The Slackening
What happens to the very laws of physics when we stop paying attention?
At the tender age of six, Susie Mathers was already frustrated with the society in which she found herself, the people, the company that she kept. At that age, her peers and relations weren’t any choice of her own, karma not withstanding. It was close to the middle of the 21st century, and despite being raised steeped in them herself, much like everyone else in her town (her county, her state, her country…) she still found the habits of those around her utterly baffling. Particularly everyone’s relationship with technology, things, objects that she could identify as being separate from the beings that wielded them so obsessively. From the first minute of the day, after one of her mothers would wake her up in the morning, she would see them intimately engaged with their phone. Their phone, their phone, their phone! At breakfast, whatever parent was cooking breakfast seemed to have a fifty-fifty chance of overcooking the eggs or burning the toast because of the things. “Damnit!” they would say heatedly, appearing to be truly frustrated with themselves or what they’d done, what they’d allowed to happen, and maybe then pay attention to finishing breakfast, plating food for Susie, or pouring her some orange juice, only to get sucked back into the thing the next moment they heard a ping! come from it, announcing what Susie learned was the appearance of something called a text from someone, a short message from someone who was somewhere else, doing something else.
For the life of her - all six years of it and the decades that lay waiting in promise for her to live - she couldn’t understand why anyone or anything who wasn’t in the room could be more important or matter more urgently than who or what was. This wasn’t a case of not yet grasping object permanence. In terms of cognitive and psychological development Susie probably tested as advanced for her age, so she had had that milestone down for years now. It was a matter of priority, respect, and love.
To and from school, dance lessons, and friends’ houses, both of her parents had nearly gotten into car accidents on several occasions because of distracted driving. Not taken in by a phone yet herself, she saw other drivers on the road doing the same. Did kids get smarter for a time and then start getting dumber again when they became adults? Susie wondered to herself often. She caught her teacher checking her phone here and there throughout the school day. Clearly she tried to be sneaky about this, but there was no hiding it; she also could not resist the allure of her text notifications. Once, after the late morning snack had been served and everyone was getting their munch on, and Ms. Clackily walked over to her long cubby-closet where she kept her jacket and purse throughout the day (and her phone, if it wasn’t at her desk), Susie startled her by coming up behind her and calling her name when she wasn’t expecting it, asking her rapidly, as kids sometimes do, “Ms. Clackily what’re you doing?” Her teacher got flustered, and reacted not with embarrassment and explanation, but mild anger and reproach. “Susie, remember what we said about personal space?”
“I do Ms. Clackily. I made sure to be at least four kid steps away from you before I called your name. I just wanted to know what you were doing on your phone during snack. Are you getting ready for the next lesson? Are we doing social studies again today after snack?? I love social studies!” Her teacher, unskillfully, could not drop her annoyance with Susie over catching her on her phone when she, the one adult in the room, knew better. Like nearly everyone else on the planet in the 21st century, she couldn’t help herself. She knew it was a bad habit. She’d heard just how and why it wasn’t good for her cognitive faculties, attention span, short-term and working memory from what she’d heard in podcasts, podcast science, from things she heard from others similarly informed in segments or sound-bytes or long-form conversations that they probably zoned out over, listening to their science podcast in order to ‘feel more productive’ and cram more information (noise, rather) into their ears, the real motivation not being to really learn anything and apply it to their lives, but actually (though only a brave few would admit this) to not have to face their automatic thoughts and out-of-control mental ruminations.
“Yes, Susie,” Ms. Clackily replied with a huff, “we are doing Social Studies today after snack, like we do every day. Now please go back to your seat and…oh, you finished your snack already. I see…”.
So too were her dance and gymnastics teachers noticeably and disappointingly phone-philic, often awkward, spaced-out, and unclear in their instruction. Other kids didn’t seem to notice this maddeningly ubiquitous preoccupation the adults and older kids around them had; they had either accepted it as normal - what life would look like when you got to a certain age - or ceased noticing people distracted on their little handheld devices by the sheer frequency of the sight. Other children might even have been fondly looking forward to the day when they reached the level of maturity when they got to do that thing with their hands too, stare into that small, reflective, video-displaying rectangle that seemed mysteriously essential to the day’s functioning. That much was clear enough to Susie, such as when her mother turned it into a moving map when they got into the car together, or when she used it to play music aloud. But most of the time, adults’ doings on the things were inscrutable and selfish-seeming, offensive even to Susie, not because she thought herself so important but because the preoccupation was such a blatant distraction from the actual, real world or space in which the distraction was taking place! Could no one else see that? In this analysis, in this line of questioning, sadly Susie found no compatriot, no one else who quite saw what she saw and the dire, glaring problems that came with it.
So thrown off and invalidated by the world around her, so consistently miffed by the people with whom she co-habitated it, little Susie Mathers, with her messy ponytail and missing front tooth, went within. At any point in the story of humanity previous to widespread phone use, previous to the normalcy of transhumanism and the standardness of cyborgship, the sharp, humorous and engagingly precocious girl would’ve been an out and out extrovert; that was certainly her inclination from the start. However, when it was so daily normal for the larger, driving, feeding, dressing adult doers around her to be caught staring into the palm of their hands as if smitten or charmed by a witch’s black mirror, Susie ‘took the hint’ and stopped engaging them as much. She stopped remarking on the wonders of trying new foods or new things like rollerblading or learning how to tie her shoes, or the change in the seasons or how and why people smelled differently to her. She learned to keep her mouth closed more often, only to speak when required, and instead entrenched herself in the castle town of her thoughts.
She thought and thought. Throughout the day, when in groups of her peers, when together with her family, and when alone, she thought. With the breadth and depth of a living, constantly expanding encyclopedia, she took note of the world around her in the terms she was taught, and then when she’d exhausted practically all the words and combinations of words for everything she knew, she started making things up. She fancied the illogical and the surreal, like a parade of pink and silver unicorns trotting into her classroom, interrupting Ms. Clackily, stomping her weakly protesting form down to the ground before growing arms and distributing endless bowls of rainbow sherbet ice cream to everyone in class. And then when all of her classmates were preoccupied with eating, Susie imagined herself hopping up onto the back of a small, willing unicorn, who bent and brayed entreatingly, willing the young girl to mount her. And once Susie did, the unicorn parade tromped off, back to whence they came, now with Susie in tow.
In the evening before bed, Susie imagined her home being bathed in a warm golden light that shone down from the utmost reaches of the sky, that healed each member of her family physically over night as well as filled them with joy.
Susie thought of scenarios like this over and over again, each day, telling no one.
And then one day, something happened. Something broke. With the adults and young adults and increasingly even pre-pubiscent kids of the world lost in their phones, diffuse in their attention and feeble in their awareness, the normal laws of physics “slackened”, is how theoretical physicists studying the problem later on would put it, because a critical mass was reached of people not paying attention to them. Someone in a trance takes for granted the functioning of the world around them, that the sun will rise again tomorrow, that there will even be a tomorrow, that the lights will turn on when you flick the switch when entering a room, or turn off when leaving it; that water will come out of the faucet and that the grocery store will always have food. With enough people no longer actively paying attention to these ‘givens’, they became more fragile, more amenable to the power of suggestion of those who did. And oh, upon noticing this slackening, did Susie suggest, and suggest, and suggest some more…
The morning she first noticed this phenomenon was a morning she was annoyed with her mothers. With their backs to her and with Susie sitting at the kitchen table, her parents were, between the two of them, cooking eggs and making coffee, doing these things on autopilot with one hand, while the other, of course, swiped at a phone. “Susie be quiet please, your eggs are almost ready. You are officially old enough now to do your own toast and butter. It’s not that hard. You know what to do,” one of the women said to her, her back still turned, while the other offered nothing but a barely audible grunt of agreement. In the moments of seething rage at her barely caring parents, Susie stared daggers at them. The air between them began to grow thick and wavy, like there was suddenly an influx of humidity in the room, heated vapor, or the beginning of a storm cloud forming. She imagined a black frisbee with bits of sharp, broken glass attached to it flying through the kitchen window and swiping both of her parents across their stupid, uncaring faces. She thought this intensely, glowering at them, even as they could not see. And the next moment, it came to be. Crsshhhh shing bnngg! “Ow what the f-”, “Oh my god what the fucking helll?!” they both called out into the kitchen simultaneously. “What the hell was that?” “Is that, is that a fucking frisbee?” “Oh ow don’t touch it Mellie it’s…it’s got glass all over it.” “What the…? How?” “You’re bleeding, Mel.” “So are you!”
As her mothers fiddled around at the violent intrusion, tended to their wounds, swept up the broken glass and then examined the window and looked outside, speculating on its origin, Susie toasted herself a single piece of toast and buttered it to the sound of the eggs frying hard to the pan. For the last few minutes, her parents had stopped paying attention to her and breakfast entirely. This was understandable, and Susie felt empathy for them as she also felt a giggling sort of wondrous amazement at the efficacy of her visualization. “Mom? Mom? Are you guys okay? I think the eggs are burning…”
She arrived late, but eventually one of her parents brought her to school, signing her in under an excused tardiness for the accident over breakfast; the secretary in the school office could clearly see by virtue of the hodge-podge of band-aids and gauze on her mother’s face that the family had been forestalled with…something this morning. By the time Susie made her way into class, they were wrapping up the morning’s reading session. Snack-time was about to begin, and Susie could not complain. She handed Ms. Clackily her attendance slip excusing her tardiness, smiling and with eyes downcast, as had been her habit lately when ‘greeting’ people. Tabitha Clackily read it and filed it away somewhere in her desk. “Please take your seat, Susie. We’re going to have snack soon.” Susie sat down, looked to her right and saw her classmate Mathias stick his tongue out at her and cross his eyes. You’ll be like that forever now, Susie thought as she briefly imagined Mathias going about the rest of his day making that face, laughing to herself as she imagined him laying down to bed looking like that.
“Ehh, ehhh, my hunnh. I han he ma hunnh! Hunnh! Hunnp!” Mathias called out with increasing frenzy. He stood up from his chair and pried at this face. “Mathias what’s going on?” Ms. Clackily asked aloud. “Hennh! Hennh meh!” the boy called out. Now the whole class became aware that something unusual was going on, something disruptive to their routine, which they all of course revelled in and got quite charged over. “Mathias, stop making that face!” “I HANNH!” the boy yelled with his tongue sticking out, unable to put it back into his mouth and therefore unable to make the many sounds that require the participation of a tongue. He started veritably freaking out, crying and pulling at his face in his franticness. “Let’s go to the nurse. Class, have your snack and behave yourself for a few minutes as I walk Mathias to the nurse’s office.”
In the absence of their teacher, the class wailed and jeered, had a wild elementary school party in the span of the four minutes that their teacher was away, stoked on the lack of adult presence in the room. Susie sat at her desk, eating her snack in amazed recognition of the apparent persistence of her powers. So it wasn’t a fluke, she thought to herself. I really can do magic now.
As her teacher returned to the room, Susie had enjoyed their extended break. Her face flushed red, Ms. Clackily looked nervous and concerned. The class remained somewhat unruly in the wake of this unexpected disruption and took some time to calm down. Susie’s mind raced at the thought of what else she would make happen as the day wore on, how her life would be different from here on out. As long as she had this ability and an axe to grind with (most of) the human race, no one would be safely caught unawares ever again.