Lazy Gun: A Science Fiction Story

This was a short story and essay reflection that I wrote for a class called Data Narratives.

0

The uncertain darkness of the station was interrupted by advancing headlights. A screech accompanied them, seeming to reverberate from all around as the tram car pulled in. The landing was transformed: what had been a cliff was now a door, and it was a door that led wherever she wanted to go.

The small crowd on the platform made a collective step toward the train, rippled at intervals to let exiting passengers off the train, and then surged forward again. There was a burst of light without sound: she could see illuminated for a long, important instant the faces of those around her, every dimple, freckle, and wrinkle behind the eye, and then they went dark again, the imprint of their lives stuck fast on the back of her mind. There was a fantastic sound, like a great, enormous piece of paper in the air was being ripped apart.

Immediately, she knew she was dead. She was no longer in one piece. Oh, well, she thought, whoop-dee-doo, it happens a million times a day. The number of people who will miss me are nothing next to the rest who won’t.

She was trapped inside; there was a dividing line between her and everything else. No, between her and herself. The line of action. Oh, no. Not now. Even now, I can’t break it. My last moments imprisoned here, no longer part of the world I’m about to join forever. Can’t have one more small taste. Imprisoned up here in the mess they call the mind. I’m not even thinking about my child. But ah, there he is. So small.

Not a million times. No, death only ever happens once—only ever once, a million times a day.

She could hear things, for a moment, like a small gap had opened in her prison, in her dying private bubble—to let something in, or maybe out. The person beside her groaned, and whispered something she couldn’t make out. Perhaps a name, perhaps a cry for help: in vain.

The moment before whatever lived up there, beneath her hair and skin and skull, stopped functioning, she realized that there was no one else. The groan had been hers, the whisper her name: “Amy,” whispered tenderly, like it was a part of a beautiful song. She remembered, at last, something she had read long ago. Something about the deed of death. Meaningless until it was enacted. Always without meaning, always without information. It told you nothing, in no uncertain terms. Nothing—then how could it be so important?

1

A soft chiming pulse crawled across the neural lace at the base of Alis’s skull, blooming into her half-dream with cold precision. She surfaced quickly with resignation, unable to suppress the quickening of her heartbeat as the connection request flared in the corner of her vision.

Alis opened her eyes with a resigned swiftness, and accepted the call with a thought. She felt her consciousness become joined with something; she could think in her own time scale, but now a part of her was in no time. In that part, there was no division between her and the wireless connection, no thought could penetrate there. Like she’d been forced out, or in. She waited for the other end of the line to speak.

“Alis, I need you to come in. Something’s happened.”The voice came through grainy—impossibly, since the central network, Elnor, never allowed transmission errors—like it was pushing through digital mesh.

“What?” She meant “what happened?” but in her grogginess it came out incomplete.

“I need you to come in.”

She checked her watch. “It’s five in the morning.”

“You think I’m happy about it, either?”

“Alright, Bruce, give me twenty minutes.”

“See you then.” The line dropped, leaving the faint residue of the hypernetwork like a receding tide in the back of her mind. That partial presence, the Wavelength, every day, coming and going—she despised it; she missed it when it was gone.

She got dressed as quickly as possible. She kept the temperature low in her room because it helped her to leave. She grabbed her bag, checked the update log. Nothing there but inconvenience: the three-line was down. She’d have to go the long way.

The long way involved a trip through the barracks district on the six, then a connection to the one-line into the city. Her apartment wasn’t far from downtown, but living next to a station usually meant easy access to some places and isolation from others. Especially when the line was down.

Despite the interruption, her morning dissolved into muscle memory. She paid for her ticket, absently wondering where all that money went, and stayed on the train six stops, neural link delivering patient, silent news directly into her subconscious to store for later use. She got off at Log Jam Station and switched to the one. She watched the crowd slowly change, their clothing and faces brightening and darkening with each stop according to each one’s specific polish and cut. When she arrived at the precinct, it was as if no time had passed at all.

“What’s up?” She asked as she entered Bruce’s office. Funny he still had one; most of the administrators stayed virtual; the buildings were largely ceremonial. But she could see why he liked it. It was a nice office, with pictures of his family on the walls and a small potted plant growing primly by the heat of his computer.

“The three-line was blown to smithereens. Seventy-five deaths.”

She struggled to find humanity enough to be shocked.

“Why wasn’t it detected?”

“Something’s wrong in the Bare-Minimum.”

“What, the hyper-cosmic entity took the day off?”

“We need you to do some groundwork.”

He handed her something, wrapped in a smother of tissue paper. It was oddly shaped; bent haphazardly. She unwrapped it tenderly as she felt a presence work its way into her neural pathways and then withdraw, leaving something behind.

“I’ve transmitted instructions for its use. Read them in full.”

Unwrapping the object explained very little, although she recognized dimly what it was. A whisper entered her mind, partly native, partly apart: a gift, it said.

“A gun,” she said.

“I’ve got a witness for you to talk to, goes by Lem. I’m sending his file over.”

“Right.”

“This needs to stay quiet. Find out what happened, find the perp. The system’s working fine now, our job is only to make sure it doesn’t happen again. No iconoclastic crusades.”

She stuffed the gun into her coat and left the precinct, processing the files she’d been given. She felt less like she was moving toward something than between things.

What a strange circumstance. They’d called her in, which meant this was a technical concern. She was still a programmer, even if they hardly needed her anymore. Even her title was outdated; she could’ve been called a lion tamer for all the relevance it bore to her line of work—which, admittedly, was some. But then, why a gun? She supposed, maybe, she’d need it in case the system went sideways, but a gun? A bonafide, analog firearm without any connection to the Wavelength.

She played the instruction file. 

“The Model 7B Line-Breaker operates on a dual-stage propulsion cycle: a hammer-actuated compression coil provides baseline kinetic discharge while the magnetic pulse ring (MPR) supplies inductive boost when local Wavelength coherence meets the 0.002 threshold. To load, engage the ML-2 latch (3.2 kg minimum), rotate the chamber clockwise to Index Mark, seat cartridge fully, rotate counterclockwise until the triple-click registers, release the ML-2, and perform a half-cycle dry fire to confirm coil tension. Standard Kinetic (SK) rounds provide stable analog performance; Inductive-Ready (IR-2) cartridges allow MPR lensing but may vibrate in low-coherence zones; Split-Phase (SP/Black) rounds remain unstable until impact and should not be stored near reflective surfaces. The barrel’s conductive cladding must be replaced every 600 cycles to prevent sympathetic ignition or phase accumulation during coherence transitions.

“During firing, expect the spring to advance the pin by 3.8 mm before primer ignition; MPR activation occurs 4–6 cm down-bore if drift remains under 0.04 seconds. Hybrid muzzle velocity averages…”

She switched it to mute.

The sky was brightening by the instant as the rising sun scattered light bouncing down among the buildings, navigating floating bridges and flying machines just beginning to fill the morning airspace to land haphazardly in Alis’ eyes, periodically blinding. Dew carpeted vertical spaces and the ground exuded the faint hum of underground train engines and faraway ships taking off.

As she reached the entrance to the rail line, someone stepped in beside her, keeping pace as she hurried onto the landing. They jingled faintly.

“Who are you?” she asked without stopping.

“Someone who walks the same path as you.”

“To the five-line?”

“My name is Paz.”

They reached the train platform and she had no excuse any longer not to look at him. He wore a thick cloak that looked like they came from a storybook. Although it looked heavy, it ruffled freely in the winter wind that came in from outside and bundled itself around his legs in thick tassels. He wore a brimmed hat, the same dark blue as his cloak, and held a tall wooden staff in his left hand.

As she looked closer, Alis could make out astral patterns engraved lightly in the fabric of the cloak, so that cosmic tragedies unfolded with every tousle of the wind.

“Why are you following me?”

“You’re investigating the three-line bombing,” he said, as if commenting on the weather.

“How do you know about that?” Alis felt her heart jump. “I could have you arrested.”

“No need, I didn’t do it.”

Alis scoffed.

“I don’t envy your job. So many dead can weigh on a soul.”

She paused. Then, for some reason, she felt the need to speak. “Someone must have broken into the network to plant that bomb. They would’ve had to shut it down from inside. But how?”

“You would believe anything complicated.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s your theory?”

“No theory. I just don’t bother chasing after dreams.”

“So, what, we do nothing? Just let every terrorist have their way?”

“What do you expect to find?”

“Anything. A perp.”

“Hardly such a thing. It is only a dream.”

“Why do you keep saying that? What, the Network dreams?” Alis could feel the part of her brain that listens turning off, and she let it.

“The Sleeper dreams. Last night, one of its dreams burst open. Loud. Violent. Seventy-five souls unwound. An ugly consequence.”

“Consequence of what?—actually, no,” Alis forced out her recall in frustration. “I don’t even know why I’m talking to you, you’re a nutjob.”

“You’re the one who believes in dreams.”

“At least I don’t believe in magic, wizard.”

The train arrived in a flurry of activity, and Alis crowded in. The wizard didn’t board, but only looked at her as the crowd seemed to flow seamlessly around him, as if he weren’t a part of it. She forced herself to look away.

2

She rode three stops and got off at the closest station to the three-line incident. It was another five blocks to walk. She could take the overground shuttle, but opted not to. It was a nice day.

When she got there, it was a mess. They’d cleared the entryway, cleared the bodies, but everything else was presumably as it had been when the dust settled. What was she expected to do? Stroll through the wreckage, stroking her chin until something occurred to her?

She found the place where the bomb had detonated. About two thirds down the car, beneath the floor. This was an old model, one of those lines the train manager never bothered to retrofit because the neighborhood wasn’t rich enough.

She brushed the dust aside. There it was: a tiny scorch mark, a little off-center. A seed point. Whoever planted the bomb hadn’t needed a powerful device, just a tap.. The coil took the hit, panicked, and dumped its stored charge into the next coil down the line. That one panicked too. And then the next. And the next. This part of the train was the most intact. In fact, according to the report, it was exactly where the only surviving passenger had stood.

She checked the net. There was only one other line that still used this technology. That’s where she was headed next. It took her an hour to ride across town to Meridian Station. She realized then that the spark couldn’t have been installed while the train was in use. It would have had to have been out of service. A quick check determined that the train would be parked in the lot between three and six in the morning. She’d wait until then. Time to talk to that witness, then.

The witness turned up nothing, because the author was already well past the word limit, and needed to wrap it up.

Alis got some sleep and woke to her alarm around two in the morning. Before leaving, she switched off her neural link, severing her connection to the Wavelength. She made it to the train bay by three.

The night manager led her to the eight-line after she showed him her badge. She whispered thanks and creeped toward the train. The overheads inside the car were half-lit, in power-saving mode. The dim light made it look like nothing else in the world existed. She made her way silently into the car.

The maintenance hatch near the midpoint was open. She stopped to listen. Machinery clicked softly against itself inside—quick, nervous, practiced. Someone working at something they’d done before. Could just be someone doing their job.

As she came closer, she could see a man crouched inside, shoulders hunched within a coat full of holes, his back to her. His hands were buried in the induction spine, fitting a tiny device against the center coil. The seed. The tap for the cascade.

She didn’t announce herself. She didn’t need to. He sensed her as her shadow fell across the panel. He gasped, twisted around, eyes wide, breath caught in his throat. Realization broke across his expression. He raised his hands in the air when he saw the gun clutched at her side.

Right, the gun. She hadn’t even realized she’d drawn it. Why the gun? She thought. Why give it to her, if not to use it? This man had killed seventy-five people in cold blood. He planned to kill hundreds more. He deserved to die. She shook her head to clear it, looked into his eyes. She fired. The dry, hollow concussion rang out against the metal rails and buzzed in the air for a few seconds before dying out. The man’s body crumpled inside the compartment, his hands reaching for her as if asking for something. His mouth quivered as he formed words.

“But… I never saw you coming…”

She flipped her neural link back on. She found the man’s signature without much trouble, although it was rapidly withdrawing from existence along with the body’s final breaths.

She retreated into the Wavelength, searching back along his trail. It wasn’t just programming, the link was more than that. She could chase the man just as if she were following footsteps in sand. She didn’t need to go far, once she’d caught the scent. If you were unknown, hiding was effortless. Once anonymity disappeared, every move made meaning. Like that.

She’d found it. Stuffed in along the edges of something like a tapeworm; it was just a slip, a needle wedged into an unremarkable corner of the Bare-Minimum. But it had broken something, something important. And it was embedded, camouflaged in the substrate lattice where Elnor’s oldest self-correcting routines slept like sediment. A bug that looked like a leaf. So clever. 

It was a simple thing to take apart. It was just a loop, self-attentive, like a whirlpool. An eddy that tied the Bare-Minimum back into itself, redirected its attention—if it could be said to have such a thing—so that it created a blind spot. But as soon as she pulled at it—decided on a beginning and tugged from there, the whole thing slipped back into innocuity.

She could almost feel it physically, as if she were the bomb being defused, as if Elnor itself was reaching inside her and switching her off. She could feel thousands of souls blotting out uncertainty in the near near future, and she breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

Critical Reflection

“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” —Virginia Woolf

“Is there nothing to ‘get back to,’ since the problem is not that things are truly distant, but that they are in our face—they are our face?” —Timothy Morton

This story concerns Alis Reacher, a detective investigating a bombing in a highly public district of Rotassa, the techno-capital of a thriving metropolis run by a mysterious non-entity called Elnor. I intended to focus more on hyperobjects as straddling multiple parallel worlds/dimensions (viz. Mieville’s The City and the City), but this did not come to pass. It shows up marginally in Alis’ conversation with the “wizard,” but was not fully explored.

Instead, what seems to be explored are the divisions between hyperobjective reality (or, “truth”) and human meaning-making. Elnor, the network, the hyperobject of this story, has no direction or intention; everything is simply a consequence of the network. Nothing can be proven about a hyperobject, because any measurement of it only measures its imprint on the observable world. It can only be appreciated “at the network level,” and thus requires “vast amounts of computation” to model.

Alis makes meaning based on specific circumstances and actors, and uses these pieces to craft a model of reality. This is one answer to the struggle to understand hyperobjects. This is the same struggle that Margo struggled with in New Waves, and that James Bridle elucidates in New Dark Age:

Consensus—such as the broad scientific agreement around the urgency of the climate crisis—is disregarded in the face of the smallest quantum of uncertainty. We find ourselves locked in a kind of stasis, demanding that Zeno’s arrow hit the target even as the atmosphere before it warms and thickens. The insistence upon some ever-insufficient confirmation creates the deep strangeness of the present moment: everybody knows what’s going on, and nobody can do anything about it.

And “that’s what workplace discrimination looked like. You could feel it everywhere—in your brain, in your heart, in your bones—but you could never prove it.” Margo faces workplace discrimination. Unfortunately, there is an impossible, interminable burden of truth placed on her understanding of that experience, and her ability to explain it to others. “When she’d look at the world more broadly you could see her trying to piece it all together, but it was just too much at times. Systems of sexism, systems of racism, systems of social class, all interlocking…” Computers can only produce truth from the data directly available to them. And while Margo’s experience proves to her that she experiences discrimination, it cannot extend beyond that. The effects of hyperobjects are vast, distributed, and unevenly perceptible, making them easy to doubt even as their consequences saturate reality. Any kind of proof is already only part of the hyperobject’s ‘whole.’ The advice of the wizard means nothing to Alis because it contains no concrete fragment she can model. What she can know is not Elnor’s “truth” but the patterns of disturbance it leaves behind. This is why the story unfolds the way it does, why it has a plot, and a solution. It is why she kills the terrorist in the end, and who’s to say she’s wrong to do so?

Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian philosopher who was discovered by the Theosophical Society and groomed to become the vessel of the “World Teacher,” but later left the society because he had found an explanation for the universe that was much simpler. Conscious thought, he posited, is a spatial and temporal division between the thinker and the world. Spatial in that distance is created by human thought, and temporal in that human thought necessarily acts upon memory, i.e., the past. Krishnamurti spoke of an experience of eliminating thought and simply paying attention to the world without abstracting it. “The moment the guru says he knows, then you may be sure he doesn’t know. Because what he knows is something past … therefore it is not real.” “The quality of a mind that sees the whole is not touched by thought; therefore there is perception.” When one ceases to think, the only thing they perceive is the observed; the only content of the brain is the observed, therefore the observer becomes the observed. Thought, he believes, is the basis of conflict, because thought is division, and without division there can be no conflict.

Throughout history, millions of people have spent countless hours trying to grasp, understand, and eliminate this division they feel with the rest of the world. The wall that prevents them from seeing clearly. Camus concluded that it was impossible, that upon reaching the bottom of things, they slip away; “the world evades us because it becomes itself again.” The context is worth considering for what it says about objects:

A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is “dense,” sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again.

Italo Calvino follows in Camus’ absurdist footsteps in If on a winter’s night a traveler when Irnerio, who has escaped the “slavery” of the written word, remarks that “you must look at [the words], intensely, until they disappear.” Calvino even comes very close to Krishnamurti’s death of the image when he muses on “a relationship with the physicality of things, not with an intellectual or affective idea that takes the place of seeing them and touching them.”

Authors throughout history have come to it from the perspective of the writing process. Darko Suvin used the term “novum,” to refer to those story elements that generate “cognitive estrangement.” Gillian Rose noticed this when describing her colostomy, remarking that it “is comparatively easy to put into prose, because it is likely to be utterly unfamiliar.”

T.S. Eliot may have been thinking of a different process when he wrote wistfully in Little Gidding:

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

But he may well have been speaking of the same experience.

Morton experiences something of a similar transcendent experience when listening to My Bloody Valentine, although we both might object to that term. He describes this music as “a viscous sonic latex,” noting that 

I do not attune to My Bloody Valentine. Rather, My Bloody Valentine attunes to me, pursuing my innards, searching out the resonant frequencies of my stomach, my intestines, the pockets of gristle in my face.

Ignoring the fact that Morton’s metaphors often betray his own compulsively rigorous vocabulary, what Morton seems to be experiencing is something like Krishnamurti’s observed-observer. Immersed in Kevin Shield’s wall of sound, the mind doesn’t follow the music, but, in the absence of consciousness, it becomes the music because there is no temporal gap between each note of grinding guitar and its processing by the conscious mind.

I must eliminate the critical distance to say that I have experienced what Krishnamurti speaks of, the collapse of the division between observer and observed when the mind falls silent. Nothing can be said about it because it comes exclusively from the absence of language, the absence of abstraction.

The characters in Lazy Gun live in a world that has incorporated networks, to some extent, into their understanding of the world. Yet they still grapple with what it means (or whether it means anything). The story begins with a death to ground it in human experience, and to broach the question about what matters, which, in the end, seems to be a purely personal question. It can’t be answered by asking the gods of this universe, because those gods, those hyperobjects, are a part of us, and we of them. There is no distinction except that which is imposed by the limitations of our perception.

Amy recalls a passage from Shirley Hazzard’s book The Transit of Venus before she dies: “the deed of death has no hypothetical existence—or, having its hypothesis in everyone, must be enacted to achieve meaning.” Really, this thought is only a question, and can only be a question: is death a hyperobject? Certain realities remain abstractions until they are lived. Death, like a hyperobject, is universally known yet fundamentally unknowable; it has meaning only when an individual encounters it directly. Meaning arises only in the immediacy of lived experience, in the moment when abstraction becomes actuality. Just as the hyperobject cannot be grasped except through its localized effects, death cannot be understood except in its enactment. To some extent, maybe, that yawning horror that dawns whenever the mind drives to pierce that “denseness” of the world at its bottom, the vulnerability of trying to see the world, global warming, or the internet in its entirety is terrifying because it is a kind of death. Krishnamurti observes that “to die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself,” and to be empty, it is filled with what actually is. As Morton notes, “When the inside of a thing coincides perfectly with its outside, that is called dissolution or death.” 

And it is important to realize the unthinkableness of even one death, let alone millions, when each one is its own unique event, at the horizon of meaninglessness and infinite meaning.

Works Cited

Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Verso, 2018.

Calvino, Italo. If on a winter’s night a traveler. Mariner Books Classics, 1982.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays. Vintage Books, 1955.

Eliot, T.S. “Little Gidding,” in The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. Harcourt, Brace, and World Inc., 1971.

Hazzard, Shirley. The Transit of Venus. Penguin Books, 1990.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu. The Awakening of Intelligence. Harper & Row, 1987.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu. Freedom From the Known. HarperSanFrancisco, 1969.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Nguyen, Kevin. New Waves: A Novel. One World Publications: 2020.

Rose, Gillian. Love’s Work. Vintage, 1997.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press, 1979.

Woolf, Virginia. Diary entry (January 18, 1915), quoted in Rebecca Solnit, “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable,” The New Yorker, April 24, 2014.