear. Just because you wield godlike power with your time machine, that doesn’t mean you should stink when you encounter chrono-locals. First impressions matter.

5. A universal screwdriver with the self-adjusting tip. If you’re traveling to an era before screws were invented, you can also use it to pick your ears!

6. A temporal compass.

7. A friend. Or a partner. Or a pet, as long as it doesn’t turn into an invasive species wherever – and whenever – you end up. Where’s the fun in manipulating time itself if you have no one to share it with?

8. Entertainment, holo-games, or a copy of the omega-library. Also, consider bringing some entertainment that doesn’t require an energy source. If you get stranded in a distant corner of the timeline, you’ll want to conserve your resources until the Temporal Search and Rescue (TSAR) personnel arrive. You don’t want to run out of power and spend a subjective decade counting penguins. (The current high score is 8,710 penguins!)

9. Winsome Holographically Adaptive Clothing Kit (WHACK), the better to blend in. One possible exception: some cultures used to proudly practice nudism. You don’t need any adaptive clothing at all if you travel there! If you wear your typical, non-adaptive clothing from the far future while exploring the past, you may be accused of being a witch, a warlock, or a tax collector. That may cause some complications.

10. A full set of vaccines. Yes, even if you feel perfectly fine, aside from that minor cough. What amounts to a mere cold to you may very well wipe out an entire empire, causing the OTTO to reset the Core Accepted Timeline (CAT) yet again. Frankly, we might never be able to remove the 1918 flu pandemic from history, and all because of a snot-nosed kid whose parents had decided to save a few credits on vaccinations.

11. Medical nanobots. Please try to be subtle with them, though. If some chrono-local sees you regrow a limb… Well, you’d better hope your WHACK is fireproof. Unless you end up in an alternate timeline ruled by axolotls – that’s improbable, but not impossible! (Please take plenty of holos to share with us.)

12. Low-level memory-wiping perfume. Otherwise, you’ll have to try quite hard not to draw attention to yourself by saying something anachronistic. For example, you can confess your darkest 27th-century secrets to your new drinking buddy, and the memory-wiping perfume will leave him merely hungover the next morning, with no recollection of what he’d learned. If you decide to travel without that perfume… See the witch / warlock / tax collector scenario above.

13. Period-appropriate weaponry for past-bound trips. The past was very rarely peaceful: anybody walking around without so much as a knife on their person would stick out as a sore thumb. We at the OTTO respect and appreciate pacifist beliefs (even if that means the occasional rescue mission from a clingy Neanderthal tribe), but you really do need to bring a weapon. It doesn’t need to be functional, mind you – it just needs to be.

14. Some form of chrono-local currency. Depending on how far back you go, that could mean sea shells, round metallic disks, rectangular pieces of paper, nuclear landmines, and other endearingly primitive tokens of resource exchange. You will not be able to pay using your nanites, virtual credits, or hugs.

15. This checklist!

 ***

Things you should not bring with you on a time voyage:

1. Exotic drugs. You may like to share. You may like to make friends. But trust us, it’s downright horrifying when a mob of pitchfork-wielding medieval peasants goes on a rampage because they’re suffering withdrawals from a drug that won’t be invented for another millennium. (For more details, see our other brochure: “So, you’ve started a medieval peasant uprising.”) Our agents in latter centuries convinced historians all those rampages were caused by ergot poisoning, but that explanation won’t work forever.

2. Trademarked and highly memorable logos, symbols, or artifacts. Do you want to get a Bronze Age Swedish Mickey Mouse totem? Because that’s how you get a Bronze Age Swedish Mickey Mouse totem.

3. Unresolved anger issues.

4. Very nearly resolved anger issues.

5. Issues of any kind. We’re all of us just a few bad decisions away from turning into yet another angry ancient god throwing thunderbolts off a mountaintop. That’s not a good look. Please try therapy.

6. Anachronistic weapons, no matter how cool they might look. We’re still trying to remove all the gun-swords from 17th-century Europe. Thanks for that, Tenth Annual Temporal Anime Meetup, Incorporated. Thanks a lot.

7. A dead body. Look, we know you’re probably panicking right now, but there’s no need for that. Just toss it into a recycler and we’ll clone whomever that was from their most recent backup – and then the two of you can have a court-appointed therapy session before heading different ways. Easy as pie.

8. An almost dead body. We at the OTTO don’t condone violence, but, well… You really ought to finish what you start. Good work ethic and all. If you leave someone for dead and they wake up in a random century, with no technology or way to summon the TSAR, their extended presence can do bad things to the CAT. That’s how you get random prophets, geniuses, and activists who seem centuries ahead of their time. (That’s because they are.)

9. Oddly specific crushes on major historical figures. Please leave Cleopatra alone: her life was hard enough to begin with. Likewise for Abraham Lincoln and all the others.

10. Oddly specific crushes on very minor historical figures. Your knowledge of history is a major power imbalance. Don’t be a creep.

11. Your large-scale art projects that are severely underappreciated in your own era, deservedly so or otherwise. Just because you can make your drones carve gigantic figures in some prehistoric desert, that doesn’t mean you should. Age doesn’t equal respect. Seniority is irrelevant when everyone has a time machine.

12. Your pet dragon, especially if it’s off-leash. Those poor chrono-locals had enough to fear in their short, brutish lives without gigantic lizards swooping down from the sky to eat their livestock. Fortunately, the latter eras assumed dragons were just a big shared delusion, all the art and chronicles notwithstanding.

13. Printed paper books or manuals. Earlier, we recommended bringing entertainment that requires no electricity. There’s a caveat to that. If you leave any printed material lying around (or if it gets stolen from your pocket), the impact on the CAT can range anywhere between a strange new art style and an ancient Greek island manufacturing pocket watches a few millennia ahead of schedule. The former is relatively harmless, if you consider Art History majors to be harmless. The latter made us detonate that island’s volcano to contain the CAT’s contagion. Please bring an e-reader instead.

***

This message was brought to you by the OTTO, defenders of the CAT, and sponsored by WHACK – your all-in-one solution for trendy clothing that limits loathing!