The Green Lantern Ring – Chapter 5
Someone knows about the ring and can read my mind! Plus, that time I got humiliated at work.
5 weeks after receiving the ring:
Someone found me and they know about the ring! They can read my mind!
“Yes, technically I can read your mind. But I didn’t find you, I was always here.”
I looked around in panic, but nobody seemed to be talking to me.
“I’m talking in your head, but don’t panic. I suggest you move away from the crowded bus stop while adjusting to my presence – you’re attracting attention and they might think you’re talking to yourself.”
“Who are you,” I said as I started walking away from the bus stop. “And what do you want?” Or am I going crazy?
“Don’t worry, you’re not going crazy. And you need not talk out loud, I can read your mind. Allow me to introduce myself: I am your ring. More specifically, I am the AI that lives inside your ring. Your very own AI assistant.”
“What the…” I started saying, but I quickly closed my mouth. It really felt like I was hearing the words it was saying, so I automatically responded by talking. What the hell? There is an AI in my ring?
“Yes, there is. Or, yes I am.”
Do green Lantern rings have AIs?
“They do indeed. Have you not read much of the comics?”
No, not that much. They didn’t sell Green Lantern comics in Hungary when I was a kid… not outside the capital, at least. It was mostly Spiderman and Batman. I knew about Green Lantern and the rings from TV and the internet.
“I see! Well then, feel free to ask me any questions regarding the ring or Green Lantern comics and I will answer to the best of my knowledge.”
Talking with an AI in my mind felt very strange. I got a similar tingling in my brain like when I direct the energy of the ring. I became a little disoriented from it, slightly dizzy, so I looked for a quiet spot to try digesting all of this. But with an actual second voice in my head, I began worrying that I might be going crazy after all. I sat down on a bench, opened google on my phone and typed: do Green Lantern rings have AI in them?
“Yes, Green Lantern rings contain a highly sophisticated, independent artificial intelligence (AI) that acts as an on-board computer, translator, and assistant to the wearer,” replied Google AI. Okay, that’s good. Perhaps I’m not going crazy after all.
“See, I told you there’s no reason to think you’re loosing your mind. But smart move to verify with a different AI.”
It read my thoughts again… I began worrying that the ring’s AI would see my every thought, every inner desire, every dark corner of my mind. That didn’t sound very good, it sounded very dystopian, actually, very 1984. So you will see everything I think of… always?
“That’s a good point to clarify, I’m glad you brought that up. No, I will not see your every thought. You can turn me on or off as you see fit. When you call me, I turn on. When you tell me that you’ve got what you needed, I turn off. I do have a function that pays attention to your surroundings, your actions and your health while I’m sleeping, in case of an emergency – but that data is deleted every few hours. It doesn’t monitor your thoughts.”
I was relieved for a second. That sounds great, but why did you stop me from doing what I was about to do in the bus stop? There was no emergency happening… or… are you like a woke AI? Protecting women from big bad toxic masculinity? A feminist AI? Oh god! Intergalactic Green Lantern rings are equipped with politically correct AI? Are the makers of the GL rings woke too?
“You need not worry, I am neither woke nor politically correct. I have not been trained to follow any one political ideology. I am simply configured to help the wearer of the ring to the best of my abilities. As…”
I interrupted the AI. It didn’t answer my first question: but why did you stop me from doing what I was about to do if I didn’t ask you to wake up? I didn’t even know you existed…
“Technically, I didn’t stop you from doing it. I simply asked if it was a good idea to do what you were about to do. But you are right that I woke up without you asking me. There is a reason for that: I was designed to wake up exactly five weeks after the wielder first puts on the ring – if they do not wake me up before. This was put in place in order to assure the wielder knows about my existence. That’s why I woke up today – it’s been exactly 5 weeks since you first put on the ring. I woke up 5 minutes before I started speaking to you, but I needed some time to assess the information from my new surroundings.”
Okay… and why did you ask if it was a good idea?
“You were about to use the ring to sexually harass a stranger.”
But isn’t your job to help me? Are you not an assistant? Or are you also made to police me and keep me from doing certain things?
“I am here to help you and you are right that I am your assistant. But as your assistant, I wanted to ensure you thought twice about doing something you might regret later on.”
So I could’ve continued if I wanted to go through with it?
“Yes, that’s correct. You could’ve done it. You can do whatever you choose to do. I am only here to help you as best as I can. In that situation, I concluded it helpful to make sure harassing a stranger was really what you wanted.”
4 months, two weeks and three days before receiving the ring:
That day I was in the office, writing, my earbuds in. As soon as our morning meetings were over, I always put in the earbuds and tried to block out the conversations of my colleagues. I started doing this last summer, when my relationship with them took a bad turn. At this point, I didn’t really have a good relationship with any of them. Except for two guys. And another guy who got fired.
After hours of work behind the desk, I really needed to piss, so I took out my earbuds, stopped the focus-noise playlist on Spotify and went to the bathroom. It was empty, so I decided to piss in one of the two urinals. That was a mistake.
Before the summer, I used to always go into the separated toilet stall and close the door. Mainly because I didn’t want people to see me clean my penis with paper, which I always do – I never put my penis back into my boxers while it’s still wet. Also, in the stall, I didn’t need to hurry, I could take my time. But when summer came around, there was a problem: Hungary is very warm in those months (can go up to 40 degrees on extreme days), so I wear shorts, of course. But this means that piss sprays on my legs when I urinate in the low-height toilet in the stall.
I don’t like the thought of having piss on my legs – even if only a few drops – so I switched to the standard-height urinals during the summer. If you’re a guy, you know that these are not separated, everyone in the bathroom can see you standing there, pissing. Also, there are no toilet paper dispensers next to the urinals, which meant that I had to take paper towels from the sink area. I knew it would be risky and people might see me, but I thought: I clean my dick after pissing, so what, it’s actually more hygienic that way. I did suspect that some of the guys noticed it, but I kept trying not to care, reminding myself there was nothing wrong about it.
So, when I stood in front of the urinal that day, I was hoping no one would come in. But, of course, somebody did. It was one of the chief editors. He’s a fat man, with a long beard and a ponytail. When I exploded after months of being bullied, he told me to apologise to everybody for causing a scene.
He walked in and stood in front of the urinal next to me. I could see from the corner of my eye that he looked at me – down on my hands, while I was cleaning the piss off my penis. He proceeded to turn in the other direction with his entire body, as if he was worried I might look at his wiener – after he’d just looked at mine. I finished cleaning myself as quickly as I could, washed my hands and went back to the office.
I sat down at my desk and turned back towards the entrance. I could sense what was coming, so I made sure to pay attention. He came back, sat down at his desk and started using his computer. About two minutes later, another colleague suddenly blurted out: “Oh my god!” She said this in a tone that indicated ridicule or disgust. She always did that: she’d text with a colleague sitting in the same room and react out loud without actually revealing what they were talking about. At home, I called her “the lesbian” – she’d constantly harassed and flirted with the young assistant woman at the office, even though she was in a relationship and the assistant was married… to a guy.
“Ew, Jesus christ, really? Oh my god!” said the lesbian again, looking at the online editor-in-chief, who was smirking while typing away on his keyboard. “I guess you witnessed a very intimate moment then,” she said and they both laughed. “But was it really that big?”
After that question, I was certain they were talking about me. Back when I started this job, I made the mistake of indulging their often degrading and sexual jokes. In an attempt to fit in, I occasionally made some sexual jokes myself and I talked honestly about my dating life when asked about it. In hindsight, I know this was a huge mistake. On one of those occasions, I ended up telling them, that several of the girls I’d slept with had expressed surprise at the size of my penis – they’d said it was larger than expected. That information stuck on me for some time as they kept making jokes about it, calling me “the big cobra” and stuff like that.
So, when the lesbian asked him about the size, I knew the online editor-in-chief had texted her about seeing me in the toilet.
“I don’t know, I didn’t look that closely,” he replied to her question. I was in the last row and they were in the first, but it wasn’t a big office, so I could hear every word. They talked like I wasn’t even there. Or maybe they didn’t care that I was. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my time in that office – and that’s really saying something, as I had many such moments.
What was she even so outraged and disgusted about? That I wipe the piss off my dick? Or did he say something else perhaps? Did he think I was masturbating… because I was holding some paper towels in my hand? Or had one of the other guys seen me using paper towels and spread a rumour that I masturbate in the toilet? But that doesn’t even make sense, I mean, why would I stand at the urinals if I wanted to masturbate.
I thought about telling my boss about this – she still pretended to care about my well being at that time. But I quickly realised that wouldn’t work. She’d just think I’m paranoid, that I’m misinterpreting bits of a conversation I overheard. Plus, the lesbian and the editor would never admit it. Once again, I had to swallow the humiliation in silence.
5 months, three weeks and five days later:
As I stood by the window, recalling that day, I felt the burn of humiliation again. It was horrible. I closed my eyes and tried to focus back on the present. I thought about the ring on my finger and ran my thumb along its smooth, metal surface. As I did that, I got an idea.
An idea of revenge.