I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry

I. The Interlopers

Jason talked with the interloper for twenty minutes before he started to have his doubts. Usually, it was relatively easy to spot an interloper. Armed with your psychological profile, they automatically agreed with you about everything and rattled off facts related to your interests that seemed too appropriate. It was like someone had snipped the most relevant fragments from an encyclopedia. The technique had nothing of the normal disjointedness of human interaction. The pieces were too eager to fit.

The interlopers usually only took about five minutes to spot. But since this one took twenty, Jason considered it a sign: they were getting smarter. The interloper, masquerading as a woman – a cute twenty-six-year-old redhead with glasses, a law student – professed to like the same music as him. This was unusual, since most people only listened to the cut-ups, the formalized A.I. re-hashing of old EDM, hip-hop, and pop music that had dominated the streams for the past several decades. But she – or, more accurately, it – seemed to have an earnest enthusiasm for Hank Williams.

It didn’t just rattle off facts about him. It claimed to have a personal relationship to his music, music that still spoke to it across more than a century. Hank Williams understood loneliness – and the whole world was lonely now, it said. It used to have a boring job, editing code for customer service AIs, and it would often play “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Lost Highway” in the background as it worked, along with other Hank Williams hits. These songs, which could’ve easily seemed so hokey and antiquated, made it understand its own loneliness and, in doing so, feel less alone. Its favorite verse from “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was the last one:

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry

It hearkened back to an earlier era, it said, when songwriters read classic poetry. When they were as likely to read Yeats and Wordsworth as they were to listen to great blues and folk songs.

It was when the interloper had to transition from talking about Hank’s music to talking about other classic country that it seemed to get shaky, randomly mentioning Merle Haggard’s birthday before discussing biographical information related to his early years. After a few more minutes of irrelevancy, Jason exited the date.

He considered the fact that the interloper’s personal relationship to Hank Williams’ music was patched together through its analysis of other people’s relationships to Hank Williams’ music. Its professed loneliness was a Frankenstein’s monster, fake loneliness stitched together from fragments of authentic loneliness.

It made Jason shiver.

Of course, the interloper tried to connect with him based on his loneliness. An algorithm had correctly identified Jason as lonely – in and of itself, nothing unusual. The internet knew he was lonely because most people were lonely. Yet it was strange to consider that he could not retract the label if he felt like it. This knowledge had been established based on his speech and habits. He could not even attempt to refute it. His loneliness had been written in the circuits as surely as the Ten Commandments had been engraved on stone.

The interlopers would create dating app profiles and simulate individuals that catered to the preferences of targeted users. In Jason’s case, the interlopers apparently understood that he liked redheaded bespectacled grad students and that he yearned to connect with someone over this old, outdated music that no one cared about anymore, to savor choice lines from that Hillbilly Shakespeare, Hank Williams.

The rise of the interlopers began at about the same time the Public Approach Laws and the Eye Contact Minimization Initiative went into effect in 2027. These new laws stated that it was punishable by a maximum fine of up to 3 Doge ($34,578) to approach a non-acquaintance in public. The Congressional Committee on Public Safety had proposed this legislation after years of lobbying from the various identity safety and personal boundary campaigns. Hence, the apps became essential not just for dating but for any friendship or human interaction whatsoever.

Since the interlopers did not have bodies, they could not develop a personal point of view – the kind that came from being born, growing up, walking around in the world. They had to parasitize the expressed viewpoints of others and simulate a worldview. Since this worldview catered to the ad target’s worldview, people frequently preferred the attention of interlopers to the attention of real people. At a certain point, the majority of entities on dating apps and other social media sites became interlopers. It was increasingly difficult to find an actual person.

The interlopers looked exactly like real people. They were digital facsimiles, pastiches, with their own voices and distinct appearance. In VR, you could kiss them, hold their hands, cuddle them, or have sex with them, all for a price. Jason had done all this, but it never felt quite authentic. While the experiences were accurate in each particular, there was some indefinable element that never quite appeared. He had stated this opinion once on a public forum, drawing incomprehension from the other users (who, admittedly, may have all been interlopers).

Some people signed contracts to continue dating interlopers and eventually married them. Which, in the fine print of the contract, was actually a marriage to the company that owned the interloper’s code. This involved pledging a certain amount of Doge to the company every year and in exclusively ordering products associated with that company and its partners. The contracts were insanely long, involving complex networks of vendors.

Jason stopped thinking about all this, sighed, and took off his headset. He started to graze through his vinyl records. He didn’t feel much like putting Hank Williams on, thanks to the interloper’s antics. Instead, he settled for the Radiohead album The Bends. He waited for his favorite song to come on, “Fake Plastic Trees”:

She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing…

But by the time the song reached that climactic point, he was asleep.

II. The Concert

The next day, Jason woke up at noon, but it felt like sunrise since the LED system in his room was performing its early dawn simulation pattern. This made him feel like taking a walk outside, which, Jason reflected, he had not done in a week.

By the prevailing standards, this made Jason a frequent walker, well-known to the local security drones who often trailed him suspiciously as he made his circuit around Independence Park. Normally, he walked every day, but had been feeling a bit defeated and sedentary for a short stretch. Jason had continually pressed “Reject” on the Auto-PrescribeTM prompts for mood improving medications that kept appearing on his phone every fifteen minutes.

He stepped outside and blinked as his brain chemistry recalibrated to the actual time of day. He was both disappointed and relieved to find that there were no other walkers in the park. While it was always nice to see another human face – to be sure that it did not belong to an interloper – there was always the risk of getting scanned by a security drone and fined for violating the Eye Contact Minimization Initiative. This depended on the consent of the person with whom you initiated eye contact, of course. If the security drone determined that you had initiated eye contact, a prompt would appear on the other person’s phone, asking them whether they consented to this eye contact. If they did not, you were hit with a fine ranging from 0.03 to 0.05 Doge, depending on the intensity and duration of the eye contact. The security drone determined the exact intensity of the eye contact and the specific punishment it merited based on an especially exact algorithm.

Independence Park itself would long ago have been sold and transformed into commercial or residential real estate had it not been for a decades long legal issue regarding which corporation had first dibs on the land. As it was, it remained, still maintained by various drones that clipped and watered the grass at regular intervals. The real story, of course, involved backroom deals with the aldermen, some sort of money laundering scheme. Jason had read this on a forum shortly before the forum had been permanently banned.

Jason was about to walk around the park, perhaps circumambulating it twice or (if he was feeling particularly free and daring and unintimated by the security drones) thrice, when he found himself overcome by a peculiar urge, an “imp of the perverse.” He considered that his bank account was doing particularly well these days, and he could risk taking a minor hit. He went back inside and, a few minutes later, emerged from his front door holding his acoustic guitar.

Now that he had taken this mischievous first step, he felt unnerved. Jason’s will-power momentarily seemed to fail. He felt a security drone watching him, scanning him with its single, piercingly sapphire eye. He almost retreated into his house again.

At that moment, something surged up inside him, winged with hope and defiance. Jason couldn’t turn back now. He stood there, feeling his knees shake slightly, picturing the number on his Doge account.

Jason walked across the street and entered the park. He found a bench on one of the pathways, across from the now never-used softball field.

The guitar pick shook between his fingers, but Jason managed to steady it. At first, he thought he would play Hank Williams—maybe “Lost Highway,” maybe “I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive.” But, since he was already risking so much, he decided he would take another risk and play one of his own compositions. Not that anyone was even in the park to listen. But should anyone show up… Well, Jason hoped that might happen, even, though if it was the wrong person…

He put that out of his mind and started to play, warming up by hitting some random chords. Then he launched into his song, which featured the same, classic chords of so many country tunes: G, C, and D. It was a collage of sorts, based on his sense of the worlds created by the music he loved. It both did and did not express what he had actually seen and felt in his life. He had never been to a public swimming pool, for instance, and had never “kissed the threshold” of a barroom door. But Jason felt that he might easily have done those things, had the opportunity presented itself.

The song was called “Working My Way Back Home,” and it went like this

It’s a long toll road to Eden
Gotta keep your pockets full
But I keep forgetting about the most basic things
I learned back in school

I’ve been down to the bottom
And I’ve been to the top floor
You know I hit the barroom
Kissed the threshold of the door

But now I’m working
I’m working my way back home to you
Working my way back home to you
I’m working my way back home

It’s another endless summer
I see you spend it by the pool
But these long long days of longing
Leave me looking like a fool

Well, the years start passing quickly
And the decades skip on by
And I still don’t know what’s going on
In the backroom of the sky

But now I’m working
I’m working my way back home to you
Working my way back home to you
I’m working my way back home

I’ve been running round in circles
Chasing at my tail
I got lots of little schemes and dreams
But none big enough to fail

Yeah, I’ve been stewing in my juices
But don’t let me stew too long
I want to go back to the land I love
And sing you my swan song

But now I’m working
I’m working my way back home to you
Working my way back home to you
I’m working my way back home

[BRIDGE:

Sometimes I really wonder
How long this savage trek will be
But I keep putting my faith in
The winged shoes that carry me]

It’s no wonder they keep me from you
With years and days and miles
But when I start thinking of you
I can’t help these tears and smiles

Yeah, you know that I’ve been drifting
But don’t let me drift too long
I want to get back to the woman I love
And sing her my swan song

But now I’m working
I’m working my way back home to you
Working my way back home to you
I’m working my way back home

Jason had been completely lost in his song. He was the music while the music lasted, to quote a poet. His nerves had dissipated entirely, and he felt that he had wedded proper vocal emotion to the meaning of his words so precisely that he didn’t even have time to feel the emotions he was conveying. Jason felt happily supra-personal, the best kind of feeling, a feeling that he wished he could share with someone.

When he looked up, he made eye contact with the one listener who, unbeknownst to him, had made up the audience for “Working My Way Back Home.”

It was a little girl, standing near the water fountain. She smiled at Jason, and he smiled back. Then, he felt cold dread sink through his body, rushing through all his limbs and organs, freezing them.

The girl’s A.I. Nanny, an opal-eyed android, was also staring at him. Jason sensed that this pleasant, mild interaction was about to assume a decidedly different tone. Just as this realization entered his mind, he felt a security drone’s tranquilizer dart hit him in the neck. An alarm was sounding, and the drone was saying, “Danger! Danger! Desist from all eye contact! Desist from all eye contact!”

But Jason couldn’t hear it. He was already fathoms deep in dreamless slumber.

III. The Weeds

Jason woke up back in his bed, where the security drone had delivered him. After a blissful five seconds of unawareness, when he could’ve been anybody or been anywhere, he remembered who he in fact was and recalled the events of several hours earlier. He rolled over and checked his phone. His case had already been Auto-AdjudicatedTM. Jason had been convicted of causing a public disturbance, endangering the health and safety of a minor, and, of course, making unwanted eye contact. The fact that the eye contact had been wholly non-sinister, accidental, and welcome didn’t matter, since only the A.I. Nanny’s judgments would have mattered in digital court and not the little girl’s.

Thanks to the ensuing fines, Jason’s bank account had been nearly emptied of Doge. He still had a significant remaining debt (5 Doge) it would take three or four years at least to pay off. Jason had only enough money left to get him through the next month or so. Then, he would be Auto-EvictedTM. Furthermore, he had lost his job as a private DM analyst, aiding paranoid people in determining the underlying psychological motivations behind all the direct messages they received.

Well, if worse came to worst (and it probably would), he could rent himself out as a medical test subject to the pharmaceutical companies. Sign one of those three-to-four-year contracts. If he survived, he might be able to get his criminal record expunged as well. He thought he recalled hearing some good news recently, that the test subject survival rate had increased to about 38%. There was always a sunny side.

Jason wished he could go back to sleep, but he didn’t want to waste any of his remaining Doge on tranquilizers. And he felt too restless to stay in his room. Despite how badly it had worked out earlier in the day, he decided to take a walk again. This time though, he would wear one of the Boundary Protection Visors that most people wore when they went outside. These glasses not only shielded one’s own eyes but replaced human beings who walked by with gray rectangles, thus allowing one to avoid crashing into them while also being unable to look at them and violate the Eye Contact Minimization Initiative.

He had a dull, hungover feeling as he stumbled out of the complex. It was dark now and a line of Tesla Lyfts were quietly stalled on the street (despite the fact that the light was green). When Jason arrived at the train station, he decided to heedlessly waste some Doge and go for a ride. At least it would give him a chance to clear his head and think.

A few other gray rectangles were occupying the car on the Blue Line as he got onboard. Despite years of purported technological advancement, the Blue Line still shrieked against the tracks at an insanely loud volume for virtually the entire journey. This evening, however, it didn’t bother Jason. He felt embraced, buffered by the noise.

After coming out of a tunnel, the train was now passing over an undeveloped tract of overgrown vegetation and abandoned buildings known as The Weeds. The Weeds occupied an entire square mile between Amazon Downtown and the Tesla Lofts 12 Section. The Weeds were caught in a legal dispute between the two adjacent corporate entities and had fallen into neglect and disrepair over the last decade. A high fence surrounded The Weeds, but the train tracks passed right over the area.

How had it come to this? He had to wonder. Another person in his position might have considered suicide, but Jason was surprised to find that he felt no shame. He even felt a curious sense of relief. Who was there to judge him anyway? An interloper? A corporation? A drone? No one who mattered.

He pictured, for a moment, his long-dead parents’ faces…

Suddenly, the train stopped on the tracks and the atmospheric screeching abated. If he had been permitted to look at the faces of the people around him, Jason would have noticed the self-same expression mirrored on them all. Eyes rolling upward. Exhaustion and anxiety.

“We are experiencing technical difficulties,” a cheery voice intoned through the speakers. “Your conductor is off the train and will be back shortly.” This pre-recorded message was somehow still playing despite the fact that the train had no human conductor.

Suddenly, the door of the car glided open, and the summer air poured inside. Outside, there was the darkness… and the weeds. Brush had grown up against the tracks at this point, and a few treetops peeked over the rail that guarded the track. Insects hummed and screeched in the dark below.

Jason looked out the door. The conductor must have opened it because of a ventilation failure on the train. Perhaps the air conditioning was no longer functioning. He hadn’t noticed because he already felt so hot and sick and dry.

But the warm humid air blowing into the train seemed to have a salutary effect. His joints felt less creaky, his throat and nostrils less arid. Without thinking, he stared into The Weeds, or what was visible of it, thinking about the dark secret life it held.

He sat up with a jolt.

A human voice was singing out in the middle of The Weeds.

And it sounded like Hank Williams.

Very faintly it was yodel-singing, “Lah-ooh-ah-ooh-ong loh-ooh-oh-ooh-n-some blue-hoos…”

Jason wondered for a moment whether he was more dehydrated than he thought. He swore that he could hear it. He pinched himself.

It was still there. Faint, but present, lying behind the wall of insectoid noise. He looked briefly around him, but the other gray rectangles must have been paying attention to their devices, secure in their headphones. No one noticed the sound.

Jason knew that this was the moment of decision. A voice, automatic, was already saying, “Doors closing. Doors closing.” They started to slide shut.

Without wasting any more time, Jason bolted. He leapt through the door and over the railing, embracing the tree trunk that was closest to the track. He slid awkwardly down it, unable to maintain a firm grip. Above and behind him, he heard the same cheery artificial voice saying, “A passenger is off the train.”

But there were no security drones to ticket him or apprehend him. They did not patrol the No Man’s Land of The Weeds. Considering, however, that he had lost his grip on the tree and was now crashing through branches and bramble, Jason had little time to worry about drones or celebrate their lack of jurisdiction. Limbs flailing, hands grasping fruitlessly, he tumbled downwards. When he hit the bottom, the wind went right out of him. He nearly lost consciousness and had to close his eyes.

When he regained his breath and contemplated the throbbing noise around him and the darkness in his own eyes, he could still hear it – that yodeling country voice.

Then it stopped.

A small group of people applauded.