Next was a room full of boys' tanks and cars and trading cards, some
in careful packages and frames, some lovingly scuffed and beaten
up. They were from all eras, and he recognized some of his beloved
toys from his own boyhood among the mix. The items were arranged in
concentric rings -- one of the robots' default patterns for displaying
materials -- around a writhing tower of juddering, shuddering domestic
robots that had piled one atop the other. The vogue for these had been
mercifully brief, but it had been intense, and for Perry, the
juxtaposition of the cars and the cards, the tanks and the robots made
something catch in his throat. There was a statement here about the
drive to automate household chores and the simple pleasure of rolling
an imaginary tank over the imaginary armies of your imaginary
enemies. So, too, something about the collecting urge, the need to get
every card in a set, and then to get each in perfect condition, and
then to arrange them in perfect order, and then to forget them
altogether.
His hand had been jerking the joystick to plus one all this time and
now he became consciously aware of this.
The next room had many of the old inventions he remembered, but they
were arranged not on gleaming silver tables, but were mixed in with
heaps of clothing, mountains of the brightly colored ubiquitous
t-shirts that had gone hand in hand with every New Work invention and
crew. Mixed in among them were some vintage tees from the dotcom era,
and perched on top of the mountain, staring glassily at him, was a
little girl-doll that looked familiar; he was almost certain that he'd
seen her in the first doll room.
The next room was built out of pieces of the old "kitchen" display,
but there was disarray now, dishes in the sink and a plate on the
counter with a cigarette butted out in the middle of it. Another plate
lay in three pieces on the linoleum before it.
The next room was carpeted with flattened soda tins that crunched
under the chair's wheels. In the center of them, a neat workbench with
ranked tools.
The ride went on and on, each room utterly different from how he'd
left it, but somehow familiar too. The ride he'd left had celebrated
the New Work and the people who'd made it happen, and so did this
ride, but this ride was less linear, less about display more --
"It's a story," he said when he got off.
"I think so too," Lester said. "It's been getting more and more
story-like. The way that doll keeps reappearing. I think that someone
had like ten of them and just tossed them out at regular intervals and
then the plus-oneing snuck one into every scene."
"It's got scenes! That's what they are, scenes. It's like a Disney
ride, one of those dark rides in Fantasyland."
"Except those suck and our ride rocks. It's more like Pirates of the
Caribbean."
"Have it your way. Whatever, how freaking weird is that?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account