“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Up, down, yes, no.” The pleasant looking woman in the grey wool uniform on the other side of the glass pressed a switch before her. A faint hiss follows as our two chambers are equalized.
“What’s the point of that?” I muttered, mostly to myself. To my surprise, Ken answered. “Toons are constitutionally incapable of giving a totally straight answer to anything. They will always deviate somehow, just to be silly.
The simple “reality check” as we call it serves two purposes. The first being to identify especially realistic toons, and the second being to ensure that both you and everyone in the vessel you’re about to equalize with are operating in the same uncontaminated reality.”
I remarked that he was being unexpectedly candid. “There isn’t much left about toons that’s classified for you now, or you wouldn’t be in here. Besides, there aren’t many uncontaminated humans remaining. We’ve been pooling our knowledge with every other similar agency around the world in hopes that we may still solve it in the eleventh hour. After all, what’s the alternative? Just...live with it?”
He gestured out the window. A mixture of regular cars and cartoon cars sputtered past. An old timey cartoon bus plodded along, the entire structure of it doing a sort of dance where it would extend upwards to one side, then retract down into the center, then extend up to the other side, over and over. Its bulbous white eyes up on the front implying some measure of intelligence, though I’ve never seen one that can speak.
“Well, I dunno. I’ve met an awful lot of people who would be happy to. Granted, it’s mostly gross overweight hairy dudes with anime girlfriends.” Ken grimaced, retracting the window blind all the way. “Does that look fucking normal to you? Can you really live with that?”
Outside, the grassy hills and nearby highway were illuminated by soft, warm rays of morning sunshine...from a cartoon sun. Big ol’ smiley face, big white puffy eyeballs like pillows that the pupils seem to float around on, giving us all a thumbs up.
I returned the thumbs up, and Ken scolded me for it. “How’d that happen anyway?” I inquired. “I heard bits and pieces on the news but never really understood.” He described an experiment in which a payload consisting of a live toon specimen was sent on a close flyby of the sun.
“The hope was to find out whether intense solar radiation might destabilize toon particles. Instead a glitch in the navigational software sent it spiraling into the sun, where some sort of chain reaction occurred.”
Figures. “You’d think they would’ve learned from the purges” I muttered. Ken nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly! Forget all the bad press that goes along with the government rounding up cute, loveable cartoon characters and forcing them into incinerators. All that did was to break them down into toon particles and disperse them throughout the atmosphere.”
He brought up electron microscope imagery of a lone toon particle. Even with the paltry resolution, it was enough to make out the usual big pillowy eyes and stupid grin floating beneath them, not obviously attached to the particle anywhere.
“So how did this start, anyway? Surely I have the clearance to know that now.” He assured me I did, and led me to the next hermetically sealed door. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Up, down, yes, no” the woman on the other side of the glass said, the very picture of calm.
Ken repeated it back word for word. Almost. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Up, down, no, yes.” The uniformed woman immediately tensed up, eyes wide. She flipped up the glass safety covering from a big red switch and her finger hovered over it.
“NO! No, it was a slip of the tongue!” Ken stammered. “Slip of the tongue, that’s all! Just nervous because of the company. Look, I can do it! One two three four five six seven eight nine ten. Up down yes no.”
The woman squinted at him, then folded down some kind of scanning mechanism she peered at Ken through for a minute. She called over someone I guessed was her superior, who peered through the device as well, and the two conferred.
Finally, she pressed the switch to let us through. The green light came on, I heard that subtle hiss, and the door slid open. “...I must’ve said that a billion times since I started here. Of course I would fuck it up right in front of a newbie. Funny, isn’t it?”
Intuiting what would’ve happened had the woman decided to press that glass covered switch after all, I disagreed. “Oh. Well, I’m sincerely sorry about that.” Ken said, sheepishly. “It’s the stress, you know? Of being one of the last clean ones.”
In the next chamber was a decrepit pile of antiquated looking machinery propped up by supports, contained within airtight glass housing. “This is where it all started”, Ken teased. “What? This pile of junk? I don’t understand.”
He flashed a maniacal grin. “Nobody did! When toons began to appear, it shocked the world. That’s pretty low on the list of conceivably possible events. It came out of nowhere, and pretty soon my team discovered the hows and whys of it. All down to this impressive piece of Soviet era engineering.”
A few flipped switches later, the machine came to life. “Used to operate with film. The resulting toons were grainy, black and white, not much to look at. We’ve replaced the film with an ultra high definition transparent digital display. Our computers generate the frames.”
Something didn’t add up. “How were they generated before? There couldn’t have been toons which react to their surroundings, or have conversations with you if their frames were all pre-drawn. I can’t imagine Soviet computers were up to the task of rendering cels at the necessary rate for real time interaction either.”
He pulled up some photos on his tablet of what looked like the interior of a dingy warehouse with row upon row of desks. Each supported an animator’s light table, and the seats all had restraints as if to hold someone in place.
“The same way the Soviets did everything. Slave labor.” I gaped in disbelief, but he solemnly nodded. “It was only because of a fire in the facility that they left it in search of someone who knew how to repair the damaged electrical infrastructure in the building.
When the cops rounded ’em up, they couldn’t get any useful information out of them. Totally indoctrinated. All they cared about was going back to animating. Every last one professed undying love for some hokey old Soviet Mickey Mouse knock-off character they’d spent literal decades animating until the fire put a stop to it.”
It turned my stomach just to think about it. “Of course Russian police discipline being what it is” Ken continued, “the details of the machinery they found in the facility were leaked almost immediately to the press. When it became widely known that there was such a thing as a machine which could bring cartoon characters to life, public demand for it was irresistibly ravenous.”
The machine, warming up until now, finally began displaying a cartoon bunny on a pedestal within the glass enclosure. Sharp, full color and realistic, but sufficiently stylized that I’d never mistake it for the real thing. Its nose twitched.
“Like life extension drugs, it’s one of those things that couldn’t be kept from the public, regardless of the consequences. They would’ve shown up outside with torches and pitchforks. They would’ve torn us apart if we didn’t make it commercially available. Naturally what most people wanted the technology for was...ahem...prurient purposes.”
He showed me some footage of western cartoon styled women with impossible bodily proportions dancing in a strip club alongside obnoxiously bug eyed anime girls with neon hair. “That’s just how it goes, isn’t it? Any time a new technology with limitless potential is discovered, the average Joe’s first question is “Can I fuck it?” Because in this case the answer was yes, there was never any hope of keeping it out of their hands.”
I smirked. Of all the things to use this technology for. “There was initially discussion of granting toons human rights. But the disastrous implications for the economy should they take away badly needed jobs, being able to work tirelessly in good humor without ever needing to eat or take breaks put the kibosh on that idea.
The only way they could be a positive addition to the world, and the only way most could tolerate their integration into society was if they didn’t have any rights. Nobody wanted to compete with toons for work. They wanted to own a toon. Or several. For housework, amusement...gratification…”
How I wished he’d stop reminding me of that particular application. “Of course their legal status as non-persons just made it easier to confiscate them all for ‘humane destruction’ when the effects of toon particles were discovered. I knew at the time there would be repercussions. Just not that they would be so immediate and severe. Nobody did.”
He flipped a switch and an abrupt, blinding electrical arc vaporized the cartoon rabbit. Then a ventilation fan sucked the newly disassociated toon particles into an adjacent storage cylinder. Identical sealed cylinders lined shelves along the wall, several layers deep.
He led me to the next door. This time it was a young man with black hair on the other side of the glass. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Up, down, yes, no.” Ken repeated it word for word. The switch was pressed, the light turned green and a quiet hiss followed.
Once the door opened, Ken led me into the next chamber where a mess of lab equipment was set up. Two of Ken’s colleagues were hard at work, one peering into a microscope while the other studied a display panel on the wall.
“Of course the first thing the government did was confiscate and destroy consumer toon projectors. Much too late by then. Some sort of...critical mass was achieved. An inflection point. Once a toon has existed for long enough, destroying the projector weakens but does not kill it.”
He pointed to a shelf full of colorful plastic gadgets I recognized as the commercially available toon projectors that were all the rage until the ban. Even then, loads of people were so attached to their toons that they wouldn’t give up their projector.
It wasn’t just the attachment you feel for a pet. Toons are intelligent, at least in their own way. They can hold conversations provided there is always a punchline. They can play with you, provided the outcome is in some way humorous. People bonded to their toons the way you would a close friend. If this had gone on any longer, undoubtedly they’d be campaigning for legalized toon marriage.
“That’s when I first began to suspect there was some outside force sustaining them. The projector physicalizes light and shadow, keeps it organized until it’s strong enough to self-sustain. The projector was never an engine of creation, rather it opens a channel of some sort through which an energy we do not yet comprehend can support the toon’s continued existence indefinitely thereafter.”
The researcher nearest me scrutinized diagrams I assumed were related to the prototype projector in the other room. His colleague peered at a monitor which displayed a CGI depiction of a photon alongside a dense academic journal related to the behavior of light.
“The projector must then tap into some physical force or principle related to light, and to time. This insight determined the direction of our research into the nature of time itself. Have you ever wondered whether time passes in a fluid, contiguous manner? Like a river? Or if instead, there is a shortest possible length of time? In which case, it’s more like a sequence of frames.”
I gasped. “Like animation!” He nodded grimly. “We may well be animated creatures ourselves, after a fashion. Naturally occurring ones anyway. Toons operate on the same principles, or rather, the projectors used to instantiate them do. This level of understanding was enough to create our own improved, miniaturized toon projectors for global markets. But it wasn’t enough to truly understand what we were doing, in a deeper sense.”
He took a circular tin from a shelf, opened it and withdrew the spool of film from inside. After unrolling it a little, he held the film up to the light so I could make out the contents. A vintage cartoon, depicting some sort of Disney knockoff character. “Salvaged from the same site as the prototype projector, I take it?” He nodded.
“If each of these frames is a moment in time, the shortest possible, then as you already know, progressing through the frames quickly enough creates the illusion of smooth, contiguous movement. You see, movement and other forms of change are the only objective, reliable definition of the passage of time physics has yet been able to arrive at.”
I rubbed my chin thoughtfully, though in truth I couldn’t fathom where he could be going with any of it. “But what about this?” He pointed, very carefully, at the slim black border between two frames. I confessed that I didn’t understand his meaning. “Don’t you? For there to be indivisibly brief units of time, there must be divisions between them. Like between the frames of this film. If nothing separated them, time would be contiguous.”
I allowed that such a division must exist, else everything would occur at once, but pressed him to explain what any of this had to do with the toon problem. “It has everything to do with the toon problem! Don’t you see? This is it! The fundamental understanding of how toons work that will at last make it possible to destroy them! To restore the world to some semblance of how it was before!”
Stay Tuned for Part 2!