Harry Lai

Cracked Screen

We were on the beach at night. The sheets of ice whittled into thin embroidered curtains, blown slanted along the constant wind, and I could make out the silhouette of my brother’s cavortions, his laggy movements accentuated by the flickers in my frame. As time slowed, the waves became thunderously loud, as heaven’s frequencies poured out the sky. My brother lifted his arms in an obtuse angle and leapt forward, and I thought he would be lifted with the wind and be swallowed by the frothy maw of the ocean. His body suspended mid-jump and stayed there for half a second, then he fell in a violent stumble, small tremors of energy rolling up the sheets of snow like the bottom of a wedding dress. He stayed on the ground, nearly still, such that I thought either he or I had froze, but I could feel the cold lash my ears, and the waves rose like the time lapse of mountains we saw in class, and as I got closer, I heard his ragged breath, feel beating in his chest, receive his thoughts which furtively pebbled my mind yet never solidified to coherence.

I saw a spire I’d never seen, a tall building on the island to the North. Had the snow abated, or was it the fatigue of time, I didn’t know, but I could make out its broad cracks and rust, which crawled alongside the rotation of the light at its peak. The light sharpened in reflections of the snow, the opposite of headlights in fog; I was reminded of the time I walked in the streets on a rainy night and a car nearly ran me over, and the LEDs shined warm rainbows in the fog, and my nylon jacket glittered with embers, and I stayed still, sparks of drift scraping my boots; I peered at my reflection on the murky waters of the bullet proof window, and I took a screenshot.

The light hit us. Little eruptions of red burst into my frame, and it felt as if little sewing needles were thrust into my pupils, and I slammed my gloves onto my eyes, feeling overwhelmed. After an excruciating few seconds, I lifted my eyes again, and the trees, the rocks, and my brother all had faint blurs on their outlines. I never knew that light could hurt us. The LEDs could tire us, but only after hours of sustained viewing. Never like this. I looked up at the edifice and it seemed larger and more imposing then before, and I darted my gaze sharply at the light to see that it had rotated a couple of degrees away from us. What purpose could such a structure have? I couldn’t tell if my brother noticed, as he laid in the snow. the hood of his jacket covering his face.

A boat emerged from behind the island. It had a construction of rotted and rotting wood, and a triangular sheet of fabric stood from its base like a flag. As it slowly rotated around the island, I noticed the outline of a figure standing on the boat, completely still. I tried to tell my brother to get up, but my words fell short. Time was moving slower. As I slowly labored up the sand towards the embankment of trees, the snow went from sharp patters to dull thuds on my jacket, and the cold clasped my body like a corset. The boat seemed to slow alongside me, but as the figure was about to direct its gaze towards us, I dove behind the nearest tree, where the storm had shown mercy and there was patches of dark green moss.

Leaned against the roots of the tree, lie a rectangular object(Height 140 mm Width 70 mm Depth 7 mm). As I peered closer and my eyes adjusted to the change in light, I recoiled backwards and slammed my left shoulder into the trunk of a tree. There was an eye on the ground. A large, rectangular eye. I thought I might be succumbing to the madness I was warned about. Hesitantly, I reached down and picked up the eye.

It came to life. A detached eye to came life, glowing into a view of the night sky with green and purple fire burning through it and a text of the time, 10:35 PM, on top of the view like how we sometimes saw warnings on the sky of the spread of toxins in inhabitable areas. This view was different from the information I received from my brother, without emotions or thoughts. I didn’t know who could’ve created this sky and for what purpose, and why they shared it with me. I considered that I wasn’t looking at an eye or the thoughts of any living creature, that I was looking at a portal, a ghost, or an aberration of my mind. I hadn’t ever seen an sky like that.

I touched the eye with my numb finger, feeling the smooth surface within my bone, when the eye changed its reception from the sky to a feed of the ocean, though during the day, with green waves palm trees in the background. As I moved my finger around the eye, the images kept flashing of not just setting, but of people, men, women, and children of all ages, none of which I recognized. It was as if I controlled what came into the eye, like how the satellites controlled what I saw. I stuffed the eye into my pants pocket.

I looked up at my brother, who still stumbled around the snow, laughing and spinning, completely oblivious to my discovery. The hood of his jacket was off and he wore a diadem of snow on his messy hair. The cold seemed not to bother him at all, in fact, the stronger the cold the more joyful he became. My brother, who always wore a stoic face and evaporated in crowds, now in hysteric glee. He always believed that the purest state of being was one unfiltered by machines, it didn’t matter how painful it was, if it was natural.

The boat anchored itself onto the shore, and a figure walked towards us. My body tensed as I realized the figure didn’t disperse any radio signals, something I’ve never experienced in another human. Maybe this wasn’t a human, but one of our famed ancestors who didn’t have the ability to communicate through radio waves. Although they unnerved me, the person didn’t appear dangerous, as they held their arms and shivered in the cold, despite their huge winter jacket.

The humanlike figure raised its arm to the air and moved it from side to side. I didn’t know what they were reaching for, but whatever it was, I couldn’t see it. Maybe they were also losing their minds, maybe the cold had destroyed their brains and rendered their radio signals void. I could see their hollow cheeks and purple, cracked lips from beneath their fur hood. I tried to take a screenshot of this person, but when I did, they vanished from the image and all I could only see the moon, the waves, the snow, the beacon of light.

They opened their mouth, as if taking a deep breath of air, and began to make strange, ugly sounds. I wish I could turn off my microphone, but that wasn’t an option. We never made noises with our mouths, an action only animals used to communicate with one another. I suddenly felt very repulsed by whatever this thing was, and I wanted to tell my brother that we were getting out of here, but my messages wouldn’t reach, and even if they did, he was too enraptured in the snow to pay attention.

They took out a shiny metal object from their jacket. It was another rectangular eye, similar to the one I found by the tree. They motioned at my pants pocket, and so I took out the one I had. The person beckoned for me to give me the eye, and deciding that this person was strange but harmless, I gave them it. They wrote a personal ID onto the frame of the eye, and wrote that I could type in their ID onto the eye to communicate with them, and I should do so on the green box of the eye. Then they handed me back the eye, and I stood in shock as they walked back onto their boat and sailed off into the sea.

…

My brother’s boots made dull clanks as I dragged his slack body across the wooden planks of the pier. The sky was clear and evenly blue; The spire of light was gone, and the sky was normal and pleasant to look up at.

We reached the road. Unconsciously, my hand reached into my pocket. It felt something smooth and solid, and I pulled it out. My hand seemed to be well adjusted to this eye, holding it naturally like an extension of myself. The number from the stranger laid on the eye, looking up in anticipation. I touched the green box and the eye transformed into a series of circles with a number on each of them. I wrote the numbers on the eye, and when I wrote the last digit, I heard the rumbling of a car and screech of tires to a halt.

Large armored vehicle with bulletproof windows. Helmets with plexiglass visors on bulletproof vests. Gloves with guns. The eye on the concrete, smashed into rubber and titanium and iron and glass. My brother shot up into a pool of static. As I laid, my eyes failing and my vision blurred to white, I saw the spire again, and the sphere of light glowing and burning. It expanded into the edges of my frame and embraced me into nothing.

\

Many years ago, we lit up fireworks on the shore. I generated a small flame on my finger and bought it onto the fuse. As I ran back to my brother, the explosion knocked me on my back, and when I looked up, colors splattered across the canvas of the night sky, a forest of orange and red and blue in different saturations. I thought I was looking at myself, that I willed the fire onto my hand as a part of my being, projected it into the bundle of explosives, and the display of infinite color arrayed a close up image of my soul.

Life in the LED: The Loss of Individual Control and Struggle over Nature in Cracked Screen

This short story uses literary techniques learned from fiction such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower as well as from critical texts. It pays close attention to voice, making sure to consider what the narrator knows, and telling implicity about the world of the story. The narrator’s experiences which would lead to their associations, and the choice of diction in imagery would reflect that. The lack of dialogue, the length of sentences and paragraphs, are all be purposeful.

The formation for science fiction involves the gathering and extrapolation of ideas from the present. Samuel Delaney describes this process in his essay Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction from his book Starboard Wine. He writes that “In general, science-fictional ideas generate when a combination of chance and the ordinary suggests some distortion of the current and ordinary that can be conceivably rationalized as a future projection”(26). The story generates ideas from things experienced in the twenty first century. Nowadays, humans have large control over visual stimuli, through screens of phones and monitors, and audio stimuli, through speakers and headphones. Extrapolating this phenomenon, I considered a world in which humans had nearly full control over the senses through technology, to the point where it would form new realities. How would this affect the behavior and psychology of humans? Would the senses be controlled by individuals or by an authority? This idea still feels grounded because it involves experiences which most people can relate to. The methods of control are understandable because they involve things like radio waves and computers.

In the story, monuments serve as marker of difference between the narrator and the reader. Noticing the exponential growth of technology, and the quick erosion and forgetting of archaic technology in the real world, I wanted to make a world in which technology marks history and the passage of time, and technology is erased in ways that history gets erased today. The characters will notice things like smartphones and fail to recognize them because they are an alternative source of perception, and indicate a period of freedom in perception, which authority would want to censor. The narrator of the story didn’t know that the images on the smartphone, which he refers to as an “eye”, are even fake. In his essay In the Valley of the Time Tombs: Monumentality, Temporality, and History in Science Fiction, Raino Isto illustrates the different forms and purposes of monuments in science fiction, as indication and riddle of time and of humanity. He writes that monuments can be evidence of the past, the future, or of alternative timelines(491). The characters’ discoveries of technological monuments represent a past in which technology serves as an individually controlled form of perception rather than constituting it fully, as well as a parallel history which has been ongoing but censored by authority. Isto also notes the monument as a riddle for the changes in humanity which would lead its creation, and in the process of solving such a riddle we find a “broader allegory for the social and technological changes taking place in modernity”(497). The sun in the story subverts this, by being an always existing entity, but censored and turned into a monument which the narrator fails to understand. At the end of the story, the narrator’s dying brain begins to the see the sun again, as he’s released from the censorship of the society.

Cyborgs pervade science fiction as a trope representing isolation from society, as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Melissa Colleen Stevenson, in her essay Trying to Plug In: Posthuman Cyborgs and the Search for Connection, analyzes the role of cyborgs in science fiction. She offers examples of writers using the cyborg as “liberatory metaphor for connections between and among individuals, particular women, across traditionally opposed dichotomies”(87). Cyborgs can avoid social categorization, as well as the constructs and pressure with come with it, through their atypical bodies. However, Stevenson notes that this difference leads to the isolation and casting out of cyborgs. Additionally, by not being a apart of any social category, cyborgs struggle to contribute to cultural discourse, which leads to their societal disillusionment. The story presents a world in which everyone is a cyborg. This extrapolates from the idea that current humans are cyborgs as something like a smartphone would be an extension of a person’s being. The internet allows us to break from our corporeal selves to form new unhinged identities, but at the same time obstruct interpersonal cultural discourse. This is why the main character struggles to understand his brother, despite them both being raised in the same place at the same time. The story also subverts the technological as secondary discourse, as the stranger who’s fully human is rendered incomprehensible and dehumanized by the narrator.

Word choice helps tell the reader about the world without explicit depiction. I had the narrator illustrate things in “angles” and “frequencies”, and describe action in terms of technology e.g., “generated” following science fiction tropes of scientific jargon. The prose lacks emotional description and is focused on sensory description, which is fitting for the cyborg theme, which is commonly associated with apathy. This is not to say that the characters are emotionless, it could mean that they can only feel the physical symptoms of their emotions, or that in a place where the mind is permeable, it would be useful not to think about emotions. The narrator also shows acute attention to detail, due to his machine mind and its inability to designate senses in order of importance, he often describes things in their material essence. The reliance on physical description is also necessary for the narrator, who doesn’t recognize many of the objects he sees, and doesn’t have any name for them.

The end of the story plays an important part in the worldbuilding. The presence of police and killing of the brothers shows that the world is authoritative in its control of perception and communication. The flashback to the fireworks represents a moment of individual expression, the notion that one could form another entity that they could see, and they could call theirs. The tragedy is that this comes in the form of fireworks, meaning that our creative expression comes at the detriment of nature, and this expression is one created industrially and not actually originating from the individual.

Works Cited

Butler, O. E., & Jemisin, N. K. (2020). Parable of the sower. Grand Central Publishing.

Delany, Samuel R. Starboard Wine More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Rev. ed., Wesleyan University Press, 2012, pp. 26-34.

Isto. “In the Valley of the Time Tombs: Monumentality, Temporality, and History in Science Fiction.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, SF-TH, Inc, 2019, pp. 490–510, https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.46.3.0490.

Stevenson, Melissa Colleen. “Trying to Plug In: Posthuman Cyborgs and the Search for Connection.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, SF-TH Inc, 2007, pp. 87–105.