IfI ’ m Trapped in the Matrix Don ’ t Let Me Find Out

It’s not that the AI art, that sick dreamscape, couldn’t have been made by a person. Nor is it that I’m content, really. But for the machine it’s like breathing: I have become obsessed with my contentedness. Take me quiet, take me ready for the next moment but never salivating at the thought of it. Tell me: what’s it like to be perched on the edge of a great disaster and a great revelation?

In the future no one will have heard of truth. In the future we will see a face and it will scare us.

Like the last twenty years, I guess. Save me or destroy me: I thought self-driving cars would be it and then I thought it was robot dogs or Furbies and then I thought it was deepfakes and then I thought it was my passwords getting leaked or prosthetics that connect to your brain. There aren’t really too many reasons to be content, anyways. Stay ecstatic or contorted with terror. I’m sure it will be the last behemoth iceberg collapsing.

In the future I’ll still get my period, stand in the shower and unstick bloody curls of pubic hair. In the future the summer won’t glide over me. In the future my animal will still rule itself.

Every documentary a new religion, a new tsunami headed like swarms of bedbugs to the shore. A new vision of hell. Jizzing on a knife’s edge is very contemporary, very B-D-S-M.

I said even if you took the blue pill, you would still be stuck with the itching sense of wrongness that led Neo to Morpheus in the first place, wet air on the back of your neck. My friend said that’s the way everyone feels anyway; I can’t argue with that. Maybe though

Neo comes every night to Morpheus, trapped in the tropical storm of his own suspicion, and every time the fear wins. He backs of, takes the blue pill. Wakes up the next day having forgotten the meeting, maybe

He has a hangover, but he’s the same person he was before, with the same questions. He keeps coming back. Eventually Morpheus starts to run out of blue pills and says Look, dude, we’ve done this a million times—just take the red one and we can move on. Maybe

Neo doesn’t want to. He says, But I’m having fun. He says, I could be on the edge of discovery forever, suspecting the worst, never guessing the scope.

He says, I’ve only just found you, and I believe you’re going to fix me.

He says, I’m salivating and I don’t want to swallow.

He says, Don’t make me fill the empty space with what’s real, oh god, you’re going to hurt me if you do.