this world begins in
The most abundant element on earth's crust. The late 20th century and early 21st century are known as the Silicon Age because of the influence of computation. Because Silicon is a semiconuctor, with conductivity between metals and insulators, it is able to switch between on and off states, allowing it to have memory.
I’ll never know how much my skin means to me until I lose it. That’s what I told myself. And I knew it was true. And it was. But I kept on selling them anyway.
“It’ll just keep growing back, you know.” said Byup, sitting on the patio with her tomato soda. She poured more on her grinning cup before kissing the grin with her cheeks and drinking from the side of it. “You really should focus more on your margins. And then what you do with them. You can really make more out of what you’ve got than what you’re making right now.” she said. “Don’t undervalue yourself.” she took another drink of the soda.
I step my fourth leg forward and lay down another bowl of freshly baked silicon chips. “I just need to sell five more, and then I can take a break, and have a vacation or something. go back home. The other home.” I say.
“The one where you don’t even have a place to stay anymore?” she said.
I take a few pictures through my eye of the five skins I have on display. “This is a good angle, right?”
“You ought to just take a video. The metamaterial tattoos on the third one. I mean. You really gotta capture that.” she says.
“Those really hurt to get.” I say.
“Which means you really have to do it justice.” She took a handful of silicon and crunched down on them. “You’d think by now they’d have better anesthetics.”
“They do. I just opted out of them.” I reply, this time taking a slingshot video.
“Aah. Because they sell more because the process was painful. Or whatever superstition the skin market thinks. You should’ve taken a video of it at least. The process, I mean.” she said.
“Yes, of course I did. I gave my best but still believable performance. Very reality TV. But you know, they say the body remembers pain. Even skin. It’s like, skin-memory. If someone puts it on–”
She laughs. “You mean if they put it on. They’ll probably just display it on a frame.”
“Or, digitize it?”
“Heh, sure. Digitize pain.” she eats one piece of silicon chip. “Etched on etched on etc.”
I hear a near-silent spray of water as a gondola speeds by, stopping right in front of my skins. Three halfies poke their heads out.
“I’ve got five skins available today. Grown over four years, unrushed. Yes, they’re mine.”
The smooth wind pulled in by the gondola washed over the five skins, making them wobble and writhe, metamaterials reflecting light as if they were turned on.
Feeling the glass wall on my palm, realizing I can no longer tell what temperature it is outside. We are fully climate controlled. The city pulses steadily. It used to glitter. I hear a distant advertisement tumbling down the hall. They are building the newest section of the city, several blocks ahead. Already, few people pass by where I’m at now, and in time, there will be nobody, once the new sections are fully functional. And the same thing will happen. The city is like a snake. But more like the snake in the video game we used to play: it grows longer and longer. I often wonder if dead skin cells I've shed or stray hairs are still in those segments. Or if some of the substances from the structures are still in my body. The old sections of the city can still be visited, if one has enough time to follow backwards this maze of glass and steel. Somehow, everything decades prior is still operational. There is no need for memory here, when one can visit it, and inhabit it directly. Nobody ever has time to take the trek, though. Sometimes, the path of the city bends in such a way that we can see the older decades from here. It means that if one exits the city and travels directly towards the older segment, one can save a lot of time in visiting it. But who would want to leave the perfectly controlled climate of the city?