THE BUTTON

The button stood out like an unhammered nail, a flourish of red amongst the blues and grays of the sleek console; an itchy mosquito bite unscratched. I looked around the cabin for a clue—some diagram or schematic that would, even tangentially, give me an excuse to push it, that enticing button—but all I found was interlocking machinery patterning the walls, flush and smooth, a seamless mosaic of maddeningly unlabeled blinking lights and dimensionally-conflicting optical illusions that made my legs wobbly.

I wanted to sit, but sitting was a luxury reserved for pilots, not some nobody unaccustomed to helming so much as a bicycle much less an intergalactic spaceship traversing the depths of a cosmos so vast that the mere hint of its scale provoked an attack on the internal calculus of identity: if infinity is irrational, what good is rationalization? How does one incorporate the concept of endlessness into an existence predicated on the senses, of knowing reality—of knowing yourself—through experience? If all of that is thrown out the window at the edges of the universe, who have you been? And who are you now?

Considering the enormity of the minds that had wrestled with these ideas since brains began to wrinkle, there was little I could hope to add to the discourse. I was only in that position, there at the forefront of the ship, because the captain and his crewmates had released me from captivity, either as a fallback against or the result of succumbing to a madness that had run through them like a pox. I learned this later, through a scrawled note depicting wild eyes and toothy smiles drawn with a shaky hand, alongside the word ifnfirmay, which explained the hideous shrieks echoing from the direction of the sick bay I encountered upon being let loose from my cell.

The button remained a temptation, a red tongue protruding from the dashboard like a dare, taunting me with its promise of action, a solitary signifier of agency against a flush backdrop of homogeneity. It was incredibly exciting, this turn of events, as I was but a pawn in some elaborate system of intergalactic trade, a piece of some puzzle confined to his cell and severely under-stimulated. The beginning of this journey had been its highlight, with that chemically-induced space sleep getting me through the first few thousand light years in a soft, warm, honey-river of dreams—an invented reality so pleasantly immersive that I was not a little dispirited upon awakening, finding my embarrassingly skin-tight and evidently metal-infused spacesuit holding me fast against the magnetized wall of my cell, splayed like a gingerbread man on a tray and just as helpless.

I remembered that helplessness as I hovered over that button, forcing myself to recall how brief my imprisonment truly was in an effort to prevent myself from simmering with thoughts of revenge, as that was one of the more unhelpful emotional soups in which to stew. I searched the button up and down, noting how the remarkable mediocrity of its construction had no bearing on the effect of its colour on the impulse-control section of my brain; how it, and the very occasional maraschino cherry treat, were the sole indicators of red on the entire ship. What about blood, you ask? Well, we bled blue, it turned out. I checked. It was gross.

But it wasn’t just the red as stimuli, electro-shocking my mammalian mind with base imperatives, but what it represented to me, the fodder to be swapped in some cosmic flea market for piece or pieces unknown, here in the captain’s cabin, free and standing fitfully, ever longing for a chair. Admittedly, I had been around a while and accomplished nothing of note back home, much less anything of value. It made sense on paper, I supposed, but it wasn’t my paper and I had clearly not been asked to contribute to the writing. And whatever it was that the button actually did, I, the useless castoff, I alone could decide whether or not to activate it.

I weighed the pros and cons of laughing manically at my newfound power, or just in general, but was interrupted by a large video screen that slid down from the ceiling as though a stretched, extended part of rather than a separate piece. As the cabin lights dimmed, I decided against laughing and instead sweat silently into the crackle of disconnect apparent before me.

yzzrt przzk zik kzuttin

My reflection flashed back at me in the interstitial moments of black between choppy almost-images before resolving into footage of me proper, leering at the camera with that smirk I use when I’m really trying to get under someone’s skin. Man—that is irritating.

yzour pruzz ze bzuttin

I don’t look too happy on the screen. Oh, I’m smiling, in a way, but I know how it feels under that nasty grin—I’ve never made that face when I’m feeling, say, generous. Or compassionate. Or, you know, good. That was the face of my youth, or at least the look of—like me, that image of me was much older now. Older, but with the distinct absence of the laugh-lines I had put so much work into, which irritated me much more than it should have considering the nonsensical nature of this encounter. But irritate me it did, and it was those eyes, that look I gave myself from inside that malfunctioning screen that kept me stewing.

Stewing in that soup that I had been avoiding.

I have no memories of childhood, nothing concrete. It’s more a slurry of feelings from back then, ineffable but disastrous; massive sweeping emotions without a tether, too big to intellectualize without the mercy of cause and effect; to figure out without any kind of context. Pieces were taken, people were taken, and I always ended up back in a box, surrounded by a palpable nothing.

That’s how the me on the screen thinks, how I used to think—that none of my life was my fault, that life and people and situations happened to me. But, unlike the guy on the screen, I sorted through my receipts, and I traced the consequences of my own actions and came up with a pretty comprehensive list of behaviours that were—let’s be kind—less than advantageous. And I looked at me on the screen and his crooked grin and I looked past him to the button on the dash and I smiled so easily that it caused the one onscreen to flicker and disappear as though it was only ever a glitch.

YZOU PREZKL THE BUTTONZK

Yelling then, angry digital me was certainly saying something about the button, but beyond the static and interference and outright rage obscuring whatever gradients the words might have contained, I was going to have to decipher what was coming out of the screen through a codex of my own idiosyncrasies if I wanted to discern what I was actually trying to get me to do.

You press the button, question mark?

You pressed the button, past tense?

You press the button, command?

That’s what really cooked my potatoes about this whole trek, this judgmental value-for-value exchange that reduced everything to numbers, as though the terrain of humanity was a hill rather than a path; as though I was going to continue rolling down instead finding steps to climb up. That and the realization that this me on the screen, looking at my situation—plucked from my life and stuffed into what amounted to nothing more than a storage-container—was right to be pissy by proxy. But that guy wasn’t—hadn’t been—living my life; he wasn’t any more three-dimensional than his picture on the screen.

And he wanted me to push the button. Pretty badly, too, because binary thought requires binary action: if not-revenge is intolerable, then revenge is all that’s left. That thinking doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance.

I wondered if it was this sort of thing that sent the crew into hysterics. If maybe they too met with themselves in an anxious moment, unable to differentiate between what they thought they were and the reflection of what they had been. I wondered if I, maybe, had a better time of it because my lack of human value was third-party verified and pinned to me like a luggage-tag, leaving me incapable of pretending otherwise. Perhaps when confronted with themselves, their illusions proved too dissonant to be overcome.

I did a lot of wondering, looking at that button. I wondered and looked for other buttons, sliding my hands across the slick walls, touching the various components of the ground with tricky steps and differing weighs, looking for latches or pulleys or hidden compartments, all while angry screen me screamed through the digital haze of his continually-fragmenting image on the box. I knew the button would annihilate us—what else would be the point?—and I knew this was angry me’s plan to get back at everyone who had wronged him, including actual me, and I really wasn’t feeling that.

Part of the cabin’s façade gave way, eventually, a tiny section of the wall folding in on itself to reveal a grey button right about where a typical room’s light switch would be. I pressed it, smiling at screen me like a child discovering the secret behind a magic trick, and the cabin shook like the inside of a long-disused truck firing up. I thought I got me, I admit; I thought screen me had me hoodwinked into engaging a secondary button of destruction, but that only lasted a few moments. The rumble eventually subsided to reveal—making its way through the floor, in the centre of the cabin, right where it should have been—a chair.

This, this was a great chair. It was a throne of comfort yet satisfyingly tactile, cozy but sturdy, and entirely engineered to conform to the sitter, regardless of said sitter’s status, adapting to king and peasant alike. Even better was that its emergence not only lit up the console into functionality, but also began the necessary absorption of the yelling screen back into its ceiling, much to my onscreen digital dismay.

izzrt przzk zik kzuttin

The garbled words faded like the shadow of a bad idea exposed to light, swallowed up into the carapace of the ship with little effort and less noise. Having rid itself of its noxious guest, the cabin flooded the interior with pleasant, welcoming lights and unrecognizable aromas that produced sensations more akin to feelings than anything of traceable origin.

The controls were simple, even child-like: this was were we were headed, to trade me in for some manner of slop, and this is where we were then heading, with a bloop on the dash to confirm the change in destination. I glanced at the button, smiling at how small it then appeared compared to how big it had been in metaphor, and watched as it slowly retreated from view, sinking into the console like a once-appealing yet ultimately-irrelevant notion disappearing from consideration.

Nobody was piloting the ship. Nobody was going on an adventure.