Chapter 31
The original device was Joselyn’s greatest investment in the company. Her magnum opus.
She’s going to be in history books. She knows this because she’s been putting her name in the transcriptions.
Giving herself credit for various historical events. Then publishing manuscripts once thought to be lost in the violent rivers of time.
One-of-one copies of writings thought to be lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria justifying her lineage.
A wytch who doctors documents.
Before people just had cellphones that they purchased online. Now they use a very specific kind of cellphone made by ArtoVCOs that’s their bespoken device. The idea came to Joselyn one night when something strange happened.
In the makeshift office in the drawing room of the East Estate, Joselyn retrieves a small black plate from her bag and places it down like she’s in the bomb squad.
She says, “It appeared to me in the night.” She’s using her serious voice.
She recounted the evening before where outside her wooden door was a small patch of moonlight on the grass just off the porch and then the endless void of forest at night.
In a thin ring of light that looked like a lunar eclipse the size of a basketball floating away every time she stepped forward, she followed it until she came to the small obsidian mirror on the ground, identical to the original. She assumed it was moved by some mysterious force, or perhaps misplaced by me. When she returned inside to find the original sitting safely in its spot near the fireplace she was bedazzled with revelation.
She picked it up and held it near her face as she gazed into it. She says, “It’s a twin. It wants to multiply itself. Asexual reproduction.”
She rubs the face of it with her thumbs still staring at herself.
Morgen’s tone moved to one of skepticism. “And why would it want to do that?”
“It’s a mirror.” Joselyn says, “I guess it wants to look at itself.”
All practitioners of alchemy from Myrddin to Jason Louv have sought after pieces of John Dee’s black obsidian mirror.
The Aztecs used it to speak to other universes.
The legends say that it was created when the eye of God shattered into infinite pieces and the dark fragments became the black dot in everyone’s eyes.
All we know is when the Aztecs communicated by looking into the smooth shining black they were seeing someone else in the reflection.
The devices sold fourteen million units in its first week thanks to a list of endorsements made by Morgen. None of us protested the use of the royal-heiress-with-a-lipstick-line move. As it is a long respected American archetype.
There was not enough obsidian to make a small mirror that will fit in your palm for everyone in the world. But there was enough to put a small chip of the rock in every phone. A shaving really. And yet the connectivity between devices never drops. The energy is indivisible. The amount of the rock matters not.
Scientifically it checks out.
We paid for the research and development to discover manufacturing procedures for replicating the crystal growth to 96% accuracy. But if you’ve ever held the real thing, you can feel the missing 4%.
The flake is placed inside the steel housing.
There are holes poked into the side of the housing like holes in a shoe box for a pet frog.
Device owners can whisper a name into the holes in the box and that person’s face should appear on the screen. Magic in the palm of your hand.
We made the world impossible to live in for those who refused to be ArtoDevice owners. All devices are replicas of the real VCO of John Dee. Today all smartphone manufacturers use our chips.
The real one is in Joselyn’s Library.
*
Our IP protected us from what became of the constant overturning of the FMCA.
VCOs were no longer legally protected by private ownership. The unspeakable, the exceptionally rare, the transcendent, the explicit, the pornography is for all the people.
A Visual Cult Object is something that I own that’s a reflection of me.
If you wanted to have one for yourself you had to keep it a secret.
Those with their own collections hid their VCOs in museums or vaults that are inside the base of mountains, protected by armed guards.
Depending on the update of the FMCA, one could transition from rich thieves to wealthy collector. At least until the overturning of the FMCA is overturned again. That which is private could become public any day.
In the short windows of time between updates, when the FMCA is inactive, museums of the world get absolutely sacked with lawsuits.
If the world got smart whenever the FMCA was inactive they would storm into the houses of the rich and retrieve every piece of art or fine furniture or technology.
In those transitory moments, it didn’t belong to one person.
Then the FMCA will be re-instated and those idiots who burglarized the bourgeoise will be sacked so hard. They know they will too. Even before they plan out their Viking pillage trip.
It would just be a gesture.
A protest.
A warning, we have not forgotten.
James Jacob Hatfield is a displaced engineer, a painter, and many other contradictions. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Barely South Review, Chaleur Magazine, Havik, and others. His ekphrasis poem “torrents of lahar, No. 36” was anthologized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is a Sterling Fellow and a Weymouth Fellow. He is the creator and curator of the Gemini Sessions Substack. He lives in Durham, NC.
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