wilight lit an empty suburbia in sepia. His parent’s neighborhood was older, more traditional. The sameness scrolled by without triggering Isaac’s conscious awareness. Yards circled each house, each house was ringed by bushes, every tree was lined with mulch, and each yard had a pleasantly curved island of flowers. Families in these old neighborhoods got an operating credit for lawn maintenance, but the scale of the operation ruled out creativity.
He pulled into his parent’s driveway and pressed the gearshift into park. Then he turned the keys slowly, reluctantly in the ignition, drawing out the moment between on and off. The engine shuddered into silence and he looked down at the floorboard, feeling the engine’s quiet. He browsed his mindstream, opening the picts they’d sent him—the picts he’d ignored while he was out in the thinspace. In a world of constant interconnectedness, disconnection was a kind of violence.
He looked at the door handle. Then he pulled it slowly upwards until he felt the inward gears of the lock press against his lazy grip. The door’s click as it released open jolted him from his reverie. Right. Time for dinner. He pulled off his baseball cap, tossing it onto the driver’s seat, and got out of the car, walking toward the house.
His father appeared at the door, standing as he approached.
Scott was young for his fifty years—he had been an early adopter of the mindscreen’s limbic connection—but he was old beside the eternal youth of those chipped since childhood. His green eyes were transparent, blazing with anger, happiness, or love behind his wire-frame glasses. During the day, he worked in sales for a lucid app developer.
“Dinner’s on the table.” Scott’s eyes were mild, but a microexpression of reproach cut briefly across his face.
Isaac rolled his eyes. It was an almost friendly entrance into their landscape of argument. “You got my pict? Because I said I was going to be late today.” The fact was they just didn’t want him out there in the thinspace, and they were waiting to eat to make a passive-aggressive point.
“That’s your choice. But we weren’t going to eat without you.” His father stood in his path, demanding address as only physical things can. It annoyed Isaac, physicality was so pushy.
The Mind pressed at him to feel remorseful, to change. It was always like this. The thickspace was smothering.
He knew that his parents worried when he went out to the thinspace—but they were creating a feedback loop. He needed out or his brain would explode. Or he’d stay and it would implode and he’d lose himself to the Mind completely. Which was precisely what his parents wanted. Implosion. He felt anger rising inside him at the thought.
“Aaah!” Isaac said in exasperation. “Don’t wait for me. Sometimes I feel like I can’t even breathe here. We don’t need to eat dinner together every single night. I can just eat soyflakes or whatever.”
Isaac’s mother, Martha, came up behind Scott and pulled on his shoulder, making room in the doorway. She taught children the piano forty at a time by playing through them so the shape of the keys became part of their muscle memory.
Her smooth face was marred by some gentle wrinkles, laugh lines at the mouth and worry lines on the forehead, the product of late chip adoption. Just now, it was her worry lines that stood out, “Of course you’re going to feel like you can’t breathe when you spend so much time in the thinspace. You’re splitting and being divided impairs your judgement. The personal mind doesn’t work the same out there. You can get confused and—”
“Mom, I’m not going to ‘get confused!’”
“—then start making bad choices. You might decide to just keep driving until you’ve ran out of gas and then a lúcido would find you. We’re so worried about you out there!”
“Mom, I’m fine. I’m not a different person than I was. I’m doing fine, I’m just trying to figure out what’s me and what’s the Mind. I’m not going to fail my choosing. I’ve got fine grades and I can operate better than anybody in my class.”
Scott looked meaningfully Martha, “Yes, but we’re still going to let him choose for himself.”
“It’s almost like you want him to lose his mind and become a vac.”
“No. I don’t. I’m just not going to get in his way. The Mind can do that.
She turned to Isaac, “Don’t you understand? You’re already choosing each day. You have to stop thinking about it. I’m worried that you’re going to split yourself if you just keep thinking and thinking about who you are and who the Mind is. Choice is not something that happens just on Choosing!”
“So what do you want me to do?” Isaac’s voice crescendoed to the end of the sentence. “I hate it. I hate how small everything is. I hate how nobody knows anything that matters. And I hate how it’s either operate or be operated. Well maybe I don’t want either. Maybe I don’t want to choose anything.”
“Yes, but but know that for an operator turned vac, there’s only operation. What’s wrong with both of you?!”
The crickets cut through the night air like violins.
“Even if I can’t choose to be an operator, I’m not going to become some cog in the machine. I’m a mystic. I’m training my Mind to overcome my flesh.”
His father spoke, “You are who you are each moment because of your brain chemicals. You can’t get away from that. If you could, the Mind would never work.”
“So why did you put it inside me then?” Isaac’s anger rose. “Why did you ever chip me?”
Scott opened his mouth to respond, then deflated, looking down. When he looked back up his eyes were sad, “Son, these are the choices we have. And we’ve always wanted the best for you here.”
“That’s not a fucking answer!” Always the same. Did they think they were protecting him by keeping him in the dark?
“Come inside and sit down
And so Isaac ate in silence until the Mind healed over the word-sliced rift, dialing down the upper brainstem’s agonistic response to the testosterone hormones swimming through his blood, calming him, bringing him back into the family, back into the collective intelligence, gradually digesting the conversation into something that could be integrated back into the self.