ai is a cyborg, not a diphthong

“From a space you cannot locate, the pop song continues.”

Image Credits: thisman.org, available on Facebook

i. 

You are standing at the foot of turn 16. The track is covered in the same microplastics, rubber, and soot that coat your body black. Grime engulfs all, the barriers that weave and form each corner are buried in a thick layer of dust. Excess char produced from burnt tyres (scorched by concrete friction and the stifling summer heat) becomes the grout between your fingernails, between the cracks and crevices, seen and unseen. 

The apparatus is solid and sturdy, and you are part of it despite your softness. Blackness creates the illusion of decay, but everything here is as new and delicate as glass. This plastic breaks like bones, it degrades like you. Everything here traverses a line between permanence and fragility. 

This techno-paradise is your boss’ fever dream. To your left, at a distance, throngs of people are enveloped in smoke, imperceptible through fog. Their silhouettes become an illusion of being and unbeing, a trick of the hazy neon. Their movements take the celerity of an old cartoon, a series of lines and shapes, as formulaic as the lights that swivel and turn to reveal people in the darkness where before there were none. 

Nothing is real here, except the series of screens before you, and the deep rot that pulsates, as steady as your heartbeat, from the centre of the floor and outwards to your feet.

Your attention is beckoned back to the course by the vector of the lights. All is subject to the choices, the inclusions and exclusions of the unmerciful yellow. The pathways drawn by shadows capture you until you are transfixed. You are seduced by the motions that entice you, as if by the slow gesture of a curling finger. It is the event of the hour, and it is time to perform. 

This is life in submission to the machine.

ii.

The screen closest to you is the manual control of the karts on track. It is your job to oversee the speed system, to speed and slow drivers according to their skill level. With just a soft press of the screen, you can watch the karts quicken or slow to your liking. 

Where first the race begins moderate, soon the karts accelerate and move faster than your fingers can handle. The higher the speeds are, the more dangerous it gets, yet all are under the illusion that they are safe. Here, the machine is worshipped and praised like an all-knowing, all-protecting God. 

The machine is an illusion that plays with your humanness, bestows power onto you in the trick mirror you face. You control the machine, and yet it controls you. You are responsible for its successes, but its downfalls are far, far worse, and you are responsible for these, too. You click and click and something deceives you, processes outside of your control, behind your back. Everything hangs heavy on an imperceptible, indefinite article. Everything in sight is dependent on something that cannot be seen or quantified, or even blamed at all.

iii.

The security cameras are innocuously placed, yet you are aware of every single one. There are cameras that survey each turn, there are cameras that watch each kart. There are cameras that are positioned to, ever so carefully, watch you, too. Diagonally, above your right shoulder, there is a camera that protrudes from the ceiling. It steals your permission, it lodges itself into the crook of your neck.

The camera is the mass at the back of your head. You cannot dispel it no matter how hard you try. Your humanness is so heavy in your lungs and they want to watch how well you hold it there, how well you can suffocate its movements, stifle its breathing. You are a camera of sorts, too. 

From opposite ends of the track, you survey the space and staff. You watch how well they can react, how well they can occupy the space between suspense and horror. 

It is only fair, for the staff are watching you in return. At 15 minutes on the clock — and this part is integral —you call the next race in and press play on the safety briefing video. It lasts for 3 minutes. This gives you time to disinfect, scrub, and place the used helmets back on their rack, assorted by size. The helmets are made from hard plastic, curvaceous and smooth. Failure to clean against the mercy of the clock will leave you drowned in a pile of unclean helmets. 

Your eyes have become accustomed to the dark. Your movements have become mechanical. You cannot afford to stop or pause, even for a brief moment. 

In your hands are a soiled rag and spray bottle. You cannot recall when you picked them up or from where and, try as you might, the walk from the video room to the helmet rack is irrevocable. When you see your hands you cannot recognise your forearms as yours. Your fingers are new and foreign. The veins in your hand that rise and fall with each movement are your cross, you can feel the heat flooding to your extremities, radiating from your palms. You have become a puppeteer of yourself. Your consciousness has been robbed from you, and so you cease to exist. 

The track is humid and hot. Heat melts through the ceiling and radiates through the floor. It surrounds you, it dulls and numbs your senses. The track is the vessel by which you are deprived until you are just a body, operating without complexity or care. Outside, the world is dark and quiet. It is just beyond your reach. Your body seems to have become part of the technology, taken by the metal and glass. You are machinery made of flesh, built of wires and bone.

iv.

If you are going to create a go-kart track, you must first consider go-kart mechanics. You must draft safety protocols that are to be followed in crashes like this one, where the driver has suffered such intense whiplash that the barrier has broken. The driver has hit the barrier around turn 8 with such force that he has jolted forward, neck askew, and his seatbelt has pushed him backwards into his seat. 

The wreckage is a distortion, a ripple in time. With the click of a button, everything becomes slow. The lights change to a flashing orange warning and the karts are reduced, instantly, to slow motion.  The tinny beat of a pop song plays over the speakers, it prevails over all. The only perceptible movement is the trio of staff that meet at the crash in lightning speed, exchanging wordless looks as they push the kart from the barrier. 

There is no one watching, but now your job is a public performance that needs to be executed with the precision of a knife. You push down the feelings in your chest. From the barrel of a camera, you see yourself crouch, exchange words with the driver who wishes to keep racing and, with another click, everything returns to how it once was. The staff return to their positions and, like magic, the blip in time is erased and the wreckage ceases to have ever existed. 

From a space you cannot locate, the pop song continues. It continues, and continues. It radiates from the ceiling, it is emitted from the walls. It threatens your personhood for reasons you cannot fathom or explain. A traumatic accident is not allowed to be a tragedy here. 

You cannot dispel the song from your mind, it plays and plays on repeat, long after the crash has been fixed. You exist in the space between anticipation and fear, in worship to the music. It is your job to stand at the foot of the track, survey the space. It is your job to wait, and wait until it is, once again, your turn to react and erase.