Graywolf Lab

From II

Automated exoskeletons supplied to enhance mobility and proficiency during combat thrust themselves from their storage chambers, and the troops slid into them in a choreographed manner. As they psyched each other up for their imminent deployment in a near future far-East Asian megacity, Mitchell and his buddies were rudely interrupted by the commander at the helm of this mission——cutscenes in games were tedious to Dylann, he preferred to cut straight to the action. Fingers gliding over plastic buttons with the deftness of a pianist. Ever an expression of calm. Eyes too distant to trouble the rest of his face. He’d conceivably reached some rarified level of synaptic cognition and played XXXX at its optimal speed without missing a beat and seemed to sync with the general cadence of his primed engagement with time established during service. The control key beneath his thumb on the illuminated keyboard, aided a shift in attention to another window on screen, rarely, if ever, acknowledging the supposed importance of ambient light to support long hours in front of a PC monitor’s glare. With blinds often closed, he’d barely registered when the sun would set. His sky had long since darkened and for now this is how things would be——any light in his life came from jittery hyper-saturated open worlds facing him from the other side of the screen. One of a litany of therapists he’d stuck with for more than a couple of sessions, had suggested, maybe dubiously, that this way of living he’d fallen into, in which he wouldn’t venture outside at least not during the day, might not be so damaging in the short term, and if he’d prefer to avoid removing the dark blanket covering his sky for now, if this is what he needed to do, then, so be it. Odd odd advice and this therapist seemed odder than the others. He’d acquired a decent enough sample size to gauge how psychotherapy professionals seemed to get into the business to deal with their own shit, or not, as the case might be, but rather to project their own pain onto others. A mimetic dalliance. A kind of mirroring that he thought, as he studied them, could never really be more than a temporary solution——surely. This therapist, the one suggesting he needn’t go outside if he didn’t want to, almost certainly suffered from an eating disorder, immediately discernible from her sunken cheeks and the dark valleys beneath her eyes and the way she, so sadly, and spindly, sat cross-legged in gaunt angles, which brewed a sadness in Dylann he didn’t run from, but rather, was drawn to, so he stuck around longer than he did with any of the others. He sensed, like him, she also didn’t sleep well. Each of their handful of sessions, without fail, came with an awkward silence at some point and almost always when he’d stop speaking. This pause would be interrupted by her stomach letting out a long and strained growl. They’d both sit quietly listening as it unfurled its sad song which couldn’t exist, and neither would overtly acknowledge the sound, but respect it enough to finish before continuing the session. His therapist’s advice might have come from a place of resignation. An understanding on her part, that there were limitations to the capabilities of her profession and at least for now, whatever treatment she might administer——all those treatments tried and tested and approved over the many years of analyses and research within the chartered halls of psychoanalytical study, would do little at this moment, to shift Dylann’s low-lying black cloud which clung to its place with great fervency.
            The decrepit world now his, given to him by the army, was a mud pit where the mind sat and where it stayed, abandoned; an old, rusting automobile, long since bought, utilised as publicly governed machinery, endemic and necessary, then discarded. For the present, alone with his cloud, Dylann stayed inside and kept life small. Swaddled by a world of pixels, a Technicolor dream-coat of ideas augmenting simulations of his dreams, all those dreams he may not now ever have. Community could be found in the game. Friends of varying temporal value and mostly only visible as spectres, or fellow soldier sprites running and crouching alongside him, taking hits and dishing out crunchy synthesised violence onto autonomous foes creeping and plotting along a series of patterned behaviours that they, Dylann and associates, studied and mastered by imagining and then predicting how these automated enemies might think. He considered these communities more engaging than the fearful fuckers outside living slovenly and blissfully unaware of anything beyond the length of the disruptive imported grasses on their front lawns. He’d returned to the country acutely aware of their ignorance. Everything seemed larger, more outsized, more ridiculous with much less purpose. Inane conversations about pointless irrelevant things. Excess. Deadening convenience. Limited moral comprehension. Conservatism born of and maintained by absence. Absence of needing to comprehend a world beyond their heated seats. How frictionless were their lives; consumptive, of no discernible purpose. He grappled with the claustrophobia of all this and the permanence of black cloud which had followed him home from the oil-smoked desert. As if, they were earthworms, he’d thought of the people around him, neighbours tucked away in their homes, tending their yards, blindly chewing through dirt. No. No. Not earthworms. Earthworms consumed in a cyclical manner, adding something. Nutrients given back to the earth which in turn fed into the cyclical energy of soil, in turn enabling plant life to thrive and offer full colour ranges, understanding and influence. His neighbours didn’t do anything like that. The nearest they got was separating their waste into the correct recycling cans. They’d only do fear they were told to do, every day, every minute. Reign in life and its cycles. Sometimes Dylann would involuntarily shudder when his choices reared. Regret was futile, yes, but that he’d given his body and mind up for this flaccid, bloated, slow-moving mess wasn’t any more a regret, but an illumination. From here on now, he found himself so often trapped between worlds, where momentary liberation existed for him in these nether environments, where actions and desires shape-shifted, and offered momentary hits of something, which felt like something real, something almost physical. It was, he’d readily admit, a dependency, and one at the time he’d considered beautiful, in the same way a heroin addict might consider the inside of their eye-lids beautiful after a hit, when all the colours on the screen fight against their fractal forms within the warm brown – but not black – darkness that looks so much deeper and more infinite than simply a thin film of skin covering the eyes. A darkness in which he can soar and cut through series of procedurally generated geometric forms and architectures laid before him, as if imagined, not predestined or predetermined; one lane unfolding on the horizon to reach, to touch another, on to a cluster of trees which one should not look at too closely and discover generative repetition fluttering to a frame rate the eye typically cannot move quickly enough to discern. So it mattered not that some things in his life now would always be the same, that imagination was limited, and there was only so much minds like his, trained in this way, fed and watered as such, could take. To Dylann there was something beautiful in the repetition of his new (but old) life, serving as a way to keep him somewhat intact, even if the night wouldn’t ever cease.