he moon outside his bedroom window glowed bright as a screen in the sky, power lines criss-crossing it like the black lines that crisscrossed the pages of his father’s old books.
And so was there something written in the logic of the universe, encoded in the distance and relation between objects? If his parents had their way, he’d stay trapped above the surfaces of things, trapped in the derivative symbolic world of the hyperreal, where meaning was easy and fast, squeezed and distilled into intoxicating liquor. Hyper-meaningful and therefore meaningless. In that world it was impossible to see into the secret heart of things.
And so he waited until the house was quiet. He touched the suppository mindport at the base of his skull and considered popping it open just to feel the smooth click of it, but then pulled back his hand. If the Mind found out what he was doing, then at the very least he’d have to stop.
He laid down in bed, closing his eyes and feeling for the blindfold, strapping it on in the darkness. When it was in place he luxuriated in the freedom of blindness, the darkness cool like the rolling waves of the sea bearing up his ship.
And now the the Mind’s window into his world was closed. It could still read the emotions of his mammal-brain, but without vision there would be no context for his emotions. And if he prevailed tonight, the Mind would gain no ground.
He moved toward the pillbox and felt, carefully distinguishing the light-coded bacterial suppositories destined for his mindport and slipping them into his basesuit pocket
The carpet was soft under his feet, the doorknob cool against his palm, and the only sound was the soft tick-tock of the hallway clock. He hesitated for a moment, his ears open, mapping the space by sound. Nothing.
He moved into the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen. He keyed in the microwave settings by heart that made it operate silently, dumped the pills onto his palm and then carefully onto the glass carousel. One pill, stuck in his palm-sweat, clinked onto the glass. He froze.
No sounds. He turned the microwave on for just one minute and then waited as it silently nuked the life out of billions of expensive designer bacteria keyed to the frequency of the red-pulsing bacteria that had been selectively injected into his specific neural regions.
Now, the read-and-write fiber-optic pathways that were an integros’ rite of passage, their entrance into the Mindnet, the cables that made it possible for the Mind to influence and read emotions and thoughts, those would fail to be generated. How long would it take for them to catch him?
So tonight he would sleep-walk as usual, under the Mind’s power, open his mindjack and insert the two pills, the glassin and bacteria. But nothing would grow, no busy busy bacteria would climb up and down the silica cabling like termites building a nest.
Instead, the dead bacteria would simply be carried off to be broken down like the alien trash that it was.
He counted slowly to sixty and then opened the microwave, dumped the pills back into their pill-bottle, and keyed the microwave back to its noise-emitting self.
He slid the pills back into his basesuit and crept back to his room to put the pills back where they came from.
But he had to create an alibi for his blackout. After all, what was he hiding? The Mind allowed you a few secrets, as long as they were the right kind of secret. Like walking aimlessly in the suburban dark blindfolded, luxuriating in the eyeless night, all screens dark.
And so he moved back to the stairs with the blindfold on, and moved out into the dark of the backyard. But before he stepped out, the scent of smoke hit him. Grandma.
He quickly stripped off his blindfold to avoid the question, stuffing it into his pocket as he stepped through the door.
“Grandma. What are you doing out here?” Her eyes weren’t very good, and it seemed she’d noticed nothing.
“Well, what does it look like I’m doing?”
“Smoking.” He sat down beside her in one of the white plastic chairs on the old concrete slab where, in the old times when meat was plentiful, his ancestors had grilled. The rows of suburban houses strung out behind him like pearls on a necklace, silent, opaque, and gleaming, the product of a long irritation now soothed.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Well, I’m better than I was but I’m not as good as I was before I got as bad as I am now.” Grandma lived in the downstairs room because, as Scott always explained, it would be easier to move the house than to move her.
“Yeah,” said Isaac. The phrase was a sort of mantra for her, a mental game she played to keep herself sharp. And despite her eighty-two years, she insisted on small rationalities with the same stubborn persistence with which she lit a cigarette in the wind, cupping her bony fingers to create a leaky shield and sparking again and again until the wind itself relented, the fire quavered but held, and she drew the flame in through the cigarette.
“Grandma, what’s it like not to have the mindscreen?” Technically, his grandma was a natural vac because she had no implant, a rarity found chiefly among backwoods savages or recent illegal immigrants. But she lived here with them, as many of the elderly did, a vac under operation caring for her daily needs.
“Couldn’t really say,” she squinted at the cigarette held before her face.
“Why not?”
“Well, what’s it like not to have your eyes?” She drew on her cigarette, exhaled, and rested her bony hand on the chair’s white armrest.
“I don’t know. I can’t really imagine life without them.”
“Exactly,” she said, exhaling smoke like a vid-dragon.
“Why didn’t you get the mindscreen? Didn’t you want to stop aging?”
“The sooner I get off this rock the better, I say.”
“Did you say that back then?”
“Sometimes.”
“So is that why you didn’t get the mindscreen?”
“No.”
“Well then why not?”
“Bad enough as it is.”
“How?”
“People barging in and interrupting my thoughts. Imagine if they were all in my head.”
Isaac laughed and shook his head. “Grandma, that’s not what it’s like at all.”
“Well, how is it then? You tell me.”
Isaac thought for a moment. “It’s like having two minds. It wasn’t always like that. Before, it was just always wanting to do the right thing, or at least the thing the Mind wants.”
“See?”
“What?”
“I’m already confused enough as it is. Sounds even worse,” she said.
“But didn’t they try to force-chip you?”
“Oh yes. Scott always wanted to stick one of those things in my skull. Said it was for my own good. You can still see it here.” She tilted her head forward, and through the thin grey hair at the base of her skull he could see a white, puckering scar. “Back then, you could just zap it and have it removed.”
Isaac shivered, looking at the wound that meant her severance from the Mindnet and picturing the blood spilled when it was drawn out. “Really? That wasn’t illegal?”
“ ‘Course. I wasn’t about to have that thing in there.” She held up two fingers. “Two times I had to get it removed. Such a nice doctor down on the south side. Very helpful. ‘course it’s not so easy now.”
“Wasn’t it hard to get yourself to have it removed? Didn’t the Mind try to stop you?”
“ ‘Course. But they couldn’t watch me all the time,” she said with a cackle.
“Why didn’t they re-chip you a third time?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really remember the second time much. I just remember the bus ride and waking up in the doctor’s office. I told them I’d rather die than have that mindscreen again.” Smoke trickled around her death-pale face.
Isaac gazed out into the still suburban night and he knew it was true. What was it about his grandma that drove her to wager everything on her own stubbornness?
That she lived was proof that there was life beyond the Mind, but it was hard to know whether she persisted out of some irrational fear of change or if life were truly better on the other side.
As she drew on her cigarette, the red-orange ember glowed like a meteorite burning up in its fall to earth. When she exhaled and tapped it over the edge of the chair, the ash hit the cement, dissolving into pieces that scattered gray to the wind.