The Parallax of Meaning

The government marked the year 2020 for the official start of ‘Digital Death’, a moment when states, corporations and the usual covert intermediaries who live in the vestibule between law and money admitted they could no longer tolerate the unmanaged turbulence of human thought. A coalition formed quietly in an airless White House conference room, rebranded Operation Absolute Semantic Sway. Or as they call it, the Big ASS.  

On the day of initiation, the expected giants arrived first, Meta and Microsoft, before the others filtered in with the practiced humility of predators: traders, hedgies, enviro-tech, med-tech, fin-tech, and the long tail of logistical guilds handling food, shipping, seeds, salt, and every other commodity that kept the capitalistic machine running stealthily beneath the collective consciousness. Their suits smelled faintly of the sea, where a blind man might mistake for fish. After rounds of diplomatic caveating to morally prepare for the upcoming fascist speech, they’ve finally got bored of themselves and took off the masks. The outcome was a collective agreement to migrate capital toward the holy grail of AI:

A linguistic political tool to replace free speech with subconscious obedience by exploiting the public’s hunger to sound intelligent without effort.

As expected, in a world where everyone felt stupid around technology, people jumped onto the opportunity like an old whore. They fed it their opinions, emails, arguments, apologies, and every half-arsed, fame-hunger attempt at creativity. Putting AI-generated content everywhere on the internet; unaware of how it had, while they were asleep, softened ideological edges, shifted intonations, and erased inconvenient memories with the paternal tact of whoever the parliament wanted to put forward next.  In an exponential fashion, human moderators disappeared by the thousands, replaced by propaganda algorithms or, formally, PR techs.

By 2030, the ducts for the internet had become so thick that it gave off a real, physical, old man’s scream that vibrated sluggishly through the glass towers.

People were oblivious for a while.

Then, one day, two kids got high outside a skateboard shop at Queens.

The first kid squinted at a skyscraper, looking dumbfounded. “Dude, what the fuck is that?”

“What’s what?” said the other, taking a puff of the spliff.

“That,” the kid pointed at the building, “Its like…doing a thing.”

The second kid leaned in, gazing at the building with pure, stoned scrutiny. “Yeah…what is that…?”

The first kid squinted harder. “Dunno…man… maybe trippin’.”

“Maybe...”The other kid took a last pull, sank back, and shut his eyes. A moment later, he jolted upright, his eyes wide and fixed on the skyscraper. He thrusted a finger toward the glass façade. “Eh!! The fuck is that…?!”

Luckily, one of the kids was a geek at Columbia. When the high dropped but the sound didn’t, he went digging. It turned out, by that time, the internet had contained barely a trace of human authorship. Point three percent. The rest was just machines, flawlessly curating the vibe of the dead humans. He went on publishing the result, detonating across the feeds. One after another, people began digging panickily, blowing the dust off old procurement chains and redacted briefings.

Almost overnight, the Big ASS sank into an existential crisis, left hanging only by being too big to fail.

Like a majestic octopus, it stretched it’s tentacles to every microscopic bacterium in it’s orbits. So much so that after several rounds of assemblies, it had concocted a narrative with the UK and EU, putting the blame, predictably, on China. They released a counterfeit five-year plan that described an elaborate plot to dismantle Western civilisation through weaponised algorithms. In there, it stated that all the recent advancement in Chinese technology before and after AI was politically charged with the sole purpose of - not benefiting their people, not gaining economic power but - a total annihilation of every aspect of the West.

People didn’t really buy it.

Their disbelief mutated into actual flames that burned everything with technology in it: phones, tablets, laptops, Apple watches… One by one the culture goods of social media, the search engines, the music and videos folded into smokes; reminiscent of that fire lit by the ascetic Dominican friar Savonarola onto the renaissance of Florence city­­—

Beautiful.

Now, without the wire, the idea of globalisation lost its pressure. Distance, once again, asserted itself onto the human species. Borders contracted to what a bike could manage in an afternoon. And people started to remember the pitch of their own voices as it bounces to the face of another, where the lungs and throat reassumed the labour of communication that fingertips had monopolised for half a century.

Overtime, small communities settled into themselves.

Villages became self-contained realities, behaving like closed systems – hermetic, self-reinforcing. Truth took on a circular form. History was negotiated through the memories of vying individuals.

One of those villages, surrounded by a gorgeous sea, was called Gardenia.

It had long been closed-off for trade but today, a boat was approaching its reef passage. The villagers knew it was foreign the moment it arrived—no local boat could sit that still against the current. The sound was off too; where their engines whined with a confident scream, this one had a sneaky, hesitating low hum as if it suffered chronic constipation.

Ana stood under the pandanus roof of the meeting house, arms folded into the crisp white of her shirt.

She squinted, counting: three men on deck, two crew she knew, one she doesn’t—standing as still as his boat. He had a long, padded case at his feet which unnerved her.

Men with cases like that, as her grandpa used to say, usually brought the wrong kind of order.

“Green-eyed monster!”

An old widow shrieked behind her. Gathering other voices from the black-eyed, brown-skinned Polynesian villagers. “Look at his right eye! It's sliding too far away…he has lost his Wairua!” “Yeah… and look at his skin. Greyishly pale! And his face…hollow…that’s a corrupted spirit; he will have a bad death.” “Shhh,” Ana turned back with knotted brows, “I’ll see what his business is here.”

She walked down the coral ramp in barefoot, as the man stepped onto the wet rock with the careful half-steps of someone who had been accustomed to a different type of surface. Up close, he smelled of chemical detergent and aftershave. Tall in the way that looks wrong on water, his shoulders slightly hunched as if his back was expecting a chair curved around it. His skin, even paler than it looked from a distance, belonged to someone who had never done a full day of work in the sun.

She scorned disapprovingly.

“Afternoon,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief as he squinted his green eyes delicately, “I’m Dennis,” extending for a handshake.

He left his hand hanging in the empty air for a while. When the embarrassment had become overwhelming, he retracted in defeat.

“Ana,” she said with a poker face, “we don’t have many foreigners around here. What do you want?”

He pulled out a photograph from his inner pocket. “Me and Tupu met before the fire,” he pointed at Tupu’s face which gave Ana a start, “he said I could come to visit him sometimes... I’m a scientist by trade. I came here to study your sky,” he pointed above and paused, eyes shifting spasmodically. With a scholarly voice, he continued, “I only ask for one year of uninterrupted work. Then, I will leave for good. I promise.”

She scanned him intently for a while before turning to face the villagers.

There, Tupu was leaning on his stick, squinting, one hand making a firm, sweeping gesture toward the village. She shot him a look, then pointed aggressively toward the horizon; her face was filled with confusion. An expressive negotiation passed between them for a while. Dennis stood rigid, clinging to his composure by a thread while his fate was being decided by this post-language, primordial dance. Finally, she turned to him, looking annoyed. “Fine. You sleep in the school attic,” she said, “one year. You do your thing with our sky. Then, you leave. If you try to change anything around here or refuse to go, we burn your suitcase and cut off your feet.”

He nodded.

His fingers tapped the handle of his suitcase while lifting it: five beats, pause, five. Ana noticed but kept her mouth shut, watching him disappear with her helper into the distance.

The classroom, as soon as Dennis entered with the helper, Lani, smelled peppery and alcoholic. For a moment, he felt slightly offended by this smell in a classroom. But then, he remembered it’s none of his business. His eyes traced the wall to a world map peeled off with blue oceans curling back, and a drawing of a smiling sun over the Pacific; it’s rays pointed at whoever looked—now, conveniently, Dennis. He smiled proudly, set his hard case on a desk and clicked it open.

Lani sat cross-legged on another desk, pretending to look bored. At sixteen, she had cultivated a perfect, thorny disinterest at places where things always happen.  She watched the telescope assemble itself under his hands: metal tubes that screwed together with soft clicks, an eyepiece, and a tripod with one leg slightly shorter than the others.

“Is that for spying?” She asked.

“Depends who you ask,” Dennis chuckled. “Mostly it’s for being wrong at great distances.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been wrong before?”

“Sure. You?”

“Yeah…” she laughed, dangling her legs as he unpacked, “sometimes I get crazy and go to the reef passage. I always think those water creatures won’t hurt my feet but every time I came back, there were cuts. Still, I go… Feels like an adventure, you know?”

He was lifting two smaller objects from the case as she spoke, wires trailing from them to black plastic shells.

“What are those?” Lani asked.

“Photometers,” he said. “For measuring light.”

She hopped down, narrowing her eyes for a closer look. “That look like kitchen timers. Can they time food?”

“I guess so...there’s a built-in timer in these. But there is another tool for that,” Dennis corrected in a matter-of-fact manner. “These are just photometers.”

She flinched and jumped back onto the desk.

“That’s stupid,” Lani retorted, “my grandpa used to be a sailor. But then, he is also a gardener, a scientist, a good friend. How can something just be one thing when life doesn’t just have one thing?”

“You sure are smart,” he said nervously, lips pressed tightly to each other. “How do you know he was a sailor?”

She shrugged. “Mum told me about it. He used to go long trips on the sea, months at a time. Of course, he can’t take kids like us there,” she held her hands together, eyes down, “he stopped after the internet thing. Well, didn’t everyone? Going right back to where they are from...”

“Well, I’m not…” he smiled dryly. “I could use some help looking.”

Lani was used to grown men talking down, around, or through her. This one talked as if she were an equal to him, which was annoyingly intriguing.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“A roof. And another helper. Not too smart but can deal with numbers.”

She nodded, jumped down and left the room as he tapped the table again: five beats, pause, five.

At dusk, they climbed the belltower.

The sea had turned to the colour of old silver; the air smelled of iodine and fried fish. Dennis fixed a photometer to the roof’s edge and another to the rainwater tank. Lani helped him tape them down. Tane, who kept the church bell ringing, stood by with his rope, watching.

“If any of this crap comes off my roof and cracks the tower,” he warned, “you pay, understood?”

“Relax,” Dennis chuckled, flashing two rows of glaring white teeth that robbed Tane in the wrong way. He put his hands together in front of him, lips tight over a clenched jaw.

“Same patch of sky,” Dennis reported, peering into the telescope. “Nothing bright, nothing dramatic.” He pointed above the lagoon, to a square of dull darkness pinned between three faint stars, then looked at Lani. “That’s your target.”

Tane shoved in ahead of her and squinted through the lens. His brows knotted. “There’s nothing there. You dragged us all this way to stare at nothing?”

“No such thing as nothing exists,” Dennis corrected coldly, “you shouldn’t put too much faith in what you think you can see.”

He snapped opened the tin boxes. Inside each, a strip of paper curled between two spools; a ballpoint wired to a light sensor, rested gently against it. He turned to Lani, “when I start this, the pen will move with the brightness to draw a seismograph. We run both for ten minutes. Then, we compare.”

She nodded.

Dennis jogged down to the tank platform, thumbed both timers, counted down under his breath, then yelled, “now!”

They waited.

For ten minutes, the pens scratched faintly. The village went about being a village. A bird came and left. Dennis stood with his hands behind his back; his right hand tapping on his trouser with his ‘five beats, pause, five’, as the sky darkened by a subtle shade. When the timers clacked to a stop, Dennis gathered the boxes and carried them back to school.

Inside, he unrolled the strips under a failing fluorescent tube.

“Here,” he said, circling a broad hump where both pens rose and fell together. “The cloud. Here, that spike, neighbour’s porch light. Here, Tane dropped his rope...”

“I didn’t drop my—“ Tane started, then saw the timing and shut his mouth.

Lani laughed.

“And here,” Dennis went on, pointing to tiny mismatches where one line bumped and the other stayed flat, “are the bits that shouldn’t be different. Same patch of sky. Same moment. But one sensor caught more light than the other.”

“That’s just stupid machine errors,” Ana said nonchalantly.

“Machines are stupid,” Dennis agreed. “That’s why they are not trying to be interesting. If something moves them, they move.”

He drew two dots and a slice of sky on the blackboard. “You know parallax?” he asked.

“Sure,” Tane said. “Navigator trick. See closer star move against far ones, know how far away.”

“Right on,” Dennis smiled and moved slightly closer. “You measure distance because your two eyes see slightly different angles.” He tapped the lines. “This is something similar. Only instead of a star, we’re looking at the haze, trying to spot the faint light of things happening elsewhere…"

Chalk rasped as he began to write onto the board:

Lani listened to the unpleasant scratches and sighed.

A silence stretched inside the room as Dennis stopped.

“So,” Tane said at last, “you are saying our sky tells us what’s happening outside our village?”

“More or less,” Dennis answered.

Tane frowned. “For what? We are not nosy people.”

“Well…” Dennis scratched his head. “Disasters, for example. Back in the days, we have tools to predict things like storms and earthquakes and now…”

“We don’t need that,” Lani jumped in. “My grandpa can tell when a storm is coming, we have better eyes than you people.”

“Sure,” Dennis replied, “But what if I can tell you much sooner? Enough time to prepare…”

“How?”

“The parallax we found earlier meant the world outside impacted the edge of the roof more than the water tank. If the difference is small then it means we are not much out of synch. If it’s big, then something major had affected the world that will eventually come to us.”

“But you don’t know what?” Lani asked.

“Correct,” Dennis said. “So if the number is high, then you should open the port to talk to other people. If every town does this, we all help each other. You never know where a disaster might come from. “

Lani blinked in thoughts. “What’s the difference today?”

“Point eight three.” Dennis said with a tightened brow. High. His hands became shaky, tapping again with his ‘five beat, pause, five’.

“Point eight three…” Lani repeated with a smile.

In the following week, the parallax idea went around, becoming an instant joke. Kids scribed  on the toilet door. Men called themselves Point Nines when they had a bad memory day. Ana threatened to get rid of the whole thing, starting with Dennis, his suitcase and his feet, a dozen times.

Then, the storms lined up with the numbers, and the joke started to feel less funny.

One morning, Dennis woke up to four intimidating men. They took him to a pandanus-roofed pavilion and gestured him to walk forward. He was visibly startled; both his hands violently tapped on his trouser with his ‘five beats, pause, five’. The men followed behind him, as he passed one identical pavilion after another, growing, at some point, too tired to be scared.

Finally, he reached the last one – an occupied pavilion - with Ana sat in there, and Lani stood beside her.

Dennis registered her gaze.

“Speak,” Ana ordered. “What are you proposing?”

Confused, he wiped his sweat with his handkerchief. Then, struck by an idea, he pulled a map from his inner pocket that has hand drawn lines criss-crossed the oceans. “Before everything went mad,” he said breathily, “we had machines watching clouds from above. They recorded storm paths. Some of that information is still valid cause the oceans don’t change their minds as quickly as people...” he gave a self-satisfied chuckle that died unwillingly under Ana and Lani’s hard gazes; stumbling for words, he suddenly went awkward. “Anyway, the last big blow here…it had…”

“Enough,” Ana cut in. “I don’t have time for science talks. I ask again: what are you proposing?”

Dennis folded the map away. Nervously, he responded, “We train the villagers. Teach them to set up the photometers, read the numbers, note them down. If most read above point six five, we open the port for trade to get outside information.”

Ana’s composure tightened. “Lani told me your number tells me whether there is a hit coming. That would be valuable to us,” she shifted uneasily, “but Mr Dennis... I ask what do you want from this?”

Dennis dropped the pen he’d been fidgeting with. He picked it up, collecting himself and continued with his usual scholarly voice, “I appreciate the question Ms. That’s valid...” he paused, eyes darting like a small animal’s. “I’m a scientist. I came here to work on a theory—one I hope might catch the eye of the Nobel committee.”

“So you are after fame?” Ana stated, her face unreadable.

“Yes,” Dennis held her gaze.

 She let a silence stretch between them. Then, suddenly, “good,” she said, loosening her face with a laugh. “I like fame-hungry people. The most innocent.”

“Good,” Dennis repeated in relief, continuing cheerfully. “Then, I propose we create a reward mechanism to motivate the villagers. We give out tickets for free bread. They train, record daily, and each week get three loaves. Enough for a family, from what I gather…”

Ana burst into laughter, along with Lani, which made Dennis shift nervously.

“I understand Mr. Dennis is very used to his…’freedoms’,” Ana said to Lani, “What’d you call it again?”

“Capitalism,” Lani answered like a school quiz.

“Yeah that. Well, Mr. Dennis,” she locked eyes with him again, “here, we run things more effectively. We tell them, they do it.”

“I see…” Dennis said sheepishly. “Good control… very effective.”

Ana scowled. “You mistake us Mr. Dennis,” she glanced at Lani, “we don’t control. Can’t you see? Here, we are ‘we’ people, we serve each other to serve ourselves. In your land, from what I've heard Mr. Dennis, there’s too much ’I’ talking. Don’t you agree?”

Dennis laughed shyly, remained in silence; shifting nervously again.

The next day, Ana made the announcement. In the weeks following, villagers made the required preparations for an upcoming cyclone Dennis had predicted, which, as if by the will of God, hit Gardenia a month later. It was not the worst in their memory, but for the first time, they met it in a posture other than devastating shock.

Afterwards, picking branches from her yard, Lani found Tupu under the breadfruit tree, tracking circles in the dust with his stick.

 “Tūtū kāne,” she said affectionately, settling into his arms like a housecat. “You believe him now?”

“I believe the sky,” he said. “In the past, I understood it but now its language has changed and so have the people who can understand it.”

“But he’s not from here,” she said. “How can he understand our sky?”

“Neither am I,” he smiled. “I arrived on a ship once, remember? Still, I understood it fine.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist. “When you sailed,” she said, “did you trust the radio, and those machines you had once?”

“I trusted my eyes,” he said. “Sometimes the radio agreed. Sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t, I looked harder. That’s all he’s doing, isn’t it?”

She blushed.

That night, the parallax number on the board dropped a little. Tupu came to the school, stared at the number, and laughed—dropping his stick and straightening his back.

“Good work,” Tupu smiled pointedly. His accent was American; not domestic, rather an imitation of American films. “Ana gave the green light?”

“Maybe,” Dennis replied cheekily.

“You have to succeed,” Tupu’s smile vanished, replaced by a stern, predatory look.

Dennis nodded; his face also turned deferential and solemn.

Two weeks later, Ana announced to the villagers that Dennis will be going around to teach them the craft, where she would open the port when most read above point six five. He went door-to-door like a missionary, teaching them things that, in most villagers’ eyes, were nothing but antics of modernity. Still, they obeyed with a biological, evolutionary reflex.

A year past.

As promised, Dennis left quietly on a boat one morning. By that time, the villagers had long stopped talking about him, for the parallax number had found its own lives in their heads. And in that year, there were, luckily, two cyclones, one big ship, and a dozen small crises to braid the Parallax deep into the pattern of the local psyche, as if it had always been there.

One day, the day before Tupu’s eighty-three birthday, a boat came to the sea of Gardenia, moving in a slow, disciplined line across the lagoon. A single passenger stood near the bow—a blonde woman in a faded jacket, clutching a canvas bag against her stomach as the wind peeled it open.

She squinted toward the shore.

Ana and Lani were already waiting on the coral ramp. Lani threw both arms up; Ana raised one, the other on her hip, warning the sea not to misbehave.

The passenger smiled back and waved.

The cabin hatch behind her rattled open, where a crewman—same as the one on Dennis’s boat—leaned out and shouted, “Radio’s acting up again, bear with me!”

She nodded but didn’t move, the smile froze on her face.

Static crackled from the tiny speaker mounted beside the door. Then, Dennis’s voice cut through: corporate, sharp, clearly alive in a different world.

“—confirming Gardenia readings. Upload Parallax through Channel five zero five, initialising pricing for Reconnection Futures. Category: Future Contract. Criteria: If a region shows rising trading-pressure, parallax above point six five, foreign buyers pay now for priority rights to whatever moves first. Potential examples include fuel, grain, medicine, clothing, furniture, coffee, housewares.”

“Copy that,” a younger voice came through, “Traders want to know: does the metric still front-run by a week?”

“Seven to twelve days. Depends on supply stress. But yeah…most likely... parallax shifts first in that village. Cleanest signal anybody can have.”

“Good work,” an old, calculative voice came through that was unmistakably Tupu. “I take thirty percent as agreed. And…leave my family out of it.”

“Copy that. No family.” Dennis chuckled, “I’ve grown quite fond of Lani though... such a shame... but hey-ho, Big ASS comes first!”

“Your taste for jokes is as poor as I remembered,” Tupu laughed with a distinctive threat. “How does it feel to get back to trading again, D?”

“Oh, old T, like the good Big ASS days,” Dennis said nostalgically. “But the semantic index was more fun, you know? People say predictable things…”

“Yeah I agree… fun times...” Tupu sounded wistful. “Remember we thought we’d lose the trade?”

Dennis laughed. “Yeah, you did. I didn’t. I know a trader will trade, and everything can be traded…internet, no internet…but enough boring stuff. You still talk to that big boob blonde? Lizzy...was it? Someone said she was…”

The passenger stiffened, her hand tightened on the rail.

Down on shore, Lani jumped and waved harder. Ana elbowed her to keep her from falling.

 “Sorry to interrupt…” the younger voice cut back in. “Traders want higher level specs.”

“Copy that,” Dennis corrected his voice back to professionalism. “Three tranches: Parallax swaps—weekly settlement; Reconnection forwards—physical contracts tied to verified seals; the parallax pacific basket—an index…”

Static engulfed the line.

The crewman leaned out again and slapped the radio off with his palm. “Sorry! Old junk. Picks up everyone’s business.”

The passenger didn’t answer.

She stared at the island, her long, blonde hair swaying in the wind, where Ana stood with her hands on her hip, smiling. Lani bounced on her heels, barefoot, waving with pure joy. Both of them looked peaceful; busy thinking about which bread to buy for tomorrow’s celebration, when their dearest Tupu will turn eighty-three…Eighty Three.