Discussion boards say every inch of this exhibition is planned, and you can’t help but wonder if that extends to the queue already wrapped around the museum’s squat building — a full two blocks of carbon-devastating concrete, roof denuded of even the most basic garden. Profligate. A relic from a world you understand so little, they had to build this exhibition.
The queue moves in staccato bursts. You pat your pockets — shit, where’s the cube with your neural mapping, three hours of work down the drain, shit — ah, there. Your other other pocket. Just in time: you’ve reached the counter.
Trembling a smile at the clerk, you trade the cube for the famous electrostim headband. Wearing it, your reflection is a distorted Saturn with its rings, and maybe this, too, is intentional, to remind you that each person casts an outsized shadow across planet Earth.
They call you forward. As the website promises, you’ve already forgotten you’re wearing the headband. Your stride is light, almost skipping through the door.
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
You’re standing in a booth with high beige walls on three sides, patterned not for interest but to soundproof. There’s no placard explaining this. It must be an exhortation to research not only the exhibition but the building itself, which, of course, you did. The floor, a richer brown, is carefully restored parquet (you think that’s the term, it’s not like you’ve seen wood flooring before). You tap your feet a few times before losing interest, your eyes at last focusing on the main attraction.
Last Icicle, 2067, Rena Lopez-Libecki (2003–2084). A glass sculpture dangles from the ceiling, blobs tapering into a blobby point. You admire how the nearly invisible pane in front of you magnifies the shadows gathering on its inside curves. That’s nice. Clever.
Then you tilt the headband towards the QR cube and as it activates you start crying, hard, like you haven’t since you were a kid and your Tamagotchi died.
Icicles mean nothing to you — the last freeze here was more than a century ago — but that’s why you’re here, learning how to feel, cheeks itching, not daring to wipe away the salt tracks as the door hisses open and you join a single-file queue, red around the eyes, shuffling to your booth in the next exhibit. There is a sign overhead reminding you not to speak. There’s a larger notice about not making eye contact: redundant. You don’t want to see your anguish mirrored in someone else’s face right now.
Ten years ago, someone’s headband was mid-oxytocin release when they looked into a stranger’s eyes. After that lawsuit was settled — both parties had previously been in committed relationships — the museum made its booths single-person.
Next is Life After Rise, 2132, Feroz Nabouli (2096–2157) and Eze Eliza Chinekwu (2089–2166). Photographs of climate refugees, the lightest touch of glutamate to dampen the part of you that wants to join them, to have your face distorted by fear of the future and resentment of your stolen past and, in the now of that capture, crammed in, hungry, centimetres from choking water.
Because, although you know the refugees suffered in ways no person should, they are also outside without pollution meters, the light on their faces more expansive than dome-sun on its strongest day. And, of course, anything plastic will be devoured by the bacteria in all water, and this has made boating — even on an overflowing raft — unaffordable for anyone but a few select workers and the very rich.
You are glad of the headband, the way it lances your guilt so it doesn’t fester inside you all the way home.
The museum has dimmed the lights and the floor eats all sound so you drift onwards, ghostlike, knowing you’re being funnelled towards introspection and, also, you paid them to do this to you. Standing in a cubicle projected with images of the old, old times — rivers teeming with life and forests that span half a continent, distracting you while you wait your turn for the last part: a whole room.
At last the images fade, tabula rasa, no stimulation of the neural pathways to reinforce these things in your mind. You can’t tell if that means you should try to remember them.
