"The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time."
Have you heard about false memory syndrome? It’s a giggle. I’m looking forward to using it as a brain hack once we get out of here alive. Rewire the pre-frontal cortex, trick it in to thinking we lived through Covid in a ranch with a pool and a herd of wild horses we rode around looking for wild mushrooms and exotic fruit like some ancient cowboys and girls.
We’ll be experimental neuroscientists bio-hacking the lockdown brain, erasing memories, splicing new ones together from old VHS uploaded onto YouTube. In years to come we’ll look back on the glorious days of lockdown like Atilla the Hun on the fall of Rome.
“Alice,” I’ll say as we sit on SpaceX Diablo, observing the Earth from our voyage to the upper Ionosphere. “Do you remember the dazzling days of lockdown? They were the best of times.”
“Of course I do,” Alice will say. “Those hours on the ranch, your obsession with science and old man music and sport. Set me on the road to where I am now.”
“Speaking of location,” I will say. “Where exactly are we?”
“I’m not really sure,” Alice will say,
“You’re not sure? You’re the damn pilot.”
And then Apocalypse Mommy will come into the cockpit with a Singapore sling and a mysterious smile and say, “We’re in space. And it’s all your fault Apocalypse Daddy.”
"How soon will time cover all things, and how many it has covered already."
The happiness diary was a mishmash of reality, reincarnation and obscure dietary references. Alice said she was happy for neighbours not having the microbe, being a diamond in a previous life and the idea of having maple syrup instead of milk on her cereal when she is big.
And cake. Forever going on about cake. Cake and ice-cream. Like broken fucking dairy addicts.
“But Daddy, life is cake.”
“What flavour?”
And Alice said chocolate and rolled her eyes.
Back in the intoxicating early days of lockdown, when hope and joy and the sense that humanity was actually honourable and connected, before the reality of homeschooling had destroyed the veil, there had been rules in our house.
The memory is hazy. Time stopped functioning how it once did on day three. The rules were something like:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws
I was confusing Issac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics with the home school curriculum. I needed more coffee. And more coffee.
“Alice,” I said. “It’s time for school. Let’s build the Solar System.”
Alice was already at the table, painting her teeth.
“Don’t paint your teeth Alice,” I said. “No really, don’t paint your teeth.”
“But it lasts longer than brushing.”
“We’re building the Solar System. Paint your teeth later. What do we need?”
“Planets,” Alice said, putting the paint down. “Mercury, Venus, Earth. Look Daddy, I can hop.”
A meteorite crashed into a moon. Supernova exploded a billion years ago. Light from stars that no longer existed shone on the eyes of cave dwellers as they looked up at the ancient sky.
She was a hulking mass of brain matter sucking up information and habits and culture like a goddamn Dyson vortex. She wouldn’t need to re-wire her brain at the end of lockdown; she was living in paradise. All she did was laugh and jump and play and eat ice-cream and chocolate and paint.
And I came to the same conclusion: I wouldn’t need to create a fictitious account of lockdown either. No fiction was as real as this reality. And then I cut my finger cutting solar flares out of yellow craft paper.
Alice wasn’t following the Three Laws of Robotics. I asked her if we were building this solar system to scale. She didn’t know what I meant, so I asked her how big the Sun was.
She thought on this like any eminent three-nearly-four year old astrophysicist would. “The sun is the size of a cat.”
“A cat?”
“A big cat. Like a lion, or the neighbour’s cat.”
“If the sun is a cat, then we wouldn’t be able to see the Earth. Mercury and Venus? Well, you can forget about them.”
“Forget, like Pluto?”
“No, forget because you won’t be able to see them.”
“Why not?”
“Because the sun is a cat.”
“Pluto is like Schrödinger’s cat. Sometimes there, sometimes not. I’m glad our sun is not Schrödinger’s cat.”
"How quickly things disappear: in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the memory of them."
We chopped up the rings of Saturn. “They’re made of ice,” I said.
“No,” Alice said, cutting a giant storm three thirds of the way down Jupiter. “They’re not. They would melt. The sun is hot hot hot.”
“You should work for NASA,” I said. “You could fly a space ship.”
“I want to be a vet, Daddy. Or a baker. Or whoever makes cakes.”
“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.”