🦺 The Birth of the Electrical Grid

Welcome to the ninth edition of Safe For Work. We kick off the March theme of power and energy with science fiction short story inspired by love, humidity, and the ephemeral spark of connection.

I close my eyes around what is technically midnight in a tiny room about 12,000 kilometers from where I live– to my mind, it’s somewhere in the afternoon, and it’s harder to get further from anywhere than here from that, I think– not without a rocket-ship. The temperature in Mumbai is 81 degrees Fahrenheit, even in this darkness– nevermind the lights of the city further around, permanent, it’s pitch enough in here. 

The power flows here at 220 volts and 50 hertz, as compared to 120 volts and 60 hertz back in Boston– and I’ll never be able to convince anyone that I can tell the difference in the subaudible humming in the walls, or the flickering of the lightbulbs when I had them on a few minutes ago, or the whirring of the air-conditioner (doing its best, the staff promised me), but I swear I can tell the difference, and there’s not anyone who’ll be able to convince me otherwise. 

What about you? Can you tell the difference? Or is there even a difference to tell here, for you?-- was it the lower voltage and higher frequency back in Boston that had felt wrong to you for the three years there we spent together before this? Maybe you’re feeling more at home here– no, of course you are, you definitely are, no question about that. Maybe you’re feeling safer here. I hope so. You’re back in the loving hands of the same body electric that first lifted you, raised you.

I’m sorry for everything. Maybe you know that. I’m sorry for how this little honeymoon or journey home or whatever it is of ours has gone wrong– it was always going to go wrong, and we knew that, I think, and I think we pretended not to know that because otherwise we never would have tried it, coming here, and we both wanted to come here. But just like all our vacations, here we are and here we are. I did the wrong thing, and then you said the wrong thing about it, and then I said the wrong thing back to you, and then you did the wrong thing because of that– because you were just hurting and lost and scared and I was hurting and lost and scared and neither of us seems to have the simple machinery to just take of each other in moments like this, or in other moments either, maybe, though we never seem to need it when we don’t need it, you know? We’re not like this air-conditioner up above the window here in the little hotel-room I’ve rented for peanuts. We’re not like this air-conditioner (it really is trying its best), it’s not just what you put in and get out for either of us. You can’t just run a current through me and get me to cool down– and we’ve tried that, haven’t we? Can’t just flip a switch and get you to forgive me, or to realize at least that I didn’t mean it. 

But you’re in Mumbai, and I’m in Mumbai. There are blood-vessels between us, still– or something like that. I am gripped by your nearness– I am in Mumbai and you’re in Mumbai. I’m here in this hotel, and you’re still (I think) in your old friend’s guest-bedroom ten, maybe twenty kilometers away– or something like that, I never know what kilometers are like, I’m always thinking in miles. You’re laying alone in bed in the dark (I think), just like I’m laying alone in bed in the dark. The walls around you pulse the same as me. 

I am gripped by your nearness to me, and I cannot sleep yet, so I get up out of this lonely bed in the dark, and I cross the room in the dark towards that lonely outlet where the air-conditioner is plugged in (it’s trying as hard as we’ve been trying, I’m sure, or even harder), and I lean up my head against the wall, and I whisper into the wiring. 

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but there’s no point to that, really. You know that, already– and if you don’t by now you probably never will. 

And that isn’t what you need to hear, anyways. 

“I miss you.”

It’s nothing more than a little flutter of probabilities and interrelationships on the quantum scale– barely that. It spreads outwards from my little hotel-room at 220 volts and 50 hertz, and is that a lot or not much at all? It’s nothing more than nothing. The electrons barely move, you know? It’s that crowded market street I was walking around a few hours ago, trying to cool myself down in the 81 degree heat (never works)– not to mention the exhaust of the must-have-been-a-thousand cars and scooters and autorickshaws pushing and honking along in barely the space of a sidewalk between the stalls– not to mention the must-have-been-a-million people pushing and muttering or sometimes shouting words I didn’t know, bare calves brushing up against hot exhaust-pipes as everyone just nudged blindly through the traffic and not even a reaction. Bottomless life, stuffed so tight and tense that nothing was really moving at all but the sound and the sweat. Bottomless life and promises, the whole mess layered on top of itself and on top of itself, like so many postage-stamps on a package sent all the way from one end of the world to the other, and then back again, and then there again, and then back again, never opened, but always filling. And never really getting anywhere at all.

One mile per year. 

But also it’s faster than almost anything. It’s very nearly the speed of light. It’s very nearly instantaneous– and it’s barely a minute after I’ve whispered before my phone is ringing on the nightstand– I have it on silent, but I can see the sudden light, painting the ceiling and the walls. I’ve got it plugged in, charging– and for just a moment, I think that maybe my little whisper has just looped around the city and back to me through that other outlet into my phone to light it up. But no, it’s really ringing. 

It’s really you. 

I pick up. I murmur to you. You murmur back.

“I miss you, too”

See you next week as we go energy harvesting in the depths of the Matrix. Stay safe.