YTTERBIUM BUBBLEGUM

In a world reduced to images, seeing is fucking. The eyeball is emperor and peers into every avenue of life. It sits upon a holographic throne projected through time and space. On the field monitor, Simone Taylor saw her own body entwined with the other actress, Sandy Cho, like spiders gasping for air. 

“My cunt likes that,” Sandy cooed, petting the bundle of platinum hair between her legs, beginning to urinate in front of the camera. Jose, the director and Simone’s long-term partner, zoomed in to see the bright spackle of piss bounce off Simone’s bronze shoulders onto the tarpaulin sheet stapled to the floor. 

The red light switched off, and Sandy pushed Simone off her. Sandy Cho was never kind and known in the business for her tantrums. And today, she wanted her cash and to get the fuck out of Malibu before the traffic became impossible. Not wanting any drama, Simone sat in the silver pool of piss and waited for her to leave.

After showering, she felt clean and fresh and zipped herself into the red dress. At the train station, and in all public spaces, she was aware of how others looked at her. It was strange and beautiful to be an obsession. Standing in the foyer, she suddenly remembered how her grandfather had a glass eyeball. When violent crime began to spike, following another SARS pandemic, someone shot a silver ball bearing into his face outside a Florida ATM, only a few blocks from the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens. It was the fourth of July and they all gathered around their father’s laptop to watch the lime green CCTV footage, the old man curled up on the pavement like a bug. After too many drinks, he would pull out the glass ball and roll it between his fingers. Simone couldn’t stand to look at him or the brown hole in his face.

“What time does the Albuquerque train get in?” she asked herself, impatiently checking Google Maps, rather than hunt for an arrivals board. She glanced across at a sickly man at the kiosk who wore a desperate expression. He carried the dead look of expiration, of a being made unnecessary in a world of technology faster than his vocal cords. Most factory workers were awaiting full automation. Whole sectors had become redundant in a world facing the possibility of life beyond work. Scandinavian countries and Germany had offered every citizen a universal income, whereas others had reverted to autocratic workhouses. ‘Freedom was treachery’, it was put by their leaders, and the public found a compulsion to slavery too routine to ignore.

Two more minutes until the train gets in. Simone walked to the vending machine and bought herself the non-alcoholic energy drink she liked with added guarana. She had a couple of zinc tablets in her purse so she took them too. Good for hair and nails. Her nails were part of her brand on all her social medias. She had painted them aqua blue this week to celebrate the sponsorship of her YouPorn account by Spirit, the cryptocurrency of Spiritum, a new open-source platform that had taken over when Ethereum crashed out the market. 

Simone considered doing a livestream quickly to check-in with all her followers but saw the train suddenly pull in on the opposite platform, and amongst the dark shapes of people, emerged the familiar face of her younger sister, Mhysa. It still felt weird to call her that. Her sister’s name had always been Promise, until she was old enough to visit the district court clerk.

“Pumpkin broth!” exclaimed Simone. She always gave her sister ludicrous names as children. She took Mhysa in her arms, who dropped inside her grip and began to cry. It had been a long and hot journey.

Sat inside the yellow Tesla OpenSky convertible, Simone pulled back the roof cover and drove them onto the freeway. She didn’t speak much to her sister or look at the stomach underneath her loose polka dot dress. She didn’t seem any different, but then again, she was only a few months along. Simone thought her sister’s face looked a little fatter, possibly, but you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. 

“How’s Greg?” she asked, passing row after row of bone-white condos. The beach beyond was overcast and clouds covered the sand and water in a moving grid of shadows. A patrol car of community officers, cans of pepper foam Velcroed to their belts, had stopped at a Fat Sam’s burger van. You could tell the volunteers from their orange vests, who felt it was their civil duty to keep the streets safe following reports of rising waves of violent crime. The lead officer wore a green vest, meaning he was paid by an outsourced company for the government, and held a M4A1 Carbine. He bit into the burger and a squirt of boiling synthetic cheese slopped across his chin beard.

“We used to love this song! It is so old!” laughed Simone, turning the radio dial higher, prompting her sister to roll her eyes even harder into the back of her skull. “Now that it's raining more than ever,” sang Simone, off-key and appearing to cause her sister physical pain, “Know that we'll still have each other. You can stand under my umbrella. You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh!” 

The final eh was too much for Mhysa and she angrily slammed her hand into the machine, causing the radio to switch off. They sat for the rest of the journey in tense silence. It was almost an hour down the coast to the doctor’s office. Mhysa had already expressed she didn’t want to go to Simone’s or to chill out at the beach first. 

“Just get me there today, Simone. Get this out of me, before Greg finds out and tries to change my mind,” she sobbed on the phone that morning, watching him drive out to the New Mexico desert to his quantum computing base. 

She had no one to turn to. Their parents had always been conservative and increasingly prone to evangelism. When the nuclear proliferation escalated between Russia and America, they witnessed the events in Alaska and immediately joined the local branch of the Second Church of the Faithful and True. 

“I am the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end,” Simone’s mother recited on the phone to Simone when she found out her daughter was involved in the adult film industry. “Promise is worried about you too. Can’t you find a nice guy like Greg?”

“Mom, please,” Simone pleaded, “I’m safe in Malibu, and I’m making a lot of money. Jose takes good care of me.”

“Sweetie, you said Jose is a pacifist. Do you think Jesus Christ Himself wouldn't wear a bulletproof vest these days? Be realistic. You only have to turn on Fox to see the Revisionists are using laser-guided missiles, right out on the street. I’ll FedEx a few grenades you can keep in your purse. I know you have a good heart, sweetie really, but you are too naïve and I don’t want you or Promise to be entering into God’s good and righteous company and leave me stranded on this hellscape, what with your father and his raging diabetes. He’s going to lose the leg by Thanksgiving, I can tell.”

“Mom, please,” she repeated, feeling the anger enter her voice, “Her name is Mhysa. You know this, and you do it to annoy her. And Jose is a socialist, I told you. He opposes the obscene levels of inequality in the west and runs a weekly mindfulness workshop for Amazon union workers to release…”

“Mindfulness? So, you just sit there and think about your life but do nothing? That’s the problem with this generation, they sit around and expect…”

Simone had hung up on her mother, and not taken calls from her for the rest of the week. Mhysa spoke to her more, often in the daytime. Mhysa didn’t work. She attended law school but said it was too competitive. It was all basically the sons and daughters of judges that wanted to inherit the contempt of their parents for minorities and poor people. Instead, she stayed home and kept Greg company in the evenings. She looked sad and alone, but at least she was her mother’s favourite.

“We’re here,” announced Simone, signalling to the doctor’s office hidden beneath a wall of fan palms, the stone walkway covered in shredded leaves and branches. There was only one protester stood at the door, which took Simone by surprise. She didn’t say to her sister but she had mentally prepared herself for there to be ten, even twenty. California was the last state in the United States where abortion was legal, apart from some highly publicised exceptions in Vermont. California was the final exit before liberalism fell into the Pacific Ocean, the land of bleeding hearts like a shining golden leaf, a woke emerald city crumbling into the sea. The huge cardboard sign in the woman’s hand read HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS STARTS AT ZERO, which Simone wasn’t even sure made sense. The woman’s face was hard and ugly, and she spat on Simone’s Jimmy Choo shoes as they ran into the office.

When Mhysa went in with the doctor, Simone sat in the waiting room and thought about human consciousness, how awareness generates and eventually turns back on itself. She looked down at her long legs. She loved her body. She loved being beautiful. She even loved the fame she gained from fucking the married son of one of the most famous Republicans. The video was leaked a few weeks later so she thought she might as well upload to her YouPorn site. The cost of litigation against her was phenomenal but the cost to the Republican party was astronomical and the money they paid her to remove the video was enough to live off for a decade, and the damage to the party had already happened. He even gained some traction from her queer followers for his love of getting pegged with a silicone dildo known as the Paris Niner. She loved fucking and being fucked. It felt simple, unlike everything else. And it had nothing to do with having babies. She loved being watched too, even if it meant putting up with assholes like Sandra Cho, or putting it up her asshole if the price was right. Waiting for time to pass, she checked her social media sites.

@Simone_Slut Love you slut. Such a beautiful slut. I would love to fuck your holes and mouth and kiss you. #ridemebare #fallinginlove

Hey @Simone_Slut Your pussy dripping is all I think about, think I need a lobotomy now !!

Can’t stop watching you pegging Pete Montgomery, yasssss sister slay @PeteMgConvex @Simone_Slut get it bitch

It took over an hour and when Mhysa came back through she looked pale, her hair soaked in sweat. Simone put her jacket around her and offered her a sip of the guarana energy drink. She thought about offering her the zinc tablets also but was unsure. What does a body need after a foetus has been removed? Iron? Salt probably. She could ask Google but now was not the time. She led her sister to the car, past the protestor who was practically foaming at the lips and appeared victorious to see her little sister look sick and weak after completing the wicked deed, of robbing a baby of God’s love and throwing it in with the murderous communists, the faggots primed to destroy the nuclear heterosexual family. 

When they got home, she didn’t bother to check Google. For once she trusted her instinct and made her sister chicken soup. It was what their mother always made them when they had the flu and stayed off school. They watched a reality show about a bunch of surfers living out on Venice Beach, sleeping in makeshift tents. Simone recognised a few from the local area. Most of them had been jailed or fined since filming for shooting up heroin or disturbing the peace. One of them was reading a paperback copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. He had thick blonde dreadlocks and his mouth was full of silver fillings.

“It’s an idea called eternal recurrence,” the boy droned on, sprinkling purple-tipped marijuana buds into a small pile of tobacco, “I guess maybe it means this is happening again, or time moves in a big circle and I choose this again. I think it’s like in the Lord of the Rings, you feel me? Those films from years ago. That big gold ring, you know? It just goes round and round, man.”

Mhysa didn’t finish her soup but Simone could sense she wanted to talk.

“Is everything OK at home? With Greg?”

Her sister didn’t reply and her face appeared vacant until finally she took a deep breath and summoned the energy to speak. “He’s working with these time crystals, have you heard of them? They are super common now in quantum computing. They pass a laser through this mineral called ytterbium and the particles move forever. It’s due to something called quantum entanglement,” she mouthed the term slowly, smiling. “When it was discovered, it was seen as impossible because the particles keep moving, like in perpetual motion. Greg says it breaks something called time translation symmetry. Do you think about time, Simone?”

“What do you mean?” Simone asked, turning the television down.

“Well, the past, the future, fucking now. I don’t get it. How is all this happening?”

Simone wanted an answer for her sister. She wanted to reach out and hold her and explain away her pain, but she had no idea what she was talking about, or what quantum entanglement was supposed to be. Mhysa could see the confusion in her sister’s face, but also the care and compassion. She smiled and kissed her older sister on the cheek and left to go lie down, saying she felt tired.

After Mhysa had gone through, Simone wished she could change the past for the anxious like her sister. She wanted so badly to make her mother see how well she was doing, that she was heading in the right direction. In the darkness, she scrolled through her phone and saw that her shares in Spiritum cryptocurrency had almost doubled their value in the last three hours. The future appeared to her like a glowing orb, a platinum blue spaceship in the sky. It had been a long day for her too and she wanted some intimacy, if not Jose, even Sandy Cho and her legendary piss. At least she had her followers, which she scrolled through in the dark, feeling their love move through her like an electrical charge. If everyone was honest with themselves, they want to be adored, she thought, turning up the television.

Before heading to bed, Simone watched the surfers ride gigantic waves beneath a perfect Californian sun. Afterwards they sunbathed in a plot of land cornered with barbed wire and Alsatian police dogs. They called themselves the Pseudo-Amnesiacs, and praised Nietzsche for his recognition of the joy of forgetting, which they applied on a cultural level. They ate bubblegum flavoured ice cream wafers and spoke about their frequent use of psilocybin, the total annihilation of the self. 

“I won’t last, you know, man,” said one of the boys, looking into the camera. “But the future? Fuck, bro. That shit goes on. The future is forever.”

by Matthew Kinlin

Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His two novels Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press) and Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press) were released in 2021. He tweets (@garbagemagician)