Apartment 8
gabrielfelipejacomel.near
•You curse the fucking smart home
•Start to force the door open
•The mansion says in a slurred voice: Unauthorized entry, sir
•You go around and force the other doors open
•The slurred voice repeats: unauthorized entry, sir
Luiz Bras, “•You leave the business arena two million poorer”
Abstract: Apartment 8 is a 8m2 kitchenette with body dysmorphia and the desire to lose weight. Slimming down to disappear from this planet that hasn’t made sense to her for a long time. She even thinks that it wouldn’t be all bad if the Great Darkness came more quickly, that it would be good, anyway, not to see herself (and the world) that way.
Keywords: Real state speculation; dream of owning a home; agrarian reform; everyday slips that lead to cataclysms.
Only one of the moons seemed to insist on reflecting any glow, waning. For the rest, the entire planet, for the first time in its history of very few adventures, was in almost complete darkness. Every light in every household would go out in mourning for a minute, and even the dogbots’ eyes gave a truce in their patrol. Dangerous? Now probably yes. But it was the only act capable of giving meaning to the mourning of an entire world that felt its days of peace and tranquility were past.
A dogbot almost instinctively lit the lights in his eyes when he thought he heard something coming from the alley that flanked the victim’s property. He felt the eyes of other dogbots that were now watching the place, fusillading his snout, without emitting a single photon. A shiver ran to the tip of the tail, not even half a minute of near-total eclipse on e-mobile had passed.
It was an almost immediate relief when a neighbor - a low-rise building with gray paint peeling in disrepair, crooked, kind of toothless windows, with those old mud roofs in ^ that made it look like the building was pulling his hat in a gesture of desperation -, few seconds before the minute-of-silence-and-darkness was complete, and in a contagious ecstasy in the neighborhood, he lit up, as if bursting with fireworks, one, two, all the lights in his rooms, floor by floor.
The incandescence spread as each building passed the torch to the next, waves of bioluminescent plankton sweeping the darkness of the night, increasingly present in e-mobile. No more! The answer came from within each house, no other lights would be turned off. The Great Darkness was terribly real and the countless buildings on this planet, in an unprecedented gesture, will leave any and all sources of light turned on at maximum power, forever. Surrounded by the eye lights of a dozen dogbots, only one smart real estate remained unlit, even after several attempts at resuscitation and restart by the Central: it was the first death in e-mobile.
Apartment 8 thought it was all a farce! What was that whole scene?! Ridiculous. gaudy. Too big, anyway. Quite an offense to her minimalist principles. Apartment 8 nearly throws up as she zaps, bewildered, through the cameras of other buildings, a sequence of doors that lead nowhere. Even worse is activating the dogs’ cameras and taking external takes of this 360º baroque that is out there. Nausea. Not even watching the Grand Prix of BioArchitecture, or anything else of the tiny content from the rest of the galaxy that notch up here, has motivated Apartment 8 for a long time. Who has been in this situation for days - of not seeing any screen, of turning off the main switch.
Of note, on the little planet, ironically located in the Macondo Arm, there is a consolidated and generalized habit of watching television, whose vision of the millions of security cameras that watch the endless buildings forms an oceanic kaleidoscope of channels, which can be organized by color grading or other graphic patterns. You can choose any of these cameras as your main screen, or even program groupings of images from rooms across the planet to the aforementioned settings, with subtle and welcome smart overhauls along the way. It’s as if the most badass Big Data apparatus released a baby in the world with the absolute screensaver, really fine stuff. One can imagine that this television system stimulates gossip among the inhabitants of the planet; curiously, it’s something that makes everyone very calm. Really safe.
It was the closest the hardy e-mobile denizens came to the hypertelepathy present in much of the known universe. That, and the meager television content that comes from other planets. As a matter of fact, nobody is usually very interested in what goes on here; and the converse is true. However, to ensure that, the alarm system is reinforced in almost every home – which makes the planet relatively prosperous in terms of security, no one can doubt it. A class mentality prevails here, even a fear that sharing the “big picture” with any other being, which includes zoomorphic robots, in short, the whole pack of dogs, make them smell a cat, with the forgiveness of infamy, so that the generalized information ends up being well delimited to the square meters of the buildings. Dogbots are reporters, bullshit hounds, in short. In the rare moments when something happens out there. And facilitators of delivery, extraction, construction, eternal construction services. Notaries full of disputes about subdivisions, land grabbing, usufruct, adverse possession and vagrancy. Kinda rocambolesque processes
of buildings
housing buildings
that house condominiums
in the form of stairs that lead
to those
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Otherwise, a very peaceful and quiet community. Prone to the stability of what endures. Over the ages, along with the honorable history of a planet where skyscrapers see no limit to break into space!
Of course, there are also houses in e-mobile. However, taking into account the small size of the planet, the sight of the few houses that inhabit it is considered the ultimate state of small thinking. Nothing close to the immense and intricate Russian dolls that are formed with bricks, reinforced concrete, mirrored glass, their doubles and such. Buildings that writhe on the horizon as in a mating dance to generate more buildings (buildings pregnant with buildings?), in twists that look like they came out of a drunk Frank Gehry’s studio (ah, this obsession with Other Earths architecture!). The kitchenette of Apartment 8, in the midst of all this, seems to have been built, with care, with the strictest refinements of cruelty, and no one can explain exactly why.
Not that there aren’t a plethora of tiny kitchenettes there. It’s just that these are usually obscenely intertwined with one another, concrete termite mounds, while Apartment 8 is this little thing on the ground floor, with nothing on top and so insignificant in relation to her surroundings that, at first, you think you’re only looking at a dimly lit alley, a gap in the matrix. Not that this bothers Apartment 8 which, as we know, dreams of being even more invisible. And thinks this planet is long gone, that something went terribly wrong way back there, and now it’s just downhill, no matter how tall the buildings are. As smart as all the properties that inhabit this place are, Apartment 8 has the feeling that she knows something more, a recent sensation. It lacks life here. Something more.
A kind of call coming from the blank screens, the air filled with electricity. Poltergeist that loomed over the noise of the dogs outside, whose moving beams of light suggested flickers of unease.
Apartment 8 heard, with all clarity in the world, and only she seemed to hear. A message, perhaps too late, from the only hypertelepath on board: It’s over!
In the only apartment where the light refused to turn on, it was as if the most powerful of the spotlights were turned on, coming from above. Some say it was projected right over the ceiling of Apartment 8. Anyway, easily filling those few square meters with light, flooding every crack in the curtain, every opening in a door or window. As if harvesting, levitating, abducting. The kitchenette insisting on keeping the structures attached to the floor, but, in a glitch in The Interface, faltering.
And the televisions of each property within another transmitted in a trance, through the lens of an infinity of dogbots, the overwhelming ballet of finitude. Like in slow motion. Like waltzing with Strauss. This giant spaceship, at least twice the size of an e-mobile, pure light that materialized out of nowhere in the atmosphere of the little planet - coming at full speed. And destroying everything. Ship and little planet, last firework of the last New Year’s Eve of the universe.
