When I was a few years younger I used to kid myself that I had some kind of control over my existence. You can, if you squint, convince yourself that you have cracked the code. If you limit yourself to six or seven whiskies a night, eat some kale, and occasionally break a light sweat, you could possibly live forever, and all those people dying are just idiots who have not, you know, cracked the code.
As you get older, though, your complete lack of control over your body or your existence becomes increasingly, disturbingly clear. Your body comes up with bizarre ways to demonstrate how little influence you have over it, physical events that are at turns ridiculous, amusing, horrifying, and fatal, almost always disconnected from every single concession you’ve made to health and aging and mortality. These events remind you, forcibly, that no one here gets out alive, and all your healthy bullshit is just that, because you really have no idea what’s going on inside the skin sack you call a body.
For example, a few months ago, out of the blue, I started snoring. I’d snored before, in isolated incidents, but The Duchess was now reporting thunderous, incredibly loud displays of volume on a regular basis, as if some vital part of my skull’s interior airways had collapsed or perhaps been eaten by some Cronenbergian parasite I swallowed when I was three years old and eager to eat everything it found, something that’s been excavating inside my for decades. When I woke up one day to find that my wife had decamped to the couch overnight to escape the endless roar, I knew I had to do something, because my wife is certainly not above smothering me in my sleep and blaming the cats.
An App for That
The first step was to download a snore app onto my phone. Yes, such things exist; one of the many horrors of the modern world is that whatever ridiculous thing you think of, someone, somewhere has already made an App for it, and so it was with snoring. The snore App was pretty basic: You left it on next to bed at night and it monitored your snoring, recording you when you got loud. In the morning you could see your “snore score” and listen to yourself.
The next morning, I was shocked, because the epic droning noise I was creating while asleep seemed impossible. I am just a man. The noise being generated was the sort of thing I would normally associate with bears, rhinoceri, or monsters of assorted sorts. I began to take the snoring more seriously, because I began to worry that some sort of hellgate had been opened inside my head and a demon was forcing its way through, and would eventually split my head open to emerge and destroy the world. So I started to investigate remedies, most of which involve making it almost impossible to breathe normally at night. There are strips called Theravents that you literally stick over your nostrils; you can breathe in pretty easily with them in place, but can’t breathe out very well, and you know what? They do stop the snoring. Which was pretty exciting, until I woke up the next morning with a mouth as dry as the desert and a pillow soaked in drool. Because those things basically force you to sleep with your mouth open all night. As scientists say: Yuck.
I also investigated a mouthpiece that shifts your jaw forward. This also worked really well stopping my snoring. This was also one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever had in my mouth, and I had a pretty crazy youth, so that’s saying something. My future, in other words, looked bleak: I would spend my dotage drooling in my sleep until The Duchess murdered me because I snored. So I decided to see a doctor.
Nice for What
I have great respect for doctors, so when my ENT suggested we do a Sleep Study, I figured, why not. Why bother seeing a doctor if you’re not going to take their advice, after all.
A Sleep Study is exactly what it sounds like: You strap on a few monitors, hook up to a small machine, and it records your vitals and other things as you sleep. In the morning it transmits the data back to the company, they prepare a report, and then your doctor calls you to let you know that you have a small demon using your head as an interdimensional gateway so you should get your affairs in order.
Now, I expected the gear to be slightly uncomfortable. You can’t strap on a breathe sensor, chest sensor, and finger sensor and then just slip away into a gentle sleep. But I was a Boy Scout. I’ve slept on rocks in the middle of winter (no joke). Plus, my super power is essentially falling asleep anywhere, at any time. This would be easy, I thought.
What they don’t tell you is that the damn device talks to you. Loudly, in a computer voice that is pretty much what Skynet would sound like if The Terminator had been a low-budget 1980s sci fi series on ABC. So I’m standing in the bathroom at midnight, clipping everything into place and suddenly this voice booms out
FINGER SENSOR OKAY!
BREATH SENSOR OKAY!
CHEST SENSOR OKAY!
And I stared at myself and realized that this was my future: Increasing cyborg-levels of insanity in a doomed effort to live forever.
I persevered, though, because from youth I’ve been a good rule-follower, a useful enough idiot when it comes to authority figures. Where The Duchess will often disdain doctor’s advice and flagrantly disobey it, in some dark corner of my mind I always assume if I don’t do as I’m told, I will immediately die. Besides, now that all the sensors were OKAY! I could go to sleep and get this over with. So I went up to sleep, trailed by cats. And as I lay in bed trying to ignore all the things strapped to me, I discovered that the device would simply not shut the fuck up.
CHECK BREATH SENSOR!
I froze. We all like to think that in moments of crisis we’ll be brave. I froze and wondered, in horror, if this had woken up my wife. The Duchess is jealous of her sleep and becomes easily enraged when it ‘s ruined.
And then the voice repeated itself: CHECK! BREATH! SENSOR!
Nowhere in the documentation had there been any instructions as to what, exactly, that meant. Check it how? Who knew. Not me, tearing at the thing in the dark. I removed all the doohickies and turned the thing off and went to bed like a normal human being.
The Department of Redundancy Department
The next day, I called the company and had the following conversation:
ME: It keeps telling me to check the breath sensor, but I don’t know what that means.
THEM: It means check the breath sensor.
ME: …
THEM: Thanks for calling!
That night I tried again. This time, I went into another room to set everything up, and when it complained about the breath sensor I figured out that if I lowered it slightly on my face it shut up. I was able to fall asleep with the contraption on, and all was well until 3AM when, you guessed it, it began bleating at me about the damn breath sensor again. I tried again to adjust it, but nothing I did satisfied it, so I turned it off again. In the morning, I packed it up and mailed it back. I figured my doctor might complain about getting only 3 hours of data, but I never heard from him or the company again.
Which means I’m probably part of some nefarious Facebookian biometric database. I’ll go back to my doctor’s office and it will be gone, a confused mess of debris left from a fast-paced shutdown. And then one day in the near future Delos is formed and begins work on Westworld, and my sleep data is in there, a tiny fraction of an algorithm designed to make the Hosts more lifelike.
And I am okay with this.