Tanis, Genius

I gave myself brilliance, but not the strength to give it up.

After sitting here for hours, I finally noticed that the room was filled with clocks. All were set differently; all were counting down like alarms and timers. But none of them foretold a real doomsday.

Fifty-eight hours, eight minutes, 23 seconds- 24- 25 read the digital face of one timer in bloody red digital letters.

One-thousand days, oh-nine hours, displayed another countdown with flaps like a calendar that click like typewriter keys when changing.

From the chrome and wire-crossed ceiling I heard a rattling little elevator-like hum, a herald to the serial-killer duotone which follows.

"Tanis," teased Locarno. "It's four-o'clock somewhere in the world."

The AI's drumming voice of tinny melodrama assumed more than the mistaken thought that at least some of the clocks were reliable. None of them were.

"It's a bath, Locky, not a drink."

Could I blame him though? All these nine-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine years and twenty-three hours and fifty-two minutes, and I had never told him the unmottled truth; that I set all the clocks.

I knew they couldn't be trusted. I knew they were never meant to be. Way back in the beginning I set each and every one. Back when I got smart.

They just reminded me in this single moment that time was a short thing and that I shouldn't hog it all. That was the yardstick and ruler of the matter of the room of clocks. I wonder if that should be 'the long and short of it', but something tells me I phased it out of the world language long ago.

CRASH.

I jumped. A clock had been knocked to the floor and smashed, all by the accidental stirrings of a curious, wire-splayed, spindle-headed little heap rising from a phase zero charging station against the far-right wall.

As planned so long ago, a dwarfish android came up to me with his trim white frame. His old arm hydraulics lifted up the locket. Bowing graciously as if it would care, I stayed true to the character I'd played and gave due honor to my past friend from whom the locket came.

Marleyvane couldn't have known my wondrous mind would find such meaning in and use for his gift of the little golden locket that flipped open to reveal the face of his father in the top polaroid slot and his mother's pretty face in the bottom one.

I already remember their faces, every detail. But I planned for this. I have to open it anyway because of the music it plays.

The android, my very first prototype of the Locarno CC system, ejects a needle from materialled digits on both its pearl-like polyfiber hands.

It's ready. Am I?

Hesitantly, I wave my hand at the robot. His sensors whir and the needles cautiously approach my forearm and the side of my skull. Both are such fine and imperceptible points that they'll go right through dermis and most muscle and bone, so I don't have to worry about that, though I still do because I'm nervous and scared about the whole scene. One needle is drawing a brain tissue sample, the other a simple blood sample. That's all the data the computing mainframe -under Locarno's ethereal supervision- will need to confirm the capsule is still specifically calibrated to my body. The android's beeping sounds positive as the spokes are withdrawn unbeknownst to me until I realize he's hobbling away to the charging station again.

But it's time to start the music. I really am wasting time now.

Like a knifed-open clamshell, I flip up the locket in my palm and immediately that haunting xylophonic melody is going through its chillingly pretty tune. It drops and sways just as I knew it did. This is my one trustworthy countdown. My one right clock. This delicate tune would end when my intelligence did, as long as I continued to have faith that this was the best thing to do and actually did it. And did it according to my short schedule.

Now, as the whole thing crashes and shudders and blinks into the dark and light like a kraken's eye again, I look up and ahead.

The clocks formed something of a hallway. A short corridor at the end of which I could see the laid-back open capsule, long meshy tubes and all. A tender light fixture illuminated it like a reaching tendril of sunshine through a glass window or a golden telescope lens. It looked beyond natural, as if the tangles of wires and little spiring assortment of technology on which they sprouted were rainforest trees.

No. It was like staring death in the face as it slept.

Every few moments, the entire room shook and shuddered and lights flickered apocalyptically as if the hands of a god were shaking a present at Christmas. This made me think the future wouldn't like me, though. Locarno and I were like a pair of socks that had overstayed our welcome.

That was why I had to do this! The soft rains must come, I'd said. The shower to wash the rank of power away. At least, younger me had said. Was I more wise now? More discerning? And if I was, who was there to tell me I wasn't?

But I'm beating around the bush. I'm delaying. No logic could change my mind at this point, only fear. All the while the chimes are chiming. So close to the end now.

I had six minutes left to be the most intelligent person to ever exist. I felt I'd already lived my best moments, though, so I was not at all compelled to have a sudden dilemma about going out in style. Besides, I wasn't dying in six- five minutes and fifty seconds.

I had to unsmart myself. It was the most ridiculous thing. It was the one fact even a genius can't understand.

Only a child of average intelligence could comprehend it. Gaining genius and giving it all up in the end. I'd known from the start, even before the transfusion, that it would finish out this way.

The weird thing? This was scary. Just crossing the room, passing all those lifeless yet mortal little clocks throwing up their numbers and dates like weeds in a west wind. Hushed air from the crown molding-high cooling vents was my only face-felt breeze, though.

"Are you scared, Tanis? After everything?"

I didn't want to answer my friend's question, but I did.

"You walk unseen and talk out of thin air, you byte-breather. Yes, I'm terrified. I've been fearing this a thousand years, and-"

"Nine-thousand nine-hundred-"

"Shut up," I snapped at his prattling correction. My voice cracked a little as I said it though, and I felt embarrassed in front of a computer program. "I've never been more afraid of anything, Locarno. You can't possibly realize what it's like for me, living the last five minutes of my intelligent life! In six minutes, I will know only as much as a nine-year-old girl."

"I thought you were braver than this, Tanis. So maybe in this life you're just a glorified zookeeper. Can't you smart something better up on a silver platter like you do every time?"

"You horrid pixel-face! You can't know!" I protested witheringly, though I hated to berate my one friend. "I am the pinnacle of human knowledge, and I have to accept that all higher knowledge will be lost so that the world will continue to survive. I knew from the beginning that I couldn't go longer than this without being confronted with the necessity of dystopia. I'll be nine again, Locarno, and never know again what it feels like to have lived to a thousand and nine."

"Four minutes," he sang out warblingly. "You still don't actually know what it feels like-"

AUGH.

My inhuman scream ricocheted off the clock-lined turinium tile walls and floor like the wake of a nuke with such vague and tangy distance that I barely registered the noise coming from my own passionless throat. I didn't feel inclined to rebuke him in words this time. I think he got the message. In a brief spirit of violence as my fear bred anger, I was wishing he stood before me in human flesh so I could see his ears bleed at the piercing decibel I'd emitted. I wished I could love him like a woman would love a man. I wished he had lived and died so I could live my final moments with happy memories of him.

But that couldn't be. All the smarts in the world couldn't make miracles accessible to my delicate child hands.

I felt pity for myself in the form I would exist in for the rest of my comparatively short and normal life. I would be tormented daily with indecision, with uncertainty, with a nagging suspicion that life was unfair and unplanned and unorganized and without purpose or design. My thoughts would be incoherent and my perspective perpetually limited.

I would have to relearn the creator. That alone would take time and be painful. And the ignorant actions I would commit in the meantime! The sullied thoughts and words that would come from my heart! Could my frail, average mind handle such a thing?

I was afraid. This was my nightmare every waking hour, always lurking in the back of my head like a shadow monster creeping forth from my closet in that Melbourne house, fangs and claws ready to dice me and array my fleshy little girl fragments on a monster's charcuterie board. The chimes were still chiming.

My whole body was trembling, so I had to summon up my willpower and put my knowledge to use in these last two minutes. I breathed and inhaled and exhaled and soothed myself with every mantra ever known to mankind. I was calming, I could feel. It was like dad and mom both caterwauling into my room in that late, hopeless night and rescuing me from the shadow monster. They scared it silly, vanquished it after a long battle, and imprisoned it forever under my bed- or more likely banished it till I grew up and lived in the same house and had kids of my own that needed to be afraid for a night so I could save them. Just in time.

What hadn't proved helpful in calming my rampant thoughts was dwelling on what I had done in my life, but I still had a minute and a half to indulge before the thinking stopped for good. So I thought up some of my best thoughts yet as I stepped forward in a gradual march beneath the gaze of the crowding, counting clocks, supplemented by a haunting gothic symphony risked through the room's outer ventilation speakers by the AI.

To begin with, part of me wished wistfully that my younger self had ordered this floor to be fabricated in a more elaborate fashion of futuristic architecture. Perhaps it could have been a catwalk. I loved the word catwalk.

Then I was at the curved desk that stood like a nightstand beside the big tube and the wire-hooked apparatus sphered around it. I took up in my pale white hand the slim tablet on the desk. Without ceremony, hastening before I lost my nerve, I slid my gentle fingers over the aglow surface. It was done. Just like letting a helium balloon into the atmosphere. No remorse.

"You going to say goodbye?"

I sniffed. It touched me that this was his only question. Not, what are you doing? Or do I deserve this? Or even why stop now? Oh- I may have really faltered at any of those.

"New world, Locarno. You don't get a parting shot, buddy." I smiled mischievously as I knew his processors were putting together the final pieces of my puzzle. "You get a happy ever after."

"Tanis," hummed the last of his echoes. "You never refurbished my memory banks from April 2nd, 3026. Did I ever tell you why you were wrong about the voyage of the M a c e d o n i a n . . ."

In a wisp of static, Locarno V8 breathed his last. Trying to explain how I was wrong.

Cheeky robot.

Now I was really alone. The sleek, cloudy shadows between the lighted patches of the room seemed longer somehow. Darker.

My full attention now on my first and last great bookending invention, I reflect on how the capsule was the device that would radiate my brain and work with the flood of fluid within to energize a reaction to drain and reverse all my smarts.

There's no use in explaining the full process over again. I'm too serious and too petrified with my immediate situation to pretend someone is here with me when clearly no one is. Someone that needed me to explain to them. I see no reason to bore myself with information I already know and those in posterity will never understand. To them an explanation would be gibberish, and to me it was even more worthless. Child's terms.

At the end of the day, that was really what it came down to: child's terms. My smartness was going away, and I was taking it from myself.

I stepped into it, my left foot making first contact on the angled metal grate that was the step. Another step and I was in, padded against the thick yet transparent fiberglass and turning myself to face forward and lean back. Was this what toothpaste felt like?

The lid sealed. Next moment, the cryogenic fluid was filling the floor. It galloped over my bare sandy-dull toes like zebras over the pallid Antarctic plains. It was like the idyllic shore of Whitehaven Beach in Australia, where I said goodbye to my dear Marleyvane. One of the last places I saw with my own eyes and not through the dimensional screens in the imaging room on Level 1.

The capsule is full now. I'm totally immersed. It's cold and smooth and clear, though it's not wet. There was a tickling sensation, but it's over now. I don't think I'm afraid anymore.

Though I'm hardly paying attention to anything but my own final thoughts, the process has definitely begun. My eyes start glossing over slowly as my head and my body flood with the comfortable fluid. It rushes between my ears and washes over my ancient, beating heart. I've seen the world -my world- a thousand times over. There's nothing left for me to achieve here; certainly not with my sight.

I know I could still flick the inner rim switch to cancel, unseal the capsule half-lid with a mere thought, climb out, dry off, and reactivate Locarno.

I don't.

The chimes are still chiming. More faintly and at a lesser tempo, but still. It's more bare-boned of an anthem, but it reminds me of the day I finished this machine I'm sleeping in tonight. The day I listened to "Forever Young" on endless repeat as I labored in the tech lab. Where was that drive now, when it came to ending what I started? Wasn't this the natural way of all things?

The soft crimson lights are flaring up, then dimming. Flaring up, then dimming. Brightening, then thinning into slits like pit viper eyes. Like sirens -not the Greek kind- they sang out a song that only washed over my face and the capsule's appendages with light and color and no discernable sound. Even the liquid enveloping my bare, floating body makes no sound as it forms around me without running.

Only the ticking of a few old analogue clocks among my collection reminded me of the existence of noise. That's how dead quiet it is.

I know the Mimochip below my left ear is still converting the last of my transmitted thoughts into my long, long diary. The moment I am reversed, I trust it will be faithful to execute a virtual editing and condensing of all my thoughts and anonymously publish the resulting memoir. Who will read it? I don't know. Perhaps my mother will take me to a bookstore or the Del Motto District Library next summer, and- oh, but I'm forgetting. This will be drastically above my reading level. What a stinging thought. I think I've offended myself too much to care to finish it.

So here it is, new world. The end of my magnum opus. The closing of my millennial love letter to humanity.

A thousand years of youth and prosperity; geniocracy dictated by a child. The future will thank me. I could have kept going, but I wanted to end on a happy note for all our sakes. There was only rising and highlights in my career, no downfall or blooper reel. Sure, there was the brief civil war with Locarno and a planet-wide coalition of AI and human rebels over a wine-tasting competition on my birthday, but I think my programming of the chip will prove sensible enough to edit those three-hundred years or so out of the histories. It's barely worth mentioning, and even Locky would agree with that.

Oh!- I can feel the unsmartening machine working already. It's wizard. Inventing this thing seems like the only genius-level thing I've achieved all my life. The years and the big ideas melt away. I'm suddenly tired, in a warm and cozy way. I haven't felt this lack of stamina in . . . forever. The chimes are so slowly chiming now. Almost there.

I have been Nine for a thousand years, and the only thing I have never been able to wrap my almighty brain around in absolute entirety and with utterly disaffectionate command is what being Ten must feel like. Tomorrow, I shall begin to finish my childhood and let my time as a little girl fade gracefully or tumultuously into a woman.

So hello, tomorrow. You will remember me, won't you?

I won't.