by Jaym Gates
The stories say God made Eve from Adam’s rib. God, the first genetic engineer. The first TITAN, maybe. The first artificial intelligence and we are nothing but cannibals in our own technology.
I don’t believe it either. But sometimes I wonder why those stories seem more unbelievable than the one we’re living now.
God is love, they say.
Who understands love anymore? We’ve killed our gods, after all.
—
I don’t wake up until after the procedure. My muse says, [There’s been an invasion.] Not of the terrestrial kind, but the mental. I know something’s wrong because it’s so matter-of-fact. Like telling someone they’re going to die because any emotion attached to it would just make it worse. There’s been an invasion. And there’s a psychosurgeon leaning over me with a cyclopian light beaming inevitability into my brain.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” she says. Her lipstick’s a smudge of burgundy, like she forgot to wipe her mouth after eating a gravied steak.
I remember being on the stroll. It was raining in my district, the way Mars rains, all interior, glitchy atmospheric monitors. Sheets of it that are slow in stopping because somebody somewhere’s too occupied by the problems of the wealthy. My body felt like a house of cards, any minute and I’d crumble into fifty-odd flat squares. This is my second morph, not any better than the first. This is my regular stroll, nine blocks from corner to corner where the corp suits like to slum if they want something anonymous. I don’t get very many propositions through a fork.
Some things don’t change no matter how many AIs make off with your future.
We’re anonymous, my kind. But practiced. Tried out, slammed open, worked in. You don’t see us unless you’re looking for something. Maybe it was the sliver of skin at my hip that caught his eyes. Maybe it was the way I leaned beneath the awning amidst red lantern glow, smoking a cigarette. I looked already bloody. I stayed near the noodle and kabob shops, the open windows and the scent of meat and hot water bubbling to the street. I remember the approach. We all know how to mark a walk-up. The hungry look in the eyes. He was spare and face forward, on the hunt. Hands dangling at his sides like he had nothing to hide.
But he did. And it was too late when he touched my neck.
I crumbled.
—
I remember dark eyes. The psychosurgeon says, “Try to speak.”
With my wrists bound, flat on my back on a table. “Fuck. Off.”
[There’s been an invasion,] my muse intones.
“No shit.”
All of these useless declarations. “What?”
The surgeon shines another beam into my eyeballs, blue this time. My wrists jerk to no avail.
There’s been an invasion. This other voice that isn’t my muse. That isn’t my voice. That isn’t anything I want to hear.
This other person. In my head.
I can’t see my hands.
The pieces tumble together, broken glass in reverse. Around me: slate green walls, like a clinic, but not a clinic because I can hear the rain sliding down the pipes. The scent of burnt wire and sugar drifts through me, soaking into my nostrils. The tiles cry and the surgeon sniffs like she’s got a cold. Or she’s bored.
There are stories. Mindnapping. We all know it. It sounds less benign than it is. Like your mind just takes a nap, but it’s not like that, all soft consonants and gentle vowels.
It’s rape, and I know the sound of that. The smell of that. It doesn’t need to be in the brain for the hard R to resonate.
“Get out of my head!”
My heels bang the metal table. The surgeon steps away, her hands up and palms facing in like she’s trying not to be contaminated by my struggle.
[I couldn’t stop it,] my muse says, sounding vaguely distressed.
I’ve heard that before.
—
It makes sense that he bridged my brain, this other voice, this foreign ego. My basic implants and not enough security would be easy for somebody with a psychosurgeon on call. I run out of energy and the spots of lights above me are from my own exhaustion, not this room. The surgeon left me to settle and that other voice is silent. I turn my head on the cold metal and see, in the shadows, a body slumped against the wall.
A man in a black jacket, still wet from the rain. A ragdoll of a man with his hands sitting in puddles. Head full of brown hair, bowed.
The pounding behind my eyes doesn’t cease.
It’s not like a muse. He speaks and a static buzz tickles behind my right ear.
“Hey.” Is that me or is that him? He keeps telling me what to do like I still have control. “Hey!”
The psychosurgeon appears again through a gap of a doorway. Like a ghoul, her ball-bearing eyes glitter. Seeing right through me.
“Let me go and I’ll give you the payment.” I don’t know what I’m saying but it sounds about right. Like an idea told to me when I was dreaming, now manifest.
With a few snaps, my bindings come undone. Her hands are efficient, the fingers of somebody used to wielding sharp tools. Sitting up takes effort and the blood seems to drain right out of my head and pool at my feet, dangling off the table. I grip the edge and breathe deeply, vision fuzzing out, while something lights up behind my eyes and my muse says, [Accessing.]
“Wait.”
But there’s no waiting. The transaction takes a blink. The surgeon leaves, streaks of light and numbers embedded in the black spaces of my inside eyes. The voice says over and over
More than myself, the jar of the command propels me off the table, a stumble toward the doorway. Beyond is only darkness. But it doesn’t matter, the thing inside my head knows the way.
—
In the steps it takes to get outside, I black out and pitch forward into the past. Long ago memory. Some desperate grasp to hold onto who I am.
My love was ignorant, like anything that comes first. Chames was my first and my last. He had a knack for remembering, even if he didn’t have the latest implants. Even when his implants malfunctioned. Chames’ memory was genetic, a fortunate glitch, the kind humanity didn’t care about anymore because they made everybody accelerated. But this was just something he’d been born with—he could look at a block of text and memorize it. He’d see a face and recall it in impeccable detail even after a year. He would’ve made a perfect eyewitness in a crime.
But in our stroll in Little Shanghai, you tried not to see things. When you’re in love, you see even less. You miss the warning signs, you cloud your vision with dreams, you believe one day you’ll get out of this place.
But there’s no getting out.
Not unless you want to erase yourself. Not unless you want to become something else.
Who believes in the soul anymore? No matter who or what you become, how many morphs you use, you’re still the thing you are.
There’s no such thing as better, only being.
The memory of Chames comes in flashes. This other voice in my head sees it too.
—
Mobility’s problematic. No inner ear balance, either from the bio implant or the incessant jabber of this other ego. I barely hear him and none of it registers as I pinball the cracked walls all the way outside. Don’t recognize the building or the street, but it’s rundown. Atmosphere’s not working rig
ht here and neither are the lights. An older section, a criminal haven, the kind of place you go to when you want to be off the grid.
As much as anybody can be off the grid with the mesh and this life.
“The fuck are you talking about?” I force it out loud, braced to a concrete corner pockmarked by time. Just another crazy person conversing with the air.
“You’re in my fucking head!”
Delayed shock and immediate indignation. My own mind is a recipe for insanity. Plus one ego too many. I turn to the wall and vomit into the edges. Nausea wins.
My timely muse: [He’s running. It’s been a day.]
I cough and pull breaths that feel like daggers in my throat. At least one of us is managing to multitask for intel. I don’t bother querying for the path of that revelation.
“Go where?” A swipe of my sleeve across my mouth, rough fabric leaving a burn.
I don’t want to go to the Bund. I want to go home, shithole that it is. And that’s where I force my feet to take me.
Us. As much as he’s riding along, I still have autonomy over my body—for now. I tell my muse: [Mute him if you can, I don’t care what it takes.]
—
The monotony of movement makes me black out again, as if the only way to ensure my mobility is to take my mind elsewhere. Or maybe I’m provoked by the dumpster diver in my head who wants to know my secrets.
I keep thinking of Chames.
I fell in love by accident. Does anybody ever mean to fall in love, besides children with fancy notions of fairy tales? That was never me,but maybe the idle wealthy and the shiny dreamers of private habitats still consider that scenario. My dreams were lower hanging and rough like fingertips.
You sacrifice everything for the touch. That’s a part of love. You begin to see beyond the skin and words, even beyond the mesh and the morph, and when you start to make reasons for the bad things he’s done, you know you’re lost. Because anything is worth that trade of mind and heart. Here, I’ve opened a port for you, unhackable, hidden, infallible. Resistant to invasion and coercion, unless you smile. That smile is every code key and counterinsurgency, the likes of which not even shady covert agencies can decipher or protect against.
We’re all so occupied by possible threat. Alien, nano, internal threat. What about the knowing heart? Even in the midst of these declarations of uniqueness and the refutation of conformity (“There’s no such thing as normal!”), they are accrued to the same sum: the idea that technology equals improvement. But history tells us otherwise, doesn’t it? For every aqueduct we get an atom bomb. People can’t create without fucking it up somehow.
Love is just another example of that.
So much stupidity amidst so much progress. The bane of our own existence since the first man struck a rock with flint and created the flame that would burn the whole world.
—
In my walking through the streets toward home, he speaks. Overriding my memories of Chames, inserting his own dialogue to a conversation I didn’t consent to.
“Target?”
Silence. The wall my hand trails along leaves streaks of dirt on my fingertips.
There’s an image through the film of rain … the man I’d seen slumped over in the clinic where the psychosurgeon did the job, this dark-haired man shaking hands with a tall young woman. They look like business.
There’s no silencing the desperation of a heart. It goes off like a gun—muffled by necessity, but never silenced. Not within the echo chamber of my own thoughts, the blur of my vision so easy to pierce with pictures I don’t remember because they didn’t happen to me.
But I feel the jolt.
A woman with long red hair and quartz purple eyes.
A scent of wearines, of wanting. The same kind of out. Something more. An undefined restlessness. A suspicion that the state of things is a lie we all tell ourselves.
She was his target. He wanted information.
He was sent.
I stumble up the outside iron steps to my single room. Crawl through the window. Face down in the corner of my bed, inhaling the salt depths of an unwashed blanket and a space without heat and very little light. I see him, this hunter, and the pieces of his lived life that he’s forced into me. Maybe we’re bleeding on each other, mutually riddled with anxiety and fear. Hard to discern which is his and which is mine, while my muse murmurs in distraught tones in an attempt to salvage what sanity I’ve got left. To partition us like a whore behind a screen and the voyeur who bought the time. Look, but don’t touch.
It’s like he put a wedding band on my finger and tied me til death do us part. The girl’s a daughter of a medtech tycoon. The girl was supposed to be his passport to a corporation his bosses suspect might be developing biogens unfriendly to civilization. She was brokering a deal by her father’s behest, with some criminal element.
It’s always one thing or another.
He thought himself some kind of hero. Going to this girl to get information that could save humanity or some shit. Worming his way into her thoughts with a smile and attention.
But somebody messed up his psych eval, or love is just that strong. He was supposed to steal secrets and burn the evidence in his wake. Take her out if it came to that. But he can’t forget her, won’t forget her, they shared some similar mission of understanding, of being trapped, so he’ll do anything—these pleas in memory decorated by kisses, the way I’ve never been kissed. Not even by Chames.
We bleed both ways.
“No you’re not.” Who needs to be kissed? Who needs the headache? Who needs crazy motherfuckers kidnapping a body in order to implant his own ego?
Technology can’t cure selfishness. It can kill desire and make us into sociopaths, but it won’t bomb out the inherent need to do shit for our own reasons.
“I want to sleep.”
My muse: [Don’t sleep.]
Who would take control then?
“My brain’s just been sliced and diced, I need to sleep.”
It’s like talking into a mirror. There’s no other way to feel but insane.
—
I make him look. I stand in front of the mirror, amidst cracked bathroom tile, and through my eyes he sees my eyes. Bruises beneath the blue, unevenly shorn hair, the scar at the side of my skull. Flakes of blood in the stubble both on my head and my face. As if I’d barely dodged a bullet. Ax-like cheekbones born from poverty, not aesthetic. People will alter their appearance until they no longer default to human because it no longer matters, they say.
They said that about digging into the Earth too, and building factories, and driving cars that spat carcinogens into the air we breathe. It no longer mattered. They argued themselves into safe places where things were done without guilt. This is a fact: human beings are unintelligent enough to shit where they eat. You have to excuse me for not relying on their foresight in matters of progress. Or love.
They, her, him. Abstract pronouns that mean nothing to me.
Because he could.
Suddenly humans are in space. Suddenly we’re all connected. We sound like we’ve figured it out, how to be “more” than ourselves. Not so suddenly there are still divisions and debates and diabolical agendas.
People throwing tantrums and committing genoc
ide. We’re not “better,” we’re just better armed.
He touches a palm to the smudged glass. Or maybe it’s me.
This is what you did.
You didn’t ask.
Love freed you and you put me in chains.
—
He’s some kind of assassin then? Looking into my own eyes doesn’t reveal that truth. He speaks to me but he doesn’t share that. Just the girl with the red hair and the quartz purple eyes. Over and over again like an obsession.
Her face melting with Chames’s on the surface of our memories.
Chames didn’t know when to shut up. The part of him that remembered everything also couldn’t let anything go. It wasn’t any conspiracy or convoluted drama. He said the wrong thing to the wrong person on the street, both of us cold and starving and frustrated.
Love doesn’t fix anything any more than technology. It just creates new and different problems.
Maybe I didn’t love him. Maybe it was just proximity and safety. Maybe it was my fault for speaking when the stranger on the street couldn’t just let it go.
“Keep walkin’,” Chames said to the stranger.
Sometimes those looks of disdain cut harder than a shiv. Keep walking, Chames said, like a dare.
And the man looked back. I don’t know who he was, but he walked back and that was when I knew we’d started something and there was no getting out.
Me: “What d’you want?”
Like we weren’t the ones who’d dared him to confront.
Maybe it was my fault, in that moment. The way the man struck at me, and Chames got in the way.
Proximity and safety. We were close and we protected each other.
It’s never enough.
“You think by saving your memories you’re protecting this girl? You’re protecting each other?”
I ask the mirror and I ask him.
Words trail off to a new image.
He tells her in order to save them both, he’ll become someone else. Then they can steal away together, he can make himself untraceable (somehow), they can get her a new body too, they will both be safe and go somewhere, far away from corporate secrets and biogenetic threat. As if such a place existed in this galaxy. He wasn’t without means or determination, and he certainly wasn’t without selfish need. Love conquers all.
