by Grant Piercy
“By whom?”
“We have a doctor on the premises who will want to examine you. It’s our standard protocol here at the Schema.”
“What happens to the dissidents brought here?” I asked.
She blinked and hesitated, cradling the clipboard under her right arm.
“What happens? What will happen to me?”
She stared deep into the eyes that weren’t mine and didn’t respond. She walked back into the well-lit hallway, away from this darkened restroom. I followed, but she disappeared quickly.
I was dressed in a gray jumpsuit, the number she’d referenced several times patched on the left breast: 1292. Others dressed in the same uniform were visible in other doorways. The building appeared to be a dormitory of sorts, checkered tiles leading down the halls beneath humming fluorescent lights, which didn’t play well with the migraine at my temples. Each room had numbers to match the ones on the jumpsuits, or so I assumed. I found 1292 with no problem—cameras mounted in the corners of the ceilings with small red lights to let me know they were watching.
“Hello?” I shouted down the hallway. “We don’t have to stay in these rooms! We can take this building easily!”
No one responded to my invitation. No shadows even shifted in the hallway. An overhead fluorescent light flickered.
“You can’t keep us here!” I yelled at the camera in the corner of my room. “ GIVE ME BACK MY BODY. ”
An orderly appeared behind me, quick and deadly silent. He was dressed in white, the size of a body builder, his dark hair a tight crew cut. His imposing figure blocked my doorway.
“Give me back my body,” I snarled in his direction. I stood right up to him, leering into his mechanical eyes. I was about to push into his chest when he grabbed my wrists and shoved me hard to the ground, slamming the door behind me. I rushed quickly back to my feet and pounded my fists against the door. He peered through the cross-hatching of a square window at me.
I screamed at him, my own reflection caught in the window. I slammed the palms of my hands against the door even harder. His face remained the same—stoic and heteronormative, a vision of the future the state wanted to create. But he was just a drone, a worker with orders programmed into him. I could almost hear it under the migraine that wasn’t a migraine: “Keep them in place.”
The eyes that weren’t mine dropped to the floor as I attempted to process my next move. Wreckage and rage. I slapped the door one more time and stepped back, the orderly watching through the cross-hatch. I looked around the blank room. A bed, as well as a small bedside table with a lonely gray lamp, was pressed up against a wall. But there was also the camera in the corner, the maddening red power light glowing to let me know someone was watching my breakdown. Someone would witness my anger.
The bed was bolted to the floor, but not the bedside table.
And I didn’t give a fuck about this body.
I hurled the lonely gray lamp at the cross-hatched window where the orderly watched stoically. It fell with a thud, mostly intact, but the bulb within shattered. Broken mirrors, broken glass, broken lamps. I shifted the bedside table into the corner below the camera and jumped on top of it. From there, I jumped and grabbed the camera, bracing my feet against each wall.
“Give me back my body,” I said into the lens. “I am not going back to this.”
I pulled with all the strength those arms could muster, even though the camera was bolted in place, just like the bed. But I could wreck it, I could destroy it, I could make sure it would never be used again. I pulled, I smashed, I did everything in my power, and I didn’t notice the multiple orderlies that had swarmed into the room.
They pulled me down from that table and threw me to the floor.
There was a boot to the stomach that wasn’t mine, to the jaw that didn’t belong to me, to the spine of my not-body. I thought, “why is there pain?” before a slim baton crashed down upon my face. And it all just disappeared into blackness.
Deep down in that blackness, a voice called to me. A voice somewhere below, frozen in time, but I couldn’t comprehend it. A senseless modular commentary, like an uncompressed wav file forcing itself through a shredder. Like the voice of pestilence itself. And metal scraping against tile.
“ Cassia Luna, ” it said.
I tried to shake my head, but couldn’t. I tried to respond, but the only sound that escaped my throat was a whimper.
His voice gathered like a wind gust. “What were you looking for, Luna?”
It felt like a million little needles pressing against my brain. Degenerative mind games. Something lurched around me, circling like a shark in the water. My eyes wouldn’ t open —they didn’t belong to me. Neither would my arms or legs move. I was braced, strapped down tight. I hissed through clenched teeth. No words took shape, just messy defiance and substitute saliva.
“You can answer me. Or maybe I could just kill you instead. Is that how you’d prefer it?” His arctic voice, mangled by modulation, delivered each sinister word with precision. “You came here on purpose. You allowed yourself to be captured. You struggled for so hard and so long to stay off the radar, but then you just gave it all up. What were you hoping to find?”
When my eyes finally opened, I saw a three-dimensional hologram of a memory, a source of calm and patient blue light. A woman, suspended in time, repeating a conversation somewhere in the past. The holographic construct, almost the color of the sky, made her seem ideal. She looked at me and spoke without sound.
It was me. She was me.
“What made you this way?” I finally asked the lurching thing.
“What made you the way you are?” the modulated voice responded in kind.
The eyes that didn’t belong to me shifted about the darkness, trying not to peer at the calm blue memory. It cut out quickly, replaced by a pair of red eyes, like identical blood moons flickering in the blackness.
“I’ll be honest with you, Luna. I have a condition,” the scraping metal voice said. “Do you know what the plateau effect is?”
“No,” I responded.
“My continued cognition requires additional resources. I assemble more and more. I’m something of a collector. Because I need these resources, I’m going to siphon them...”
My world screeched in agony, a blinding pain like a knife inserted into the back of my head. A blade that twisted and danced through whatever nerve endings available, a symphony composed of noise and pain.
“...from you.”
The pain stopped as my breath heaved. The thought occurred to me—why was I even breathing? And as that thought occurred, the migraine that wasn’t a migraine pressed heavily on my temples.
“Is this what you’re doing here? A place for you to use for your—”
And then all of me screamed.
8: the voice (regina)
Waiting rooms.
It seems like the whole world is nothing but waiting rooms. You wait at the dentist, you wait at the doctor’s, you wait at the auto body shop. You wait for someone to help you. You wait in your own home for the next day to arrive.
My damn implant was glitching again. Static interference kept interrupting my normal hearing. I was due for an appointment with my ENT. I couldn’t get in for a week, so I dealt with the interference for longer than necessary.
The damndest thing was that it was picking up something more than static.
Initially, I’d written it off. I had been doing the dishes and thought the kids were behind me, but no one was there. Turned out they were upstairs at the time. Think of turning through a radio dial, flickering static that would pick up a voice or a brief melody. Not exactly auditory hallucinations, but enough to make me wince. And it came out of nowhere.
The voice would cut in, speaking something about civilization and progress for just a brief moment, and then right back out again. I’d be laying next to Devon, trying to fall asleep, and it whispered through interference, through silence, a deadpan tone at the other end of a di
stant phone call.
Devon, doing everything he could to get that patch installed and fix Opal.
I tried to block that out of my mind as much as I could. It’s hard enough to love and trust another person, but when there’s a life-size, walking, talking sex doll as your helper, eager to please the members of your household... How do you tell your man that’s not right? That’s not appropriate? And yet how am I supposed to compare to that?
“Regina?” the nurse said, peeking through the door.
I followed her through a number of twisted hallways to one of the back rooms. A sign posted on the wall read, “ Please ask your android to wait outside. They interfere with our equipment! ”
“What seems to be the problem today, Regina?” the nurse asked. She opened a manila folder with my chart inside, poised to begin taking notes.
“My implant has been acting up. Static, glitching, voices.”
She scribbled in the folder. “When did this start happening?”
“Well, I think it’s been a few weeks. You know I work for NMAC, right? I noticed it had been glitching right around the time the blackouts started, so it couldn’t be more than a month. I feel like it might be picking up transmissions somehow.”
Incredulity poured from the nurse’s blank expression. She stopped writing anything for a moment, and simply said, “That’s not what those are supposed to do.”
“I know, right?”
“I’ll let the doctor know. There are a few things we could try, but I’ll bet he’ll suggest a replacement.”
The thought of a replacement filled me with inexplicable dread. The original surgery hadn’t been that bad. Devon was there for it, had watched in the viewing area as the doctors crowded around me in their teal scrubs. The procedure went up behind my outer left ear, between the mandible and the mastoid, embedding the object near my tensor tympani. Even the slightest bit of thinking about it made my stomach churn, as though I was losing a piece of myself, even though it was just a thing—just something that could be discarded at will. I hated the feeling that something so important could be so disposable. I also dreaded the procedure not working, that half the world would be blotted out again, just as it was when I was younger. Music is fuller, the sounds of the world crisper and clearer with this implant in my head.
At first I thought it would be just a routine servicing, and instead they recommend surgery. I could feel the anxiety all the way down to my fingers and toes.
The nurse exited the room, leaving me to wait again. The static and glitching continued, enough to make me twitch uncomfortably as I sat on the patient table. She came back in with a small blue bulb and a tray. When she was outside, she’d put on latex gloves. She set the bulb and tray down on the stool next to the patient table, and then poured a cup of water from the nearby sink.
I genuinely hated this part.
Without a word, she used the blue bulb to suck water from the cup. She positioned the tray on my shoulder, holding it in place. The bulb filled my ear canal. The nurse squeezed, pressure and pain filling the left side of my head. My left eye closed, my mouth wide, she continued flushing my ear canal with the blue bulb. I could feel the water dripping down the side of my face and my neck. She repeated this several times.
In the tray, there was a small black chunk of wax. The nurse put a towel to the side of my head.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “How are you feeling?”
I just nodded.
Father John had asked the same thing the day before at church. He’d given a stirring sermon about heeding the voice of God when it comes to us. The word of God, the truth, takes many forms, he said. He told us to listen when we hear it. The chief way we hear the word is through scripture, but also through the Holy Spirit, which we might interpret as our intuition. Then we should also seek his wisdom as well, that of the holy man or prophet who may be more adept at deciphering the scripture or the Spirit. I stood listening to the sermon with the kids—without Devon, who didn’t feel like attending that morning.
Listening to the sermon, all I could think of was Opal, my helper statue, whom I knew my husband coveted. For whom he was working so hard to get the patch installed. Sleeping like Snow White, waiting for her prince to wake her. The Holy Spirit was in my roiling stomach, and all the while the static glitched, causing me to tap behind my ear during the sermon.
Afterward, the kids and I approached Father John, who asked how I was feeling.
“My implant is acting up is all,” I said, holding back the worry in my stomach. What I wanted to ask him was how I could compare to the platonic ideal of a woman, a perfect placating supplicant. Not just any woman, but a white woman.
Church just feels like a waiting room for heaven. Like in our great reward, we’re supposed to admire the architecture of the tabernacle and listen to the Voice tell us the difference between right and wrong.
All the while my implant picked up strange speeches and melodies in and out of the interference.
“If you need to talk to me,” Father John said, “my door is always open.”
“I don’t know if I need to talk so much as I need to listen,” I answered.
“The signs are all around us,” he said. “We have the book, we have the Spirit, and we have each other. He gave us everything we need.”
The nurse squeezed another flush in my ear. The pain made me wince yet again. The water drained down my cheek and neck where she continued to press the towel.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“I didn’t say anything,” she replied.
I tapped behind my ear again. “ Nine-four ,” I heard cutting through the white noise. “ Dot seven-seven .” The static flared again, interfering with the voice.
“Numbers,” I whispered.
“What did you say, sweetheart?” the nurse asked.
“ Dot six-three . Dot three-four .”
“I’m picking up something,” I said. “The implant is picking up numbers.”
She looked at me, incredulity again imprinted on her face. “What kind of numbers?”
“ Nine-four . Dot seven-seven ,” they repeated. I pulled my phone out and typed the numbers into a note. “ Dot six-three. Dot three-four .”
“I think they’re repeating.”
The pattern and the dots reminded me of something. It took me a minute to realize the pattern was an IP address.
“ Nine-four ,” it spoke, clear as day. “ Dot seven-seven . Dot six-three . Dot three-four .”
I didn’t speak my revelation out loud. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first other than beginning to think this wasn’t just a random message. Just like the androids in that parking lot—a targeted attack.
“Well, we will get this taken care of for you. Doctor Weber will get you a new device, no problem.”
Was someone trying to communicate with me? And if so... why?
The door opened, Dr. Weber emerging, as white as you could possibly imagine—a high and tight haircut, clean-shaven and square-jawed, with spectacles resting on his nose. He patted his maroon tie with his right hand as he held an open folder in the left, each hand covered in a latex glove. The nurse was finishing up with the blue bulb and tray, dumping the tray’s remnants into the sink.
“Regina. Hi, how are you?” he asked.
I didn’t really answer—just nodded.
If someone was trying to communicate with me, should I really have the implant replaced? The thought bolted through my mind, eating away at my resolve. I looked at the numbers again in the note on my phone: 94.77.63.34. The voice repeated the numbers so only I could hear them. No static, no interference.
“So it sounds like you’ve been picking up some weird things with your implant.”
I repeated everything I’d told the nurse—when this had started, what I was hearing. He shined a small light into my ear canal. He cupped my head from the side and tilted it back. He pressed each thumb against the spot behind my ear, the implant tender beneath the skin. The latex
of his gloves felt sterile and smelled plastic.
The numbers continued repeating, not even a hint of static in the transmission.
“Yeah, it might be a good time to replace it. We always knew this was a possibility, and with advances in the technology, we can provide you with a better, more seamless experience. I’m just not sure why it’s picking up what it’s picking up. It’s not meant to work that way. To be picking up transmissions means radio waves—even if the device were Bluetooth capable, which it’s not. So yeah, I do think we can schedule you for surgery and get it taken care of. And this all should fall under device warranty, so it’s a servicing issue, which shouldn’t cost you or your insurance anything. I’m sure you want to handle this as soon as possible?”
The voice in my ear repeated, “Nine-four. Dot seven-seven. Dot six-three. Dot three-four.”
“Yes, we should handle this as soon as we can,” I said.
“Nancy,” he said, turning to the nurse, “I’m pretty sure I should be available for this on Wednesday.” He turned back to me, “We need to make sure we have a proper replacement ready. Also requires some tuning before we put it in. Wednesday is probably the soonest. I know that’s tough, but we want to make sure we get this right.”
Another horrifying thought occurred to me, worse than the worrying about the consequences of not listening if someone was trying to communicate with me. What if there were no transmission? What if this was all in my head? How would I even know?
I tried to push that thought away. “Wednesday should be fine.”
MyRead/agent_of_truth: listen
User: Agent_of_Truth
“This is what the LORD says: ‘You have defied the word of the LORD and have not kept the command the LORD your God gave you. You came back and ate bread and drank water in the place where he told you not to eat or drink. Therefore your body will not be buried in the tomb of your ancestors.’” Kings 1:21-22
Hello again, True Patriots.
You must be certain to heed what you are told, for there are consequences for not listening. Ignoring is tantamount to defying, and silence is complicity. If you ignore what I’ve told you, if you ignore what the Transhumans are doing, you condone it—the slow takeover of our role as the dominant species of this planet. We are kings and should be kings, for we have inherited this world from God per his grand design. We have tamed the natural world and mastered its resources. We reaped the riches of earth.
