Outer Sunland Surgeon

By David Ure

As processing power grows in the twenty-first century,

computers progress to a state of programmable matter. How 

is this technology used? The offspring of oligarchs transcend 

mortality as beneficiaries of Life Contract insurance, assuring 

their survival...sometimes despite their own best 

effo

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Ure
• Release date: Mar 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087911304

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Outer Sunland Surgeon

Outer Sunland Surgeon

David Ure

Text, artwork and cover by David Ure

Copyright © 2020

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

Slam Section

Distracted

All Fixed Up

Teenage Wildlife

Dr. Anthony of Sunland

Cashing In/Out

Melting Plastic Sun

Monster on the Side of the Highway/Policy Cancelled

Repetrospective

Intercom

Epilogue

Slam Section

From birth, Ray Hanson sought only escalating risk, adrenaline, and sublime thrill. He spent his youth ditching school to skateboard. The afternoon I met him, just after taking spring finals, he was busting barefoot kickflips into the deep end of an empty swimming pool, among other harrowing tricks. We were around seventeen then.

The skateboarding world rewarded Ray for his combination of unearthly athletic ability and what has subsequently been diagnosed as bipolar disorder, which pushed him to ever-increasing heights and ever-sharpening, rapidly narrowing death traps. While he danced toward the edge of existence, I went undecidedly off to college, where I earned a degree in literature while figuring out that all I wanted to do was make music. As I played in underground bands and projects, Ray’s skateboarding career soared.

His courage, madness, or whatever you want to call it, found the professional skater on surf vacation to Hawaii, where tentacles from an enormous storming eye scrolled towards the igneous shore, forming thundering twenty-five-foot walls that tripped and slammed down over a reef so shallow and serrated that locals and professional surfers knew better than to touch it. Undeterred by sensible warnings, he took off his wetsuit, paddled out, and rode the liquid beast naked, reaching a brief, rare moment of total physical and mental sublimation atop it.

In that ecstatic moment, his mind ascended to the mountain of cloud shadows, abandoning his body, which fell off its board into spiraling water. After pulling him in five directions at once, the beast dragged every nude nerve of him over intricate blades of bleached coral. His little head was severed and sent off floating on a raft of sea foam. Any hopes of reattachment were dashed when a seabird picked up the easy meal and flew off.

After nearly bleeding to death, he lay in the hospital: an inflamed being, regretful and self-loathing. The contorted flame of Ray’s broken life force reached desperately for some other form to take.

Behind a sterile, turquoise curtain, he rarely, if ever, blinked. The stubborn might of his consciousness held his eyelids out of the way like psychotic theater curtains, and the obsessed energy in his eyes took to reading dark Russian fiction, old dystopian and surreal sci-fi, Edgar Allen Poe, the Greeks, Buddhists, Transcendentalists, and eventually, at the recommendation of a radiologist, Futurists, whose predictions offered brief glimpses of an age when, through cloning and digital evolution, he might be made whole again. Technological transcendence became Ray Hanson’s primary fixation. On a brief hiatus from work, I hung out in the recovery suite, watching Ray’s eyes race through words on the page with the same rapid intensity that he’d approached obstacles on his board. It was as if his physical presence was transferred to this new mental manifestation, able to process text at a speed I’ve never seen before or since.

Towering stacks of encouraging mail and flowers arrived from fans, naïve to the true nature of his injuries. One admirer sent him a necklace with a crucifix made from a circuit board. It rarely left his neck. He was too busted up to skate but needed to get off his ass, even if it was only the ass in his head, so as not to tear himself apart further or become lost in some indefinite nap as he waited, like an idle mercenary, for science to progress. So he decided, with the encouragement of a psychoanalyst (who insisted that love was a metaphor for happiness), to create the following fictitious contrivance as a way of coming to terms with what happened to his body.

As Ray’s long-time brother in mania, I acted as transcriber and editor of his vision. Sometimes he dictated, other times I transcribed what I saw projected in his crystal eyes—which could be difficult, as each eye glowed with its own independent scenario. I had to develop the mental equivalent to a drummer’s limb independence, being present in more than one place at a time in order to interpret the visions of the two projector eyes.

Post-op, shortly after the accident, Ray’s sister Lindsay and I sat by his bed. Lindsay emptied the eclectic contents of her purse out on the sheets, picked up a small spring from the assortment, and stretched it out slightly. She looked at Ray, grabbed a nail clipper, and cut the stretched spring into two unequally sized coils.

Let me see that, Lindsay said and removed Ray’s circuit-board crucifix. With delicate, turquoise-nailed fingers, she attached the longer piece of the spring to the vertical beam, and the shorter piece to the patibulum, creating the impression of a DNA double helix split in two and crucified by circuitry. Lindsay placed the necklace back on Ray and picked up her phone, which was connected to a small speaker. The Velvet Underground song Pale Blue Eyes played.

"Thought of you as my mountaintop. Thought of you as my peak. Thought of you as everything I’ve had but couldn’t keep." On prescribed morphine, Ray, with no known history of sappiness, wept, and I sensed a story’s life in his brightly burning seizure of consciousness. What that story would be (and how universal its themes) came as a surprise, although not really, given the primitive complexity of the creature, who insisted that I include the following document to clarify one of the story’s key technologies:

Streaming Instructions for Mind’s Eye Cam:

Note #1: A mind’s eye cam captures everything seen by the mind; including dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, as well as what one’s eyes see consciously.

Note #2: Installation may be performed surgically at any stage of life; however, surgery during the first year is highly recommended, as the anterior fontanelle provides easy access to the brain, eliminating the need for craniotomy.

Note #3: Included with each mind’s eye cam is a mind’s ear recorder, which captures sounds experienced by the mind as the mind experiences them. This includes paracusia and tinnitus, as well as clean audio. The mind’s ear recording is automatically synced to the mind’s eye video and (unless muted**) accompanies all vision when streamed.

Standard Streaming:

2 winks: begins live-streaming one’s mind’s eye cam video to social media

3 winks: snaps a mind’s eye picture and uploads it to social media

**Touching both of one’s ears twice mutes mind’s ear audio from current capture and standard stream. Touch twice again to unmute.

Time-Machine Streaming:

1 wink* begins scrolling backwards through one’s mind’s eye capture.

1 more wink after* marks the starting point and begins time-machine streaming mind’s eye footage selection to social media.

** Touching both of one’s ears three times mutes mind’s ear audio from current time-machine stream.