Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory
Katherine Morayati
cover art female protagonist IFComp 2015 IFComp Game keyword parser multiple endings present tense puzzleless second person slice of life Xyzzy Awards 2015 XYZZY Best Use of Innovation
Synpiece: A wearable technology that changes the wearer's mood. Users of the Synpiece can adjust the 'color' of their experience, which adjusts psychological traits mapped to hue (emotion), saturation (intensity) and value (complexity). The Synpiece can be used by brands to increase users' engagement. In your email client, this is saved as a draft. There's some more text at the bottom. You don't remember typing it: "become hypersaturated."
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You keep going
down. - Stina Nordenstam, "Memories of a Colour"It was still
months before we'd tell each other our stories. And even then some seemed too small to bother with. So why do they come back to me now? Now, when I'm so weary of all of it. - Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
Continue
A story, eventually; by Katherine Morayati

Studio 4D, 7:00 pm

An afterimage is a visual left lingering before your eyes, after
you've focused on one thing too long; burnt-out retinae, producing bullshit. If you've seen red you produce un-red; blue, un-blue;
green, un-green. An involuntary strike. The state is not permanent, until it is.

Your primary project at Synfac was developing wearables. But your
last project was sentiment analysis. Intern work. Your job
was to mine influential tweeters, popular song, emails and letters and texts acquired for you by means you'd rather not consider, for the
oily stuff of emotion. This was supposed to focus you. Instead you're now a broke computer, made of errors: tweet fragments, disheveled paragraphs, bastardized sentiment. You have no sentences, just quips; no thoughts, only responses. Here is one:

Laid off from the synesthesia factory. Branded a fool. What will
they say, Monday at --

You have gotten no further. There is no rhyme to what you do now. And at any rate, your concern is not Monday at whenever the hell. Your concern is tonight at 8 PM.

* * *

Synfac originally hired you as a copywriter, then promoted you to amorphous creative, then gradually demoted you once they detected a lack of actual creating. This was not in the plan; you took the job a year ago knowing headquarters were far from any robust job market. It was less a move than a trust fall.

To compensate, Synfac put you up in a company apartment and paid the first month's rent. Nothing extravagant, of course: a studio, slightly under market rate but of course not free; a bit over-sparsely furnished, as if they'd rented the unit expecting a bachelor; full to distraction with Synfac technology, to remind you that the space was meant for after-hours research. Even the unit number was deliberate,
as explained to you on day one: Studio 4D, the fourth dimension. Which is time, of which you now have an abundance.

You've got to admire how legit it all was: standard real estate company, standard contract and standard lease, and this year's lease doesn't end until December. Optimism: You get to stay here even after your layoff. Pessimism: You must.

Without your Synpiece with you, the room is blank and chilly, less modern design than empty ice tray. Everything is some form of inert gray: dormant green-screen wall paneling, dresser practically frozen shut, desk a little more cluttered these days but as desks go still austere. Only your saturator pole seems obviously amiss.

* * *
You check your inventory
You're wearing a ratty cotton dress. A lifetime of possessions has left you with this.

* * *
Dress
You've worn this ratty dress since Friday night: a billowing tarpish thing, colors dulled, holes in the hem. Dress as metaphor. Fortunately for you, this metaphor is easily revised.

* * *
Revise
Your first thought: to check your computer. This is in fact your default thought; give it five years and it'll have your cortex and
also your amygdala. "Thought" is the wrong word. What it is: now your core creature drive. Ancient drives: hunger, exhaustion, libido. And their modern replacements: refreshing, unplugging, FOMO.
Refresh
Your next thought: How you have managed such disarray in a week's
span. You feel as if you have been dropped into a spot-the-difference picture, the kind from a children's whodunnit book, where you are expected to solve the mystery of how you murdered your life.
You unplug
What do you want to unplug?
You examine the dresser
You consider changing your outfit. You were never extravagant with fashion. The idea of a uniform appeals: wearable anonymity, no skin, signals or stories. But none of that is accepted in women, not even in tech, not even the temperamentally private. And you have been told you have more of a story to tell. And anyway, even a uniform would take up space. So now you have a dresser full of clothes reserved for special occasions, which you suppose tonight is.
You open the dresser
You open your dresser and clothes drool out. This is a new pattern: carefully stacked and folded clothes on the bottom, tossed and crammed clothes on top. Like tree rings for your employment.
You take the clothes
Every outfit betrays you in some way. Now you wear: A simple cotton dress, dully, subtly polka-dotted. Appropriate age: late thirties, or forties, or at least fully grown up.
You look
Your apartment, in theory: A neutral base to practice and study this business of feelings with no interference; decor would be a stain,
life a confounding variable. This translates in design to
"minimalism," which is appealing enough. But your apartment, in practice: The usual ecru hamster-box with every serviceable white, frosty or clear item of furniture you or Brian found within a fifty-mile radius. The bed was from a prefab catalog; the desk was forgotten in the corner of a Methodist thrift store; the kitchen is like all kitchens are; the shelves, you are certain, were literally cubicles once.

* * *
Shelves
The bookshelves, as described: An aspirational perk, the mark of creatives, suitable for picturesque libraries arranged in rainbow colors. Bookshelves, as supplied: Gray plastic overstock from the office, suitable for cubicles and other modular stacking. Upshot:
Under palatial office sun or a Synpiece lens, they shine. Pessimism:
In any other circumstances they suck away vibes. And here you have no Synpiece, no office, and no good vibes. A while back you arranged some books and knickknacks and old photos about the shelves. Only the
photos help, and only to a point.
Examine books
After taking the Synfac job you bought every design, programming and theory tome you'd ever seen namedropped in a blog post or heard in a colleague's half mention. You'd built up quite the impressive library, even arranged it all by color (if anyone earned the right, you did). What you didn't do: ever read them.
You examine photo
Which do you mean, the office photo, the cuddling photo, the third photo or the photos?
You examine the office photo
You remember this. You took it the first day on the job, about a month into dating, which naturally bound job and relationship into one unit, a synchronized squad cheering on your self-improvement. It seems a lot more unfortunate in retrospect.
You examine the cuddling
You'd driven into the city to visit him at the park, which seemed a little silly given the surfeit of parklike stuff in your own neighborhood, but it turned out rather nice. Off camera, you remember, there were babies. You recall thinking it was too early on to safely coo over babies in his presence, but nothing felt wrong.
Third photo
This photo was early on, obviously. At Lurie Lake near the old power plant. Some abandoned building at some late hour, lit by artificial
red flash. From a car, maybe. Or strobes off a far-off arena. Nothing you could have planned. You are in purple and besotten.
Y.
cheapglulxe quit with exit status: 0
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I'm searching for a colour, don't think it's got a name. It's
something between pink and brown -- just like when the sun sets, sometimes when it rains, like it's the first time you see it go
down. - Stina Nordenstam, "Memories of a Colour"
down. - Stina Nordenstam, "Memories of a Colour"To become
fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what's fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate. - Tom
Mccarthy, Remainder
Mccarthy, RemainderIt was still months before we'd tell
each other our stories. And even then some seemed too small to bother with. So why do they come back to me now? Now, when I'm so weary of
all of it. - Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory
A story, eventually; by Katherine Morayati

Studio 4D, 7:00 pm

An afterimage is a visual left lingering before your eyes, after
you've focused on one thing too long; burnt-out retinae, producing bullshit. If you've seen red you produce un-red; blue, un-blue;
green, un-green. An involuntary strike. The state is not permanent, until it is.

Your primary project at Synfac was developing wearables. But your
last project was sentiment analysis. Intern work. Your job
was to mine influential tweeters, popular song, emails and letters and texts acquired for you by means you'd rather not consider, for the
oily stuff of emotion. This was supposed to focus you. Instead you're now a broke computer, made of errors: tweet fragments, disheveled paragraphs, bastardized sentiment. You have no sentences, just quips; no thoughts, only responses. Here is one:

Laid off from the synesthesia factory. Branded a fool. What will
they say, Monday at --

You have gotten no further. There is no rhyme to what you do now. And at any rate, your concern is not Monday at whenever the hell. Your concern is tonight at 8 PM.

* * *

Synfac originally hired you as a copywriter, then promoted you to amorphous creative, then gradually demoted you once they detected a lack of actual creating. This was not in the plan; you took the job a year ago knowing headquarters were far from any robust job market. It was less a move than a trust fall.

To compensate, Synfac put you up in a company apartment and paid the first month's rent. Nothing extravagant, of course: a studio, slightly under market rate but of course not free; a bit over-sparsely furnished, as if they'd rented the unit expecting a bachelor; full to distraction with Synfac technology, to remind you that the space was meant for after-hours research. Even the unit number was deliberate,
as explained to you on day one: Studio 4D, the fourth dimension. Which is time, of which you now have an abundance.

You've got to admire how legit it all was: standard real estate company, standard contract and standard lease, and this year's lease doesn't end until December. Optimism: You get to stay here even after your layoff. Pessimism: You must.

Without your Synpiece with you, the room is blank and chilly, less modern design than empty ice tray. Everything is some form of inert gray: dormant green-screen wall paneling, dresser practically frozen shut, desk a little more cluttered these days but as desks go still austere. Only your saturator pole seems obviously amiss.

* * *
Panelling
Your first thought: to check your computer. This is in fact your default thought; give it five years and it'll have your cortex and
also your amygdala. "Thought" is the wrong word. Something closer: anymore, your core creature drive.

The original creature drives: hunger, exhaustion, libido. And their modern replacements: refreshing, unplugging, FOMO.
Desk
Rudimentary method of painting a fresco: Find a blank surface, preferably white. Apply paint on top; let it turn to sediment. Apply more paint on top of the hardened old paint. Repeat until you have produced a thick pile of texture and art. Now, subtract all the art. What remains is what has happened to your desk in the days since it happened.

Your computer sits idle. Your severance papers are where you left
them. So is your old keycard. And check stubs and seltzer cans, clutter on and all around it.
You examine papers
You have looked at your severance agreement exactly twice. It is printed on chipper iridescent letterhead with a color-wheel stamp, and it tells you in lawyerspeak to go fuck yourself. Also: They'll give
you four weeks' severance, if you never admit to it. And: You may not say what they did to you. You've broken this clause with your mother and therapist already. By tonight you'll break it with Brian (or worse). Perhaps you're breaking it now in your head.
Brian
What Brian is: A man you used to know. Deflatingly human when you're with him, horribly beguiling when you're not. It wasn't enough for him to finagle his way into every memory of every item in your home; you can't stop documenting everything about him on top of that -- all your old emails, all your texts, the whole corpus of it.

What Brian also is: a person you dumped in a rambling email and then tentatively un-dumped in another, in less than a 24-hour span. While you're being honest..
Email
What do you want to email?
Clothes
Every outfit betrays you in some way. Now you wear: Black-and-white work skirt, black shell. Unremarkably put-together. You'd wear it on a job interview if you had one.
Walls
detect that color best. Your apartment is not green because humans
also detect the color, quite emphatically, usually when trying to sleep. But "green screen" is the best term anyone came up with for
what your apartment has got: panels -- floor-to-ceiling each, so no room for other decorations -- that display images that change the feel of a room. The idea was from f.lux, the endgame probably to show or at least enhance ads, and the technology from Disney cruise ships. Presumably the makers did not visit CruiseCritic.com, which you did
and found tourists complaining about the glitches jerking and fritzing their way down the promenade of their "virtual balconies."

These, too, are currently glitchy; they're supposed to work in tandem with the Synpiece and saturator, but never quite pick up either's signal, like a radio skipping stations. Even when they work they just sort of change the room's paint job.

A disconcerting feeling while alone: realizing you are surrounded by screens.
Saturator
The existence of such a thing called a "saturator pole" is of course a blunder. One of the code-dwellers uttered the words "responsive
design" in range of someone whose earshot was triply unfortunate: someone wonky enough to pay attention to programmers, pretentious enough to wonk over monochrome design publications, and executive enough to wrench his pretentions into an official pivot. Thus rose, like a techy Tower of Babel, the Saturator, which (the pitch goes) detects your emotional undercurrent -- your presence, basically -- and infuses the room with simpatico ambience and portent, like an air freshener for mood. (The original tagline said "incense for mood," but marketing thought that sounded too hippie, someone higher-up and unbuttoned asked whether there was a type of incense not for
mood, and thence went the afternoon.)

It took another month of meetings to persuade legal to have one installed in your apartment, a month you regretted once the prototype came in: a Super Mario-esque monstrosity that protruded horizontally over the bed and across the room, like a fluorescent light if those were large and killed you if you woke up wrong. You bitched, others bitched, and from the bitching came the current model: a vertical pole where a heating pipe would be, slender, slightly gnarled and ending in a broad starburst two feet from the ceiling. It pulses with a deep unidentifiable color; in about a three-centimeter radius surrounding the pole are cilia of iridescent light. You think it resembles a maypole. Everyone else who's ever been in your place thinks stripper pole. At one point that was funny.
You examine Saturator
Marketing never settled on one metaphor for the saturator pole. Guy
who spent half of the workday moonlighting for his progressive rock band: "It's like an amplifier. Except it amplifies you!"
Woman you are uncertain has left her teens yet: "Like an Instagram filter, except, like, permanent?" Guy about town: "Like catching feelings. Ugh." Suit from some mysterious corner office: "It could collect user data if it's on long enough."
Experience feels
You consider PR. The problem: to succeed in doing PR for others you must first prove you've succeeded in doing PR for yourself. You must turn all the glop that is you into a tantalizing direct-to-consumer product, call it Aspirational You. Aspirational You is something special. Aspirational You does not evaporate or sweat under heat; she solidifies, like a cake. If she were knifed the blade would come out clean.
You email brian
For a few months your job was to distill all the history of color psychology into meeting length. Most color psychology is not really psychology, but Synfac's competitors, at least in their outward-facing materials, seem to work with the rigorous material of "vibes" and "moods," so your layperson's stab was fine.

One system: the Luscher Color Test, in vogue a few decades ago but now usurped by the MMPI and Big Five. The Synpiece's underlying color
model is only slightly altered from it: orange for force, blue a sort of pristine placidity, purple surrender.

or bastardized by a proto-Buzzfeed quiz site. Bunk, obviously, but
also sideways genius. Its makers found something unexploited: the
Forer effect for those prone to self-loathing, i.e. half the Internet.

What you are, uncharitably: "Looking to stand out in the crowd and wanting to keep her rank and status. Her current situation is irritating her because she can't seem to find anybody out there who values the same high standards she does. She is feeling isolated and wants to give in to her carnal urges, but can't bring herself to
appear weak in the eyes of others."
Email
What do you want to email?
Message
Every phobia has two parts. There is the phobia itself. Then there is the meta-phobia: the fear that no one takes your fear seriously.

One known phobia: scopophobia, the fear of being watched. According to psychiatric journal The Alienist and Neurologist, published
in 1906, scopophobia is most common in women. This is not elaborated further.

You are at your computer. The top Google results for scopophobia and women: 1. Wikipedia. 2. An online store of graphic tees for women: devils, evil eyes, glitterfied fear slogans, figures dripping with viscera. All form-fitting, naturally. 3. Something from something called the Creepypasta Wiki: "Do they see a monster wrapped delicately within glittering wrapping paper? Do they see malice hidden within me or do they see an ingenue?" There are comments on this. They gave this scopophobia an 8 out of 10.
You look at the walls
You and Brian had a joke that next April Fool's Day you were going to break into whoever at the Synpiece office manages this stuff and show hapless users just whatever the fuck. "Maybe those screamer videos," Brian said when he first got the idea. "Or stop-motion! You know, like the super-slow kind that only moves when you're not looking?" He could go on for hours like this, kitten-quick, drawing in energy from something vital and wonderful that has nothing to do with you.
Esk
Everything here is contaminated by memories. Like when Brian set all the wall panels to a stop-motion sequence of photos of the two of you. Or the time he stopped by when you were calibrating the saturator
pole. ("Calibrating the saturator pole" sounds like a bad joke. You know this because he made it.) You'd hoped to climb it, but that failed. So you'd stood tippy-toes on a footstool he bought weeks ago, monitoring every gradual shade of mood; he'd distract you the whole time, blowing up clouds of dust, performing little fireman flourishes by the base, pretending to spot you then grabbing you by the waist pretending to be King Kong.

The goal was to make you smile for once. Or so he said. You don't remember whether you did. What you remember: the air was tinged yellow-gray.
Desk
Even the slighest glance at your computer compels you to check it.
Computer
Optimism: You never much used the laptop they gave you, meaning you
are now merely underemployable, not underemployable and computerless. Pessimism: Which means you did all your work on your own machine,
which means now your work space has permanently squatted upon your
home space. Like a snake still in its shouldabeenshed skin. It isn't even a good or fast computer anymore. If you were a snake you'd be the overgrown eldritch kind.

You have only two windows somehow: browser, email client. It would be admirable organization, were your screen not covered in sticky notes.
Notes
Mouldy headline from a productivity bloglet: to-do lists are out, clogging your computer screen in obtrusive to-do stickies is in. What the headline did not say: humans are resourceful and can learn to kind of stick them down the sides.

There are four, jaggedly written. Manila notes down the left side: CHECK EMAIL FROM COLORBUZZ; FILE YOUR DAMN SEVERANCE PAPERS ALREADY
YOU CRETIN. Rouge notes down the right: GUESS WHAT ROSLYN YOU'VE
STOLEN A SYNPIECE!!; BRIAN, LURIE LAKE, 8 PM. ?
Lurie lake
There is a photo of you and Brian at Lurie Lake, by the power plant when dusk turns the sky auburn, where you look all right. You look
like an object of love. And you never figured out how you did it.

Somehow it is 7:20. If you don't leave now, you never will. There is
no plan that cannot be expedited by agonizing over it.

You get in your car and drive into the dark.

* * * * *
* * * * *
Keep going
Lurie Lake is five minutes outside the city, which translates to
twenty minutes from your apartment, or ten the way you are driving.
You are reasonably sure this is where you are still heading.

* * *

Your car is a mess, but you still notice it immediately: your
Synpiece, on the floor by the backseat, right where you left it.

You had to put that thing somewhere hard to reach; to the dismay of your coworkers with road rage, driving while augmented is not recommended. Everyone with a prototype got a huge warning saying so. Reason one: Driving with a Synpiece, depending on its calibration, falls somewhere between driving to a particularly nocturnal soundtrack and driving while high. Reason two: It does things to you. If you're commuting you'll wish you weren't. If you're driving past an
ex-lover's house you'll perhaps drive toward it. If you're driving in
a subdivision it'll seem impossibly hushed, the particular intimacy of suburban stillness; every house will suggest things that happen behind its closed doors.

Funny how you still believe that warning.
* * *

* * *
Wear Synpiece
(first taking the Synpiece)
You slip the Synpiece into your left eye. It doesn't behave like a contact lens exactly. Not hard enough. Presumably safer. You have sussed out the precise feeling: it feels like a pat of butter to the cornea. In the sense that it is cold, you mean. But also in the sense that it melts.

Undocumented steps to get this thing to actually work: 1. Caress the eyelids to gently nudge the Synpiece into position. (1.5. Pull over, are you thinking?.) 2. Cup your eye sockets in your fingers,
like you're in a horror movie and will shortly produce their contents. 3. Close your eyes tight. 4. Meditate, or breathe controlledly, or if it's you think upon your unsuitability to do either. Just at any rate pause. This sort of breathing produces a tremor, which is normal. 5. Imagine you will open your eyes and the world has changed. You need
not imagine your actual surroundings. In fact, it's better if you don't. Imagine an executioner's blade at your neck. Or autumn's first windowful of snow. The point is not what to expect; the point is
to expect. 6. Open.
You look around
* * *
* * *Now I am night driving. Now I tilt my head back and fill myself with breeze. Now there is something like a sunset. Now the radio darkens its key. Now the road arches its lanes in front of me; and now the road curls its lanes behind me.

I can't see the Synpiece while it's on. He told me I'd go cross-eyed wearing it. It's more that everything looks closer than I know it is.
You drive
Now the moon in the sky dips down into my car with every ripple in the road.
Brian
What Brian is: not the sum of his traits. Five-foot-six, thatch of hair, perpetually bemused expression, limbs goofy like a scarecrowThat's all.
Yourself
At this hour through headlights, the trees on the highway look like they're a movie scene. I know the kind: damp fetid cedar, rainymood lighting, lovers thrust forward into tree trunks and downward into needles.
You drive
Glimpse of a sign: Exit 49, turn right. Lurie Lake is Exit 51. Not
long to go.

I hear somebody else's radio through my own car. They seem to be listening to how strobe lights sound.
You listen
The way I'm driving, the car sounds about to fall apart.
You continue
Now I am tailing their car like a wolf. Now their music is louder and someone is howling in it. I imagine an entire pursuit narrative in their head. And I imagine their head must be nice to get into.
Continue
There are seven ways to turn into the city. What a sad person I would be to take advantage of any of them.
Lake
Now the buildings are growing tall and thrusting against the horizon; now the traffic swells to meet it; now I feel perfectly small.
Continue
Now I am clear to the shore of the lake. Everything is jagged like lightning or a fence. And I am alone.

I exit my car like a queen enters her chambers. Then I approach the station like a supplicant approaches her liege: tiny, wrapped in
autumn space. Now I'm walking slow; now I'm walking fast.

The lake shore is steps away from me to the north; perhaps I'll have company there.
* * *

* * *

There was an explosion at the plant a few years back: no casualties, just smoke and burnt-fire sky. It is a terrible thing but right now it seems like it would enhance the mood.
Go north
I approach the lake, suddenly noting every footstep and breath.

I'm at the lake now; with each step the fence tears something new in the sky. Now I'm looking out on the water like there's a ship waiting for me. Now I'm sitting on a park bench looking up at the latticework of leaves above me. The only time I pay attention to those is while being unsatisfactorily kissed. It's better this way: as prelude, not distraction.
* * *

* * *
Lake
The water is murky with possibility.
Swim
There are no railings here. Go any further and I'd plunge into the lake. A thought.
You think
I am thinking of Brian's folk-music phase. Specifically, of this:
"Made my steps towards the water where Undine last was seen, I was
told that if you saw her, it should make you more naive..."

* * *

Brian approaches with his familiar half-darting half-bouncing gait. I've made myself hidden, I don't know why.

I emerge and walk up to Brian, wordlessly. I can't think of anything
to say, and besides, the air feels reactive against me like I'm
searing it, and I don't want to ruin that.

"Are you OK?" he asks. "Your email was a little... concerning." He pauses. "Roslyn, what is this?"
You talk
(to Brian)
I try to form what I'm thinking into words. It takes longer than it should.

"I'm good. I'm better, actually. Look." I throw my head back and brush a wisp from my eye, a combination ta-da and flirt.

"What's wrong with your eye?"

"It's the Synpiece," I say. "I'm wearing it right now."

"Is that it?" He waves his hand in front of my eyes, like he's swiping a phone; he looks less impressed than he should. "Huh." I think I'm supposed to think he's angry. What I do is take his hand. It feels
like it's made of tremors and unfulfilled --

"Roslyn, you're shaking."

I laugh harder than I meant to. "I guess you could call this thing a drug." Now he's drifting. "This doesn't make any sense." "I just want to try."
You talk
(to Brian)
The lake looks straight out of a ballad, the kind where heroines are fucked or passionately murdered.

"This isn't going to fix everything. It's a glorified piece of
plastic. You said so yourself," Brian says. "What exactly do you expect?" In response I pull him close and kiss him like I'm arranging
a movie set. I guide and choreograph his hands to where they need to go, move him by the hair and press him against the bench. The sky is burnt orange and the air is chills. I try not to think about anything else.
You think
else.I pull away and try to gauge Brian's expression. It is something between curious, upset and dazed, and I can't place it. "Are you
okay?" In response he pulls me into a hug. This is all he does for
five minutes, and all he does for the rest of the night. Somehow I
find this pleasant. Specifically, as pleasant as a compromise.