Bliss

by Lisa Henry

  “Oh, I’m not kidding. Maybe you get a master who likes his dick sucked, maybe you don’t. Maybe you spend the next seven years on your knees, maybe you spend them at a sink washing dishes. Whatever. That’s up to him, though, not you. And I ain’t met anybody who didn’t wind up using their rezzy to get off one way or another.”

  “Fuck you,” Tate said. “I don’t suck dick!”

  The men laughed.

  “If he tells you to, you’ll fucking love it,” the first man said. “You know what this is, rezzy? This is my favorite part of this job. Where I see some vicious, violent piece of shit like you and he swears he’s gonna be different. That he’s gonna keep his pride and his dignity and he’s not gonna let the chip rule him, he’s not gonna become some rezzy robot. And then we stick the chip in him, and you know what? He’s just like every other piece of shit rezzy who went before. Picking up trash and sucking dick and begging to do it all day long, because guess what else? It feels good, rezzy. Feels good when you do what your master says.”

  “Fuck off. I don’t believe you.”

  One of the other men grinned. “They always say that too.”

  “I want to see my lawyer,” Tate managed, his voice hitching.

  It couldn’t be true. No way in hell. Cold dread filled him.

  “You will,” the first man said. “You’ll see him in a few days, and you’ll be so fucking happy to be a part of the rehabilitation program that you’ll thank him for it. You’ll even thank the cops that arrested you. Good guys, those cops. Makes them feel like they’re doing a worthwhile job when a rezzy apologizes for all the trouble he gave them.”

  “Why . . .” Tate sucked in a shallow breath. “Why the fuck are you even telling me this?”

  “Mostly to see the look on your face,” the man said. “To see how fucking outraged you are, because you sure as hell won’t be doing anything but smiling once you’re doped up on the chip.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tate babbled. “Please, I want to go to trial!” He’d throw himself on the fucking mercy of the court. Tell them what it was like out there, where life was filthy and squalid—not like here, where everything was open and so, so clean—and Tate had been desperate. Not just for himself, but for Emmy. “I want to tell the judge I’m sorry, and—”

  “Tell what judge?” the man cut in. “The judge whose new assistant you punched unconscious at the station? You fucked up, rezzy. You came into Beulah, and you fucked up. Now you have to take the consequences. And I promise you, you’ll be happier than you’ve ever been.”

  “Even if you are sucking dick,” the second man leered. “Best place for an animal like you, on your knees for a decent man.”

  “Groveling,” the third added with a laugh.

  Tate’s stomach clenched. He’d had nothing to eat or drink all day except for the weak coffee the cops had given him. Not enough in him to vomit back up but, shit, it was trying. “No . . . I can’t . . . I’m not like that.”

  “Hey, it’s not so bad,” the first man said. “That’s the smartest thing about the chip, rezzy. It doesn’t care what you like and what you don’t. It rewards you for doing what your master says. Doesn’t matter if you’ve never sucked dick in your life before. Your master tells you to do it, and doing it is gonna be the best feeling in the world. Best sex of your life, I bet.”

  “Impossible. It’s fucking impossible.” Tate couldn’t meet the man’s eyes anymore. He fixed his gaze on the floor. “It’s wrong.”

  “What’s that? A moral judgment from the piece of shit who punched a guy just for standing there?” The man reached down and gripped Tate’s hair, twisting his head up. “You could have killed him, you know. It only takes one punch. What if it had been a woman or a child?”

  Tate’s voice rasped when he spoke. “I wouldn’t have . . .”

  “And why the fuck should I believe that? You’ve earned your punishment, rezzy. Men like you are the reason people in that shithole Tophet are afraid to leave their own homes. You’re like a fucking cancer on society. You need to be cut out.” The man wasn’t grinning anymore. None of them were. “And you should be thankful that in Beulah we don’t answer violence with violence. You should be thankful we’re better than you.”

  Better? Tate wrenched his head free, not caring about the pain. These people actually thought they were better? Okay, so hitting that guy had been wrong, but no way in hell did that make this right. Fuck, he’d just wanted to get home, pay off all the money he owed, and move out of the city. Just wanted to be free of fucking debt collectors, free of threats of violence. And everyone said that Beulah didn’t even have prisons . . .

  Stupid of him. Unbelievably fucking stupid.

  “Please . . .” He swallowed and looked at the floor again. “I’m sorry. Please.”

  “That’s good. Begging. Apologizing. You’ll be doing a lot of that over the next seven years, so you might as well get used to it.”

  Seven years. Seven. Bad enough that he was losing seven years of his life, but to be living them as someone else entirely . . . Tate couldn’t even begin to wrap his mind around that. He hunched over, shaking his head uselessly.

  “Okay.” The man’s voice was softer now, and Tate wondered if that was because they’d broken him enough for one day. “We’re gonna give you a sedative. It will sting a little. You hearing me?”

  Tate nodded, tears filling his eyes.

  “We’ll walk you out of here, and we’ll transport you to the facility. Tomorrow you’ll get your chip, and after that you’ll go home with your sponsor.”

  Oh, back to sponsor now, not master. Back to pretending this is somehow civilized.

  Tate flinched as one of the men knelt behind him, shoved his pants down, and jammed a syringe into the fleshy part of his ass.

  The drug began to work immediately. Tate slumped forward, but the man caught him and hauled him to his feet. He tried to fight the effects of the drug. He didn’t want to go quietly, didn’t want to go peacefully. This was wrong.

  One man on each side of him, arms under his, they walked him out of the station.

  Tate stared up at the sky. Blue and free of smog. Kind of pretty, except he couldn’t focus on it. Beulah was really pretty, and everyone was really nice, except for those guys . . . those guys back at the . . . back somewhere. Shadow men.

  Where was he going now?

  They loaded him into the back of a van, onto a mattress, and Tate sank into it.

  The hum of the engine put him to sleep instantly.

  ate fought them when they came for him, but it made no difference. It took four of them to manage it, but in a few minutes they had him strapped facedown to a gurney and were wheeling him into surgery.

  The procedure itself was painless. He watched as a nurse slid a needle into the crook of his elbow, and he didn’t remember much else after that. Some pretty colors, some weird dreams, and maybe some people talking. He didn’t know if that was in his head or if he’d actually heard the surgical team talking. He couldn’t remember anything they’d said, and it wasn’t important. Just weird, he’d thought at the time, that he could hear anything at all. A general anesthetic wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He’d had better blackouts on alcohol. The headache after surgery was milder than after a bottle of vodka, though.

  He lay awake on the narrow hospital cot and wondered if he should feel any different. Shit, there was a chip in his head. A chip. In his head. Crazy.

  And maybe it wasn’t working because he wasn’t thinking any differently than usual. Maybe it was all bullshit. Maybe the technology just didn’t work on him. Maybe he didn’t have the sort of brain that could be rewritten to make him a happy slave.

  He wasn’t thinking any differently.

  He didn’t want to get on his knees for anyone. Didn’t want to suck anyone’s dick.

  Maybe if he played along, if they thought it had worked, maybe he’d be able to get out of here.

  Because it hadn’t worked. There was no way in hell
that he was a slave. Not now, and not fucking ever.

  When he was a kid, he’d had seizures. He’d grown out of them, but they’d been frightening. He’d never known when they would come. And, for years, he’d never trusted that they’d stopped. He wasn’t like the other kids in his neighborhood. Didn’t think he was invincible. Never did drugs to lose control, to get out of his own head. He hated that sensation, that weird dizzy prickliness that preceded a sudden loss of consciousness. Strange electrical misfires somewhere in his brain that he’d been held ransom to. It wasn’t until he hadn’t had a seizure in years that he’d even started to drink alcohol.

  Maybe it was what was saving him now. That brain of his that never worked exactly the way it should. Because he didn’t feel any different.

  Fuck Beulah, and fuck their legal system, and fuck their chip. They hadn’t gotten into his head at all. He forced himself not to smile and give the game away.

  “All right,” said the surgeon who came to inspect the stitches in the back of his neck. “That seems to be healing well. How do you feel?”

  “Fine,” said Tate, keeping his voice respectful. Happy slave, happy slave.

  “Good.” The surgeon smiled. “Let’s activate the chip.”

  Shit.

  Aaron was as good as his word with the groceries, meaning that Rory woke up on the first day in his new house—he still couldn’t stop the thrill of excitement that ran through him every time the realization struck that he had a house—to kitchen cupboards packed with enough basics to see him through the next few days. He made scrambled eggs and toast, simply because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to afford the luxury of eggs, or any fresh food, really. Produce was too expensive in Tophet even if his debts hadn’t been bleeding him dry.

  He ate standing at the sink, staring out into his back garden—his back garden—and decided that yes, he’d get chickens. He’d figure out how to build a coop to keep them out of the vegetable garden and everything.

  The only dark cloud on his horizon was the . . . What had Lowell called Rory’s assailant? The rezzy. Because sure, maybe the system worked. And sure, maybe Rory wanted to do his part to be a good citizen and help rehabilitate the guy, but to have him in his house? God. He didn’t even know why the guy had hit him. He wasn’t sure he’d ask, either, because if he’d driven the guy to violence just by standing there, imagine what talking to him might do. Rory would be afraid to wander around his own house if his assailant was sharing it with him.

  Which one of them was getting the prison sentence, exactly? Because it felt as though he was being punished for something that wasn’t his fault at all.

  He sighed, left his dishes in the sink, and went to try to reclaim some of his prior good mood by inspecting the house again.

  Last night, eating takeout, he and Aaron had poked around a little. There was the main bedroom, a spare bedroom that he decided he could use as an office, and a smaller, narrower room behind that. Aaron told him it was a storage closet, which was hard to believe since Rory had rented rooms that were smaller than that. It would be perfect for the rezzy, Aaron had said. But a narrow, windowless room? It seemed a little too much like a cell to him, but then Aaron had pointed out that the rezzy was an outsider as well. It would seem more like a palace than a prison to him. And it wasn’t too small to fit a bed.

  The house also had a neat and tidy laundry room with a new washing machine. No dryer though.

  “Sunlight,” Aaron had told him with a grin. “Why waste power on something the sun will do for free?”

  Rory liked that. He liked the marriage of technology and simplicity here. He liked that it was second nature for people in Beulah to think about their impact on the environment. And a part of him even liked the idea that they thought people could be rehabilitated, educated instead of punished, even though he really didn’t want to be a part of the process in his assailant’s case. He liked it in the abstract at least.

  Which, Rory supposed, would be the first test of whether he would embrace his new life as a citizen of Beulah or if he’d remain an outsider at heart.

  So he’d do his best to help rehabilitate the man, to put aside his old prejudices. He’d do his best to trust the system that had delivered such a high standard of living to the citizens of Beulah. This place had given him a fresh start, hadn’t it? He could at least try to show the same courtesy to his assailant.

  A fresh start.

  All it took was a couple of taps to the doctor’s keyboard. This wasn’t sci-fi, just an ordinary medical procedure. It was practically routine, except for the part where it was supposed to turn him into a slave. Deceptively ordinary, almost infuriatingly ordinary. To do something like this to a person . . . It should be dramatic, shocking, terrifying to see. But it wasn’t. All the terror was trapped inside Tate’s head.

  “Almost there,” said the surgeon.

  It didn’t . . . didn’t hurt, but he was aware of the strangest sensation of falling, like he felt sometimes in that weird place just before sleep. Like he had to reach out desperately to hold on but there was nothing there.

  And then it was done.

  He was there, but he wasn’t.

  His consciousness, his self-awareness, the part of him that translated to a snarky voice in his head, all still there. All there but so far away.

  Not . . . not at the front anymore.

  “You may feel disoriented,” the surgeon said.

  Tate blinked at the man. There was a fog in his head.

  There was a fog and . . . and closed doors. He rattled the doorknobs. The real Tate was just behind the doors, but they were locked. Locked. And receding into the fog.

  Lost. He was lost and afraid.

  “Kneel.”

  He sank to his knees.

  Less frightening on the floor. Not as far to fall.

  No. It was less frightening because the surgeon had told him what to do. Until then, he hadn’t known. He was still lost but it was okay as long as someone told him what to do.

  The distant part of his mind, the part that was still his, fought for a moment, pushed futilely against those locked doors. Couldn’t get through to him.

  He looked up at the surgeon.

  “Good boy,” the man said, turning from his keyboard. He patted Tate on the head.

  Warmth spread through him.

  Somewhere through the fog, he knew this was wrong. He knew this was the chip, but it didn’t matter. His own consciousness had been locked away. He had to listen to someone; otherwise, there’d just be nothing. He couldn’t let himself be nothing. He couldn’t. He had to hold on to this new feeling or lose himself entirely.

  “You did a bad thing,” the man said, patting his head again. “But you’re very sorry now.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, relieved.

  “Take your clothes off, Tate.”

  He froze for a second, just a second. No longer than the space of a heartbeat. Then he tugged his shirt over his head, the pull of the stitches in the back of his neck breaking him out in gooseflesh. He lifted himself up far enough to shove his loose pants down, almost tangling himself up in his hurry to get them off. Then knelt there, expectant and hopeful and so fucking pleased that he’d done the right thing.

  “Now, if your head hurts, it’s because you’re not doing something right. You’re thinking the wrong things or you’re doing the wrong thing or there’s something you ought to be doing that you’re not. These are like hunger pains, Tate. You need to listen to what your body is telling you and learn how to avoid the pain. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good, Tate.” The doctor spun his chair so he faced his computer and recorded something into a form. “You’re taking to this very well. Most everyone responds positively to simple commands after the procedure, but once it escalates to things that skirt the edges of propriety, things that people find humiliating or degrading, malfunction—pushback—becomes more common. Tell me you have a small dick.” />
  His eye twitched, but then his mouth opened. “I have a small dick.” How could he feel so horrible and so relieved at the same time?

  “Yes, yes. You’re doing very well.” More typing. The doctor’s voice was cool and clinical, but there was a lizardlike quality to it too, a sort of lazy, hungry pleasure that simultaneously disgusted Tate and made him so, so happy. “All right, now I want you to crawl across the floor to that table there.” He pointed at a medical tray on wheels, draped in that antiseptic blue paper.

  Tate crawled.

  “How did that feel? Be honest.”

  The words were out of his mouth before he could stop himself. “I hate it. I want more.”

  Tap tap tap went the keyboard. “Yes, that’s normal. All to be expected. Now, if those last few actions have a four percent malfunction rate in initial tests, this next one has a twenty percent chance of malfunction. Of failure, Tate.”

  The words twisted somewhere in his gut. He didn’t want to fail. He wanted to please the man. He wanted the man’s praise to deaden that abortive knocking in the back of his head. To silence the part of him that was still screaming and searching for a way out.

  “It’s not really your fault, although you’ll feel like it is. Honestly, it’s just a matter of human nature that the self-preservation instinct is one of the hardest for the chip to override. Far more difficult than the need we all feel to preserve our dignity—a much more modern concern, you understand.”

  Tate listened avidly, but he didn’t understand at all. He just wanted to do well. To be good.

  “Stand up, Tate.” The doctor smiled. “Now take the cover off and tell me what you see.”

  He obeyed. A scalpel gleamed on the metal tray. “A . . . a blade.”

  “Good. Pick it up.”

  The metal was cold in his fingers.

  “You have two choices, Tate,” the doctor said. He had the kind of voice you’d hear on those old hypnotize-yourself-at-home sound files. “A scalpel is just a tool. It serves a single purpose: to cut. Human flesh, specifically. But like any tool, it can be turned to another purpose. To harm rather than to heal. If you wanted to, you could hurt me with that.”