by Rayya Deeb
The end of the tunnel opened into a labyrinth of tubing encasing more tubing, turquoise water cooling smaller pipes of colorful liquids. It was so quiet it was almost peaceful. Then the masks came off: Reba, Dom, Anika! And some scruffy skinny dude with dusty red hair, freckles and a Spanish accent. Maybe in his late-twenties.
Dom hurried right up to me, unlatched my drone cuffs and embraced me. He held on tight. His hard breath was all I could hear.
“You have no idea how relieved I am,” he exclaimed, with his arms around me. My arms hung at my sides, frozen between the choice of pushing him away and hugging him back. The others watched us intently and I couldn’t help but wonder what everyone’s motivation was.
“Relief?” I hissed. “What are you all thinking?! Should I be relieved that S.O.I.L. has us on their radar now because of this?”
Reba snapped, “You think that is something new? We’re always on S.O.I.L.’s radar!”
He had a point. But I was pissed.
“I know, Reba! So you should know how crucial it is to stay one step ahead.”
“Of course I do! We all do!”
“Then you must have a real good reason for stopping me!”
Anika came in close and spoke like this was the most important matter of all time, but she was also as centered as a monk. “Doro, what the guys have been trying to tell you is all true. If we don’t wipe out the virus in your implant,” Anika said as she shook her head in distress, “we’re going to lose the Doro we all know and love. There is no better reason than that.”
That hit me like a punch in the stomach. I shot my gaze to the stranger. “Who are you?”
“Don’t worry about me. These people risk their lives for you, and I don’t even know you, but because Reba vouched for you, I am here, risking my life, which is something I am really starting to regret.”
This guy was authentic. I looked at Dom, Reba and Anika. They all looked back at me as if to say, “Of course this guy is authentic, and you need to listen to us.”
Then Reba explained, “This is Giancarlo. He lives here in Hub 48 and he’s an Intuerian, too.”
“So what’s he doing here?”
He didn’t like my tone. “How about not talking about him like he’s not here,” Giancarlo snapped back, “when he is responsible for sneaking your friends in here under the guise of the Intuerian diplomacy program.”
Reba interjected, “He put his life in Seneca on the line for me so that I could save my friend, and we could find the way together.”
I tried to collect my thoughts. Despite the paralyzing uncertainty, I felt a mounting desire to quell my paranoia and accept what they’d been telling me. It felt like the right thing to do. Just let everything go and let the people in my life who had my back before get my back again. Why was this so confusing? Maybe I was messed up. It totally made sense that my brain was under siege. I had trusted a stranger in the wilderness, but not the people who knew me best. That wasn’t me.
Dom spoke with a tremble in his voice. “Doro, not coming with you is the biggest regret of my life. I reacted because I was hurt and I realize I wasn’t just putting you at risk, I was turning my back on everyone, including all my loved ones in the Aboves. We all know too much to just sit back and let this unravel in a way that isn’t for the greater good.”
It felt so incredibly good to hear him say these things. We knew how huge this was. Way bigger than us. We needed to unify. I was petrified. If I didn’t let him back in, I could lose him again. I deeply wanted my team to fall back into alignment. Dom could tell I was beaten down. “Doro, you and I can take things slow,” he said, “but we all need to hurry up and find your dad.”
Anika looked to me and, although she was quiet, she spoke with such certainty that I had no choice but to actively listen. I felt confident with this woman’s intentions in life and she most definitely did not have any reason to betray me. “Sweetheart, we need to reboot your internal flex system.”
I looked to Reba. “We don’t have time.”
“We don’t have any other choice, Doro, you’ve been compromised—”
“How? Can you prove it or are you just assuming?”
He scrunched his lips and furrowed his brow in response to me. He knew that I knew it was true.
I turned back to Anika, to which she replied, “All sorts of ways. This is a hack with purpose— disorient and distract. I’m sure you’re seeing visuals of things that aren’t actually there. For example, they’ll make poison look like water when you are dying of thirst. Or they’ll send a vicious dog running out in front of you when you’re about to turn in a certain direction.”
“The watermelon,” I mumbled to myself, and then louder, “I fell off a cliff!”
“Exactly, you see, and another, even more dangerous part of this hack stimulates the parts of your brain that are responsible for certain emotions like fear and paranoia. By triggering certain brain signals, they can lead you to become legally insane, to the point of no return.”
I was defeated. I never imagined that my greatest strength could be manhandled like this, but the proof was in the pudding, and my brain was that pudding.
“As long as you are on the grid, you will be inundated with misinformation,” Anika said.
“I’m off now, at least I think I am.”
“So then you must have noticed something was going on.”
I did, and it clicked. I looked at my friends. I’d resisted them so badly that part of me wanted to just say no for the sake of not looking like an imploding jerk. Staying inside my cocoon was safer and much more in line with my character.
“Yes,” my voice trembled. I knew there was something fiddling around inside my mind, making me weak. Something I couldn’t control.
“Campbella, a weak person never would have made it this far,” Reba said, flashing his big brown puppy dog eyes. It felt like an old friend coming home. Or like when Killer darted across Washington Boulevard in rush hour traffic and someone stopped their car and jumped out to pick him up. He was safe. I didn’t feel much relief like that these days.
“I’m sorry, Reba.”
I had totally shut him out. He never did that to me. I kept doing it. This had to stop. He couldn’t have been more forgiving. “Don’t apologize. I fully understand what you’re up against because in many ways I have felt your pain all along the way.”
Dom pulled his backpack off and unzipped the top. He carefully removed a silver mask from it and handed it to Anika.
Reba tapped me on the shoulder. “Giancarlo and I are going to keep a lookout. We’ll be back soon.”
I nodded, knowing how risky all of this was, for all of us. Giancarlo’s face was awash with strong annoyance. This all had to work out for everyone who ever did anything for me. But not just my people, for all people who put others in front of themselves. The giving, thoughtful people— they fuel me.
I took both of Reba’s hands and held them tight as my hands shook. I looked to Giancarlo and back to Reba. “Be careful.”
15
MY MIND WAS flooded with a million thoughts a second. A wicked sense of fear tried to sneak its way in as I lay still in the pitch black, but I was aware of who was with me: Dom and Anika. The last time the two of them were together at my side incredible things happened. It was different this time. We were not in the secret medical chamber on Anika’s pastoral farm in the Virginia countryside where she had successfully performed the flex implant procedures on me and Dom. We were inside a highly-secretive subterranean city in a foreign country, and I was basically maneuvering through it as an enemy of the state, with a group of accomplices— a scenario not exactly on my to-do list when I started high school. I had no doubt that we were high on S.O.I.L.’s radar. But radars were meant to be avoided. Better yet, rendered obsolete.
My body lay flat like a log against the chilled stone ground. I was far enough detached from my body and deep enough inside my mind that the cold didn’t bother me nearly as much as it usually did
. The mask strapped to my face formed a suction through which no air could seep in. Concerns ping-ponged all over my neural circuits, but the second the red laser light fluttered across my eyeballs, not another thought crossed my mind. An intense orchestra of lights kicked in. There was no telling what was happening, but I didn’t think about it. I just waited in paralysis as the laser lights checked me back to the baseline.
For something that wreaked such havoc inside of me, the fix was super quick. The first thing I felt was a tingling in my toes. I wiggled them. Then I did the same with my fingers, only to realize my hand was being held. I didn’t have to see to know who it was. The electricity between us awakened my senses. After all the time I spent getting beaten down by the elements in the wilderness, I didn’t think it was possible to feel this way ever again. I was grateful that my friends had come for me and got me back to this point.
I felt a gentle tap on my forearm and Anika calmly said, “I am going to remove the mask now. Just take it easy, no sudden movements as your brain reconnects with the rest of you.”
“Okay.”
My mask came off. Anika and Dom were right there. The massive weight was lifted as the cloud that enveloped my head was gone. I didn’t even realize how bad it had been until it was gone. I let the moment sink in while avoiding thinking about what I knew had to happen next.
I saw Dom’s smile and the twinkle in his eye and just like that, for a moment, everything felt alright. I reached up and ran my fingers through his hair and down the stubble of his sideburns to his jaw line. He leaned into my hand and looked at me the way I’d missed hardcore. His eyes said I love you. His eyes said I care about you. His eyes said no matter what I am yours. The feel-goods rushed through my whole body and I think he felt it too but he just seemed so pensive. “I haven’t been able to find it in me to get any sleep or even go for a haircut since you’ve been gone,” he quietly said.
“Honestly, Dom, I have no idea how much sleep I’ve had, or not had, or even how long it has been since I saw you last.”
“Twenty-seven days,” he said with absolute certainty.
He could have said a week, he could have said a year, but no matter how long it was it was too long and I was just glad that period of time was over.
“Thank you for not giving up on me,” I said as I caressed his hand.
He looked like he was about to cry underneath his warm, trembling smile. “I thought about you day in, day out,” he whispered in my ear. “It killed me that I couldn’t be with you on your birthday, but I got you this, and I couldn’t wait for the moment that I could give it to you.”
Dom unzipped his jacket and reached inside to pull out a little black satchel from his pocket. I slowly sat up as he held up the most beautiful necklace I’d ever seen. He gently placed the delicate gold chain that had a teardrop-shaped pearly moonstone with a baby-blue shimmer, around my neck. I looked down at it and then up to his sweet eyes and kissed his full lips.
I tucked my arms up under his and rested my head into the nook. Soothing was an understatement. I rubbed my thumb on the stone. This gift brought me right back to the Brooklyn Bridge and that deep connection I had with Dom. Against all the odds, we were back together again like a magnetic force.
Anika stayed quiet and still, like she was meditating and letting Dom and I build up our psychological immune systems for what was ahead. I was really taken by the fact that Anika was even here because I knew where she’d come from and whom she’d left behind to be here. She had sacrificed so much, and I didn’t know what I had done to deserve that. “Anika, you have done so much for us.”
“Oh, Doro, you and Dom have done more for me than you’ll ever know.”
“Us?” I asked, thinking that we had been the ones getting all the help and not the other way around.
“Yes,” she said. “You’ve helped me find purpose again. And I will not let that fall by the wayside. Just being is no longer an option for this old lady. I know what we are on the brink of here.”
I was definitely in good hands. But I also had to bring my A-game with no delay, because these loved ones of mine were my responsibility now. I’d brought them into this.
Dom agreed, “We all know how important this is, and nothing will compromise that ever again. I sent Reba a flex. As soon as he’s back with Giancarlo, we’ll hit it. I can’t wait to shake your dad’s hand, Doro.”
I could not wait for that either.
16
TWENTY MINUTES AFTER my reboot, a couple of quinoa bars, and a nutrient shot, I was feeling light as a feather and sharp as a samurai sword. Stepping inside the central foyer to S.I.C.E. I could tell that the blisters had healed and my feet weren’t in as much pain as they had been the past few days. I was accompanied by a very strong garlic and sun-dried tomato aftertaste that had no expiration date. For that I felt bad for my accomplices, but I chose to be selfish and relish in the medicinal culinary bliss. It was something I more than missed. My senses were tickled just by being under this massive dome of glowing butterscotch light that soared high above the trees and gleeful birds, covering several miles.
Thousands of individuals in every shade of life were walking along with purpose. All about us were coffee and snack stands, media posts with multilingual B3 broadcasts and hallways shooting off in every direction.
I noticed that one of the screens had Becky Hudson on it, so I motioned for the others to come check it out with me as I knew she was on the English speaking station and I hadn’t caught up on any Senecan news in ages. It hit me that it would be good to stop and take a dose of world happenings real quick before I resumed this tunnel vision to finding my dad. As we approached the monitor, behind Becky Hudson there was a shot of the Pope getting off of a private BoomJet on a tarmac and waving to the people below.
“Pope Francis Notaro has been in Geneva for two days, ending his visit before the United Nations with an address on the global spiritual crisis of flex implants.”
Images of people in zombie-like states in mental hospitals, being strapped down, looting stores and crashing cars, flashed on the screen.
“The Pope has called upon the citizens of the world to renew our commitment to our God by not playing God. He stressed that for Catholics and non-Catholics alike it is imperative that we put our faith in our respective deities rather than playing God on our own. And implanting computers into our physical bodies is just that. He said without any hesitation that there is no greater form of blasphemy.”
Dom and I looked at one another and then to Anika. She had a slightly different interpretation of what the flex implant meant in the religious landscape. “Science and religion have butted heads for a long, long time. Don’t let that report fill your head with stuff that isn’t necessarily the absolute truth.”
Dom was not sold. “I don’t know, Anika. Doesn’t it scare you to say something like that?”
“It never scares me to say what I think.”
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to refute the word of the Pope.”
“I respect that,” she said, “but what if you had hard evidence to the contrary?”
“Then we’d be having a different conversation. I just think it’s convenient for us to believe these flex implants are harmless and we are without sin by engaging with what they can do. I’ve seen what can happen. It’s like we’ve opened Pandora’s box.”
Dom was right on with that. The flex implant was a vehicle for both good and evil, some of which people might not be able to control once they had one.
“This is true,” Anika conceded.
Giancarlo just had to chime in. “I think you’re being dramatic, you Americans. Everything is over-thought and over-talked. A hundred years ago they had the same debate about tattoos. Whether it was artistic expression or ruining the body God gave you.”
With that, Dom lightened it up. “Well, at least my parents won’t ever know that I did this like they would if I had a tattoo. My mom is so proud of my baptism pictures.”
An
ika and Dom’s mom go way back. “Your mom would be so proud of the man you are becoming, Dominic. Don’t let a news broadcast on some antiquated interpretation of God’s word lead you to believe otherwise.”
Reba weighed in, “I agree, Dom. A flex implant is just like a drug. It can be used for good, or it can be abused. The device itself doesn’t define your soul. It’s all about how you exercise your free will with the capabilities the device provides you.”
Dom reached for Reba’s hand and shook it. “Thanks, man.”
Anika offered her support, too. “He’s right. The people we just watched going crazy on the news were probably using the implant for all the wrong reasons, if they even had the implant at all.”
Dom shrugged with his hands up. “We don’t even know that though. Because, as we’ve learned, it makes even the smartest people in the world vulnerable to malicious intentions.”
Regret was written all over Reba’s face for the decision I had made to get the implant. He didn’t have to say a thing and I could tell he didn’t want to. I understood Reba’s nerves, but I wasn’t here to dwell on the past or question my decisions. I was ready to rock the future. “We’re only vulnerable if we stay stagnant, and that isn’t me. It’s time for us to do what we came here for.”
Looking around at the others, I could feel my motivation rise like a fever. I could see it happening in them, too. Giancarlo was fidgety, though, nervously scratching his chin and stretching his neck. I was starting to learn that he always did that. He attempted to calm himself by taking both hands and rubbing the temples on either side of his forehead with his eyes closed. I could tell he wasn’t a fan of mine, but he knew deep down that assisting on this path that I was at the center of was the right thing to do. Because he felt that, and Reba felt that, because two Intuerians believed in me, my drive was on fire.
