I’m working on a story about a guy who never wants to leave the house. He wants only to stay at home watching the perpetual broadcast on tv of a story about long-distance space travel. The story is called Emerson-528.
In my attempt to work out this fiction, another narrative interfered, one with a sympathetic artificial intelligence voice. This, and life itself, have caused some delay in bringing Emerson-528 to light.
Among the delays, I took time out to read Sentinel by Art Clarke, followed by the novel that took this short story to its climax – 2001: a Space Odyssey. The novel was written alongside the Stan Kubrick film of the same name.
Clarke’s story about Hal-9000, the AI concept who tried to kill his astronauts, added more mystery than I can handle with regards to interstellar travel. Time… distance… the universe itself all contain impossible sizes and proportions beyond the reach of my small imagination.*
It’s no wonder I need to create a character whose strongest desire is to simply be at home (not to boldly go… as Capt Kirk would wrongly say).
This protagonist has no name, but for these purposes I’ll call him Fred.**
Keeping Fred at home allows me to control his exposure to upsetting phenomena. I can let him listen to his favorite podcast or tune into Emerson-528 with a Coke and a smile, avoiding the bother of pleasing his bosses at work, hearing grocery-store muzac, driving with a squint toward the winter sun, sitting at red lights with no crossing traffic as the bass one car over throbs in his ears, or splashing through rain to reach a crowded restaurant with a long line of indecisive diners and cranky kids who should be home in bed on a Saturday night and not being fed chicken nuggets off the Olive Garden children’s menu.
These kinds of nuisances.
Keeping Fred at home allows him to decompress and compartmentalize all the unnerving stimuli that accost the average earthling when this author forces him out the front door to shop for a couch or silence the leaf blower guy or have his oil changed; expedite an urgent letter at the post office or get his eyes examined or God forbid have a colonoscopy and other procedures at that gross cluster of buildings now known as the medical center.
Fred can stare in bliss at zero gravity life with a faint digital tone beeping like an intermittent pulse with the reassurance that all systems are go, the nutrient supply is holding up, and the trajectory is on target for some distant future point and mission on which he has not been fully briefed, but which he will perform nobly and correctly because his handlers chose him precisely for this work years ago, in a time where all that is now past has no bearing his purpose.
Breathe.
Relax.
A leaf on a stream in a brilliant autumn, a voyager in a spacecraft hurtling toward the expanding edge of the universe.
–
*I think of Obama, in better times for this nation, opining to a staffer that more stars fill the heavens above than grains of sand cover the beaches on earth.
**As a Fred, he would have parade-route privileges with a group called The Marching Freds in Miami’s annual King Mango Strut, which is a real thing since 1984 or so, and an event our homebody is unlikely to want to participate in except for the important fact that he can do so anonymously as one of several dozen people named Fred, who can be white, black, or of other race, straight, gay, or trans if they wish; its all up to them!
##
Ben East Books 
Leave a comment