Doug Sharp 4,000 words
A Typical Day in the Future
By Doug Sharp
Optima savored the first stirrings of her waking mind. Ebbing image of pink marble columns encircling her monumental golden statue worshipped by chanting throngs.
Her eyes lingered shut. She visualized what sight would greet her when they opened. A marvelous, handsome, loving man. Her man.
Optima’s eyelids ascended. Dawn sun gilded the face of Max as he smiled across the pillows to his wife.
His deep, rich voice affirmed, “Another day.”
Optima’s lush undertone, “To savor.”
Both stretched, luxuriating in the feel of their bodies.
“A child,” Optima crooned.
“Children,” Max asserted playfully.
“And a dog.”
“Most certainly, the doggiest of dogs.”
Knock.
The couple exchanged expectant glances.
Max called out jovially, “Enter and be recognized.”
The door swung open and Bowser, the canine member of the Best family, galumphed into the room barking joyously. He leapt up onto the bed and slobbered enthusiastic kisses on Max, who good-naturedly drew the blanket over his head and growled.
The children giggled outside the door.
“What mischief are you two up to?” Optima inquired.
Bowser turned his attention to the door and Max emerged chuckling from the blankets, wiping his cheek.
Eugene strode into the room laughing, “We woke at six.” Eugene was a fine-featured ten-year-old boy. His young eyes held deep pools of wisdom peering out from under fine yellow bangs.
Max shook his head in mock disapproval, “Memorizing the encyclopedia again?”
Optima sniffed the air. Fantastic sweet food-smells wafted through the door. “Pristine, did you make breakfast for us again, you naughty child?”
Pristine walked mock-solemn into the room, bearing a silver tray. Two plates of waffles heaped with whipped cream and topped with luscious gleaming strawberries.
Prissy was a muscular sixteen-year-old dressed in a black leather jumpsuit. Her red hair billowed around her shoulders like clouds at sunset. Handcuffs dangled from her belt. Pristine was a bit of a tomboy.
Breakfast was sensational.
“Bye, Dad.” The children hugged their father as he reached to open the door. They played this game each morning – keep Dad from leaving for just one more moment. Dad tickled, twisted, and let out a great groan of triumph as he broke from their grasp and ran through the doorway.
Eugene whispered to Prissy, “Some day we’ll really keep him. Next time use your handcuffs.”
Prissy laughed, “You know how much he loves his job. We could never be so cruel as to keep him from it.”
Eugene smiled a rueful smile.
Five long minutes later the door gave its warning cough and opened.
Optima was the first to greet Max. A long, lingering kiss that made the children giggle.
Prissy waited until Dad caught his breath. “How was work?”
“Work was sensational. I averted an emergency. My pals at work struck a medal to commemorate the deed.”
“Tell us! Tell us! What emergency?” The kids hugged each other and tried to hide their excitement. Optima tried to look very grave.
“I saved a life today.”
“Yay, Dad!” “My hero!”
Optima gave Max one of her looks – a promissory note to be redeemed at the Bank of Carnal Bliss.
Prissy was bursting, “What did you save, Dad?”
“We’ll come to that.”
The family listened closely. They all loved the danger and glamour of Max’s work.
“I was three minutes into my five minute shift when I saw the truck speeding. A young boy joyriding in a stolen truck. I tried to kill his engine but the crazy hothead had disabled outside control.”
Prissy nervously snapped her whip. Eugene stared in fascination. How would this turn out?
“It was then that I saw it – a flash of shimmering blue and radiant red. My instruments zoomed in, plotted trajectory, and flashed a red X at the point of collision.”
Optima swallowed hard.
“I took the only course I could. I selected the truck and said vaguely into the air, ‘This truck is a nuisance.’ The AI picked up my meaning and a streak of blue zapped down from on high and slagged the truck.”
The family waited, not one of them daring to breathe.
“The hummingbird flew through the point of predicted collision. It never knew how close it came to obliteration on the speeding stolen truck.”
Eugene had to ask, “Was it an endangered hummingbird?”
Max shrugged, “Not particularly. But it was beautiful and did not to deserve to die.”
Max sighed with exhilaration. His lightning reflexes had saved a precious life. He had done a good day’s work. The rest of the day was pure icing.
The kids recovered from the tale and ran to school. After love for family, learning was their chief delight.
Optima shivered with guilty excitement as she accessed the camera in the learning room. Spying on the schoolroom was her naughty secret, the one illicit action that made her more than a passive reservoir for pleasure. She could lie about it, too. That was wicked fun, part of a healthy psychological mix.
She settled back to watch her children do what they loved second best.
Prissy squealed with anticipation, “I must paint! Let me at the extruder.”
Eugene stepped back from it to let Prissy get to work. He had to think some more before he asked for gifts.
Prissy enumerated colors: cadaver blue, honky pink, hole black. Brushes and stretched canvas marched to their places in Prissy’s studio. Today her room grew red-brick walls, rough wood floors, and a bank of cracked, aged window along the upper wall - a perfectly diffused northern light.
Prissy attacked the canvas. Her brush slashed like a cutlass.
Optima turned the camera to Eugene.
Eugene was at his particle physics again. He had a squat little mirrored jar targeted by a tight blue beam. Optima was proud of him for wearing his lead apron.
With loving concentration Optima spied upon her children’s lives.
Too soon the scholars were done and called out for her to see their day’s achievements.
Optima had only seconds to appreciate Prissy’s masterful painting of vampires and shrieking crows. Prissy scraped away the paint. Optima knew that soon Prissy would paint a masterpiece that met her own lofty standards. Only then would they hang one of her paintings in the mainroom.
Max had ignored his chisels and massive block of marble today. Particle physics was the boy’s overriding passion. He was gleeful. Optima could read it in all the secret little signs a mother sees: he was smiling.
“I discovered a new fundamental particle today, Mom.”
Optima shook her head and smiled in wonder.
“It’s really neat.” He projected the crazy swirl of collisions and virtual particles and pointed to a tight spiral. There it is.”
His voice grew shy, “I named it after you, Mom. The Optima.”
As on all such occasions Optima’s heart filled with a warm, contented joy. Her name was sprinkled through the universe on flowers, particles, symphonies, typefaces, diseases. How far her children ranged.
Prissy’s eyes bored into the particle diagram. You could see the neurons chugging in her brain. She called up a math screen, made a few notations. She clapped her hands and called, “Look, Eugene. Guess what happens when you fill one of your entropic exclusion fields with Optimas.”
Eugene glanced at her equations and groaned. “Why didn’t I see that?”
“Don’t feel bad, silly. You discovered a pollution-free, inexhaustible source of free energy.”
Optima tsked and rolled her eyes, “Not again!”
When they had stopped laughing Optima hugged them, one under each arm. “Any family or personal business?”
Prissy shook her head. Eugene nodded.
“Tell me, son.”
“Tonight I need the wet room because I really need to masturbate.”
Optima gave him a squeeze. “Glad to see you’re taking such good care of yourself, Eugene. The room is yours.
“Nothing else? The day is yours.”
With peals of laughter the kids ran to their rooms.
Optima sank back in the nearest chair and rested in warm, drowsy fantasy. A pair of lips, the smell of Max. She gazed up at her husband.
Max looked thoughtful. “Today is perfect, my love.”
Optima looked puzzled, “No less than we deserve.”
Max wasn’t to be stopped, “Too perfect.”
Optima blinked in astonishment, “Please stop. You are confusing me. I can’t bear it.”
Max bought his great hand to his forehead, radiating wisdom. “I need contrast. All this joy and beauty and perfection runs together.”
Optima understood. With relief, “A nice trauma.”
Max beamed thankfully, “You understand perfectly. I need a trauma.
Eugene burst through the door, weeping. “Oh father, oh father, come quickly.”
Max hugged his son compassionately, “What discomfits you, my boy?”
Eugene sobbed and looked up into his father’s eyes. Tears ran down his cheeks and weeping shook his voice, “I can’t say it, Dad. You must witness.”
Max gave his wife a look that said, “Leave this to me.”
Eugene turned toward the door and faltered – stepped back into his father’s arms.
Max stroked the boy’s golden hair, “Be strong son. I will be with you. Lead me. Take my hand. Be courageous.”
Eugene looked up and strength flowed into him from his father’s eyes.
Once more he turned to the door, and this time he walked, albeit timidly, clutching his father’s hand out the front door.
Pristine knelt on the lawn with her head bowed, her back wracked by little rhythmic sobs.
“No! This isn’t…” Max ran to her, dropped to his knees, raised her head, “Are you injured, Pris?”
She shook her head.
“Your heart is broken?”
She gazed up at him through lashes wet with bitter tears, and choking back a sob, pointed down, down, down with a trembling finger.
Max’s eyes followed her finger’s implied arrow to the ground. An expression of anguished horror disfigured his noble countenance. His eyes grew huge, taking in the abomination. He arched his back and screamed to the sky, “Why? Oh, why? WHY ME?”
Eugene, who had slowly and sadly followed, bent and put an arm around his tormented father, “Be brave.”
Max closed his eyes and slumped with a heartrending moan.
Pristine reached out her hand to her father’s furrowed brow. “We can survive this.”
Eugene chimed in, “Together, as a family, we can overcome this horror.”
Max pulled himself together with a trembling sigh and, setting his mouth in a determined frown, deliberately forced his eyes to look once more.
There it lay. No denying it. No explaining it away. There it lay, flaunting its hideous presence to the outraged firmament above.
There are objects that cause bravest’s blood to curdle, eyes to bulge from sockets, buckets of sweat to squirt from brows, tormented shrieks to tear from raw esophagi.
Infinitely baser than those vile, unnamable, but ultimately bearable objects – leering from an unholy dimension of the obscene, slithering from an unimaginable universe vandalized by cretins, excreted from the stinking lower intestine of the abyss – glowered this: (my word processor near crashes from shuddering horror) the ghastly, crumpled, glistening foil from a stick of gum.
In a word: litter.
Strength fled from the huddled trio and they slumped together wailing as one wounded tender being.
Optima stood in the doorway, biting the knuckle of her fist, eyes glistening with liquid empathy.
And then she shook her raven tresses and laughed at the sky. All was well. Perfection in all things.
Her family stood, still joined in an embrace. An embrace no longer desolate, but loving, strong, and proud.
Optima delighted as she watched adoration flow from one to another of her dearest.
They turned as one and seeing her, smiled.
Max was first to speak, “Wow. I needed that.”
Prissy chimed in, “Refreshing. Like a cold shower.”
Eugene grinned, “Really, really neat.”
Max gazed down lovingly and said, “Thank you for sharing this, my children. We have hours of day before us. Now we will appreciate our blessed lives more deeply, more thankfully than ever before.”
Optima laughed, “Is that possible?”
All three nodded as one, and, sensing their impossible synchronicity, burst into bell-like peals of laughter.
Among the incidents of the day one stands out.
In the kitchen Optima tiptoed up behind Max and breathed on his neck. He spun and looked down at her. His hand rested on the essential incurve of her hip.
Optima raised her right hand, fingers curled like claws. She snarled a carnal snarl and slashed her paw through the air.
Desire so thick you could pour it on pancakes.
Max grabbed her wrist and pulled her tight. Her heart fluttered like a baby bird as her head nestled in the hirsute hollow of his throat. He tipped her face up and kissed her. A gentle kiss, just enough to kindle a spark in her loins.
Max crooned to her, “Later, beloved.”
Optima’s mind was in a torrid turmoil, the spark in her belly transmuting into hard blue crystal, “I can’t bear to wait. Let’s do it on the table.”
Max shook his head ruefully, “Be strong. Savor the tension.”
It was his voice that did it. His voice squeezed the blue crystal in her loins and something intimate and glorious shattered inside her.
Max drank in the sight and sound of his beloved wife slumped to the ground still panting and twitching with aftershocks.
He threw back his head and howled at the ceiling.
Optima called to the children. As they came into sight she could hear their footsteps.
“Your father will get food for dinner. We’ll eat in an hour. Did you do your Singularity Practice today?”
Eugene nodded, “We did three. We piggybacked them.”
Prissy said, “Number two was sooo coool.”
Optima had a passion for Singularities and she took a strong interest in her kids’ progress. “What was ‘sooo coool’ about singularity two?”
Eugene started, “We started with the usual puter-breeding-puter-Moore’s-law-asymptotic-slope-of-thinking-power. We did the download and our intellects ballooned.”
Prissy held up a black-polished forefingernail, “Things got really, really clear. The universe was transparent. That thing, you know.”
Optima nodded and Prissy continued, “Then Eugene and I busted into giggles. To be a giggling god is a remarkable thing.”
Optima caressed her children proudly, “Sounds like you made a great Singularity. Soon you’ll be ready to merge into social Singularities and then won’t you have fun?
“Now tell me what went wrong in one and three.”
Eugene snorted ruefully, “Number one chaosed into madness. The usual I am omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent vortex of sealed paranoia. It spun so fast that personae were flung off. It was a mess. An infinity of gibbering hadrons. Bracing in its way, but no future in it.”
“And three?”
Prissy, “A messy one. One of those singularities you’re glad you’re in the iso-field. I don’t think the Big Bang was set right for that one.”
“I hunger.” Max’s lips had trouble making the words.
A facet of Max that thrilled and frightened Optima. “Go then. Swift and sure.”
Max stripped and oiled his body. He stood and stretched his face upward. His shoulders lowered, his jaw thrust forward, his eyes went fierce and cunning, his breath snarled.
Optima knew to stay silent as Max sank into his primordial mind. His body morphed from taut, upright poise into a lethal crouching stance.
Optima never tired of ogling his spare, muscled form. Max’s elemental mind sculpted his physique into cruelly alluring conformations.
Deadly gleam of metal in his hand. Knife sharp and brutal.
Optima palmed open the door, for Max’s hunting mind knew not domestic practices.
Max leapt through the passage and loped away.
Optima formed a window to witness his hunt.
Max stood atop his lookout hill, scanning. Searching the forest to the north. On to search the jungle to the west. To the southern prairie. There! His head snapped to his target, far on the brow of a shallow hill.
He was off like a wolf in resolute pursuit. Oil and sweat glistening on his body reflected the brown, long grass. Perfect camouflage.
The herd of pronghorn antelope startled at his sound too late. They sprang swift in terror.
Max scorned the young and sick and pursued the fleetest young buck. Even so the chase was short. Max leapt onto its back, his arms round its neck. Knife flashed, blood jetted, the herd scattered.
Max knelt on the buck’s head. His own neck arched toward the sky. He howled his triumph to challenge the sun.
Optima watched Max’s retransformation from beast to intelligent, compassionate, honorable Max.
Max knelt beside the antelope’s still form and Optima could see his lips move in his Hunter’s Prayer:
“I drink deep from the Blood of your Life.
“I slice dinner’s meat.
“Oh Wolves and Ravens,
“I leave you yours.”
The Bests sat around the dinner table. Optima lifted silver dome from platter to reveal sizzling antelope steaks. Under a smaller dome nestled a quivering heap of lime Jell-O cubes.
Eugene thanked his Mom, “This is unreal.”
Max, “Fantastic.”
Prissy squealed, “Jell-O, the perfect food! Bouncy colored crystals that never fill.”
Max lifted a pitcher and poured a purple, pulpy juice into Eugene’s tankard. “I tread the blackberries you two picked this morning. Drink of summer’s bounty.”
Optima, “Leave room for Lemon Meringue pie!”
Bedtime for Eugene. Pristine was a real sport. She continued to listen to the nightly bedtime story even though she was sixteen.
Max read tonight. Optima lay snuggled on the bed between the children.
Max began, “The Man who got Hit on the Head with a Rock – Another Jackanapes Club Adventure by Miss Sibyl Owsley.
“The frozen pond was very cold. Katie’s lips were blue. She was barefoot on the ice and her feet were frozen. She couldn’t walk.
“She shivered. BRRRR. She didn’t care about the treasure or the island anymore.
“Do you think Katie is happy?”
“NO!” squealed Eugene.
“That’s right, Eugene. She’s cold. It’s hard to be happy when you’re cold.”
“Sometimes when you’re sledding.”
“Shhhh”
They loved for Max to mimic an old-fashioned schoolteacher reading to rather dim students.
“Tim saw Katie’s danger. He ran to ladder.com and got a ladder. He laid the ladder on the ice so Katie could climb back safely.
“But the frozen pond ate the ladder and then started eating Katie.
“Katie yelled, “Help! Help!” She was already eaten up to her knees.
“Yuck!”
“Shhh.”
“Tim had a magic monkey in his pocket. He didn’t like to use it except in an emergency.”
“Is this an emergency? Yes, Pristine.”
“Katie is getting eaten up. Then everyone would forget her.”
“So it IS an emergency!”
“YES!” the children chorused.
“Every time he used his little magic monkey it got sicker. He pulled it out of his pocket. It curled up in his hand shivering. Its little monkey eyes stayed shut.”
“Is the monkey cold?”
Prissy waved her whip excitedly.
“Raise your hands. Yes, Gene?”
“I think he has a fever.”
“Good thinking. The magic monkey is sick.”
“Sorry, little monkey, said Tim. Katie is getting eaten up and that is an emergency. The poor little magic monkey threw up in Tim’s hand.
“Ewww.”
“Sometimes bad things happen.”
“In stories and TV.”
“In real life, too. Bowser threw up on the rug.”
“Good discussion, class. Let’s finish the book.”
“Jim put the magic monkey on the ice. The little monkey forgot all about being sick. He started to jump up and down and hoot. The little monkey wasn’t little anymore. He reached across the ice. He reached to grab Katie, who was being brave. The ice was up to her belly button.
“As the monkey’s giant fingers gently grabbed her by her head the ice erupted.
“The explosion threw Katie high into the air. The monkey got little again and curled up on the ice. Blood was coming out of his nose.”
“Dad.”
“Yes.”
“I need to jack off in the wetroom. Can we finish the story tomorrow?”
“Sure. Abuse yourself with my blessing.”
Optima laughed. How perfect was communication among her family.
Max turned to Prissy. “And as for you, young lady, if you get up at an ungodly hour again to cook a wonderful breakfast for your mother and me we will…” He put on a dreadful scowl. “We will thank you.”
Max and Optima sat together in the swing chair, rocking slowly as pretty colors played in the sky. Sunset was their time to talk, their time to share.
Max’s mind mulled. Optima could almost see the thoughts coursing through his brain. “Say what you are thinking, Max.” Two fingers of her left hand rested on the pulse of his wrist.
“I have found the secret of optimal living.”
Optima’s brows knit. She hated headaches. “Don’t we always live at the peak?”
Max nodded, in a soothing rather than agreeing manner, “Listen, Optima. Perhaps you will agree.”
Optima pressed her temple with an unsteady fist, “Perhaps? Of course I will agree. You and I have but one heart and one mind.”
Max caressed her raven tresses to calm her. He whispered, “Life is a glorious adventure. At the pinnacle of life stands truth. And I have climbed that mountain to the top.”
“Mountain, Max?”
“Metaphor, metaphor, dear.
“Let me say it plainly.” Max brought her fingers to his lips and kissed their tips. Then he licked his lips. Optima’s thighs twitched remorselessly.
He declaimed, “When you think of me I exist. When you look at me I come alive. When you talk to me I gather cupcakes from the stars.”
“Cupcakes?”
“Metaphor, my dear.”
Optima wrinkled her cute little brow. “You mean that I make your life worth living.”
Max looked down at her. His eyes glistened with liquid rapture. “You are life itself to me.”
Optima gasped at Max’s insight. She reached behind her back to unhook her bra.
They lay in their rumpled bedding, damp and sated.
Optima gazed lovingly at Max, already breathing in the slow rhythm of early sleep.
“Goodbye, dear.”
His body ghosted and was gone, as vanished the sound of his breath.
Goodbye, dear.
Optima stretches out across the bed, purring with health and well-being. A day well done.
She looks up out of the page and locks eyes with you. A satiated smile relaxes her lips. She’s had her fun and knows it. She’s seen it all.
She winks and shimmers. Her opacity ripples. She is gone.
The bed follows her into nothingness. The house. The world.
Look over your shoulder, reader.
What do you see?
It yearns for you.
THE END