oday was Wednesday, one of Sol’s days to be operated, and she was thinking about how tired she was.
Despite that, she wouldn’t let herself slip into the trance, like the lúcidos, because the hangovers just got worse and worse, until you’d spend your credits on the lucids rather than face the evenings. Until you were a wraith, sleeping at the edges of the thickspace.
But she and her dad needed the credits, so they each spent two days a week under operation. Working free was hard enough, but working at the Mind’s pace was grueling for the body and the personal mind both unless you fell into the trance-state. A vac.
She smiled to herself. Empty.
But she wasn’t empty, and she’d never let the Mind have her like it got her mother. Fuck the fake mindscreen. If reality was bland porridge she would rather drink it down straight than be deluded into thinking it was mead. The “lucids” were the place revolutions went to die.
There were nearly a thousand white little cubbies where each worker stood and assembled the mindscreens. Sol wore all green, like the others on the line, breathing through her dust mask, her hair bound in a white hairnet. She sat bent over the mindscreen she was assembling. Her job was to press the thickspace chip carefully into the tiny module being assembled for implant into the brain.
She gazed at the logo stamped small in the silicon: nine imperfect pomegranate seeds. Forever summer, that was the Mind’s promise, the three months of winter deleted like corrupted data. She snorted inwardly.
But where did winter go? Was it deleted: metadata torn from an inode, left to lay nameless and confused until another season overwrote it?
A woman next to her on the line handed her the the circuitboard. Sol’s hand jerked as it moved accept the component, engaging her automation. She watched as her own hands tweezered a green chip from a clear plastic box and pressed it into place with movements nearly too fast to track. Like tiny ballerinas. Tiny bulimic ballerinas dancing through hunger. Dancing through hunger toward a perfect, beautiful body.
A mosquito landed on her leg. She could see it out of the corner of her eye, compacted against her flesh, staring at it it as it swelled with blood, white stripes dilating as it fattened with blood. Against the automation, she managed to twitch her leg uselessly. The mosquito continued to swell. She willed her body to drop the Mindchip and crush it, but even as she ticked toward it slightly she felt her operator tighten her own fingers against the chip, swiftly passing it to the man on her left and seizing a new chip.
Tighter. Tinier. She tried to breathe in deep but her breath came the breath of a robot-bellows, in and out, in and out, in and out, pressing the exact right mix of oxygen into her lungs
Don’t even try, she thought as her hand moved precisely to tweezer another green circuitboard, relax. But she couldn’t. Her body continued its perfect machinations, neither slower nor faster, while the mosquito ripened on her perfectly oxygenated blood. She felt a scream building in her mind.
Stop! she willed. She was spiraling, spiraling, spiraling. And if her limbic system spasmed, the Mind could cut out her consciousness and play the pleasure dreams across her secondary cortex. But later she would pay the price. In the evening she’d feel the pull toward the lucids like the faint seduction of poppies.
She reached upwards with a silent scream. A prayer?
She felt a tingle rippling through her autonomic nervous system. A peace started in her flesh and gradually moved out to her limbs—a warmth—dissipating the cold feeling of mechanism. Her panic gradually subsided.
She saw the remains of the mosquito on her leg, small droplets of blood around its rent-open body. Had she exploded that mosquito?
As she gained distance from her panic, her thoughts moved upwards into her rational brain. What would it be like to let the feedback panic of powerlessness envelop her? She felt it rise like bile in the back of her throat, but she pushed it down, shuddering slightly. Lunch was coming soon. She tore her mind away from this thought as her hands operated.
She pictured the old vidvertizement: as a young man worked, he smiled. A overlay faded into the top part of the screen, and you could see he was pict-chatting his wife and two kids, who waved at the camera. A voice came, “Keep your mind on your loved ones. Let your body work so you can relax.” A dark and ironic bitterness crept over the disgusted feeling.
Her linemate handed her the next chip. The woman’s hair was grey and matted, and she stank of urine. Her green eyes rolled and quivered slightly.
All of a sudden Sol felt the Mind drop her like released breath of a sigh. Lunch.
She stood up, covered her ears, and walked briskly toward the door. She enjoyed the feeling of movement, in control of herself, even as she braced herself for the lúcidos’ panic response to separation from the dreamspace.
Her linemate had raised herself to full height, her arms toward the factory ceiling, her entire body tight as a guitar string. Half of the factory workers were panicking, and the other half were filing out in silence, ears covered.
Sol felt the terror of that hundred-throat scream in her viscera, just as she did every day. You couldn’t get used to it. For a lúcido, dropping out of that trance was waking from a dream to a nightmare.
Sol shuddered. Soon panic would fade to weeping, and then they’d shuffle, one by one, into the cafeteria.
Eyes for the Mind. Their emotions were always running so high that the record switch never went off. Always streaming back to the Mindnet.
Sol didn’t hate the lúcidos like her friends did. Mainly, she pitied those with nothing apart from the Mind, no family, no way to center themselves, no reading. They were the ones who tipped over.
Ironic that it was precisely those of her friends whose minds had starting to go from too much time in the dreamspace whose hate ran the deepest. Didn’t they know they were just the sort of people who became lúcidos?
But maybe they did. If you’re close to the edge looking over, those that have fallen are terrifying.
Now the gray-haired lady had recovered, and was on her hands and knees, sobbing quietly.
But it was lunchtime, and she wondered what they’d be having today. She was so fucking tired of soyloaf sandwich.
She stood in line alone and took out her book. She felt a pang of sadness. It really wasn’t the same since mom had left them. She looked over at her father, waiting at the table, reading. It wasn’t easy for him to handle the trays with his leg the way it was.
In fact it was soyloaf sandwich again. And it wouldn’t taste good to her because she had neither the constant drip of positive emotions like the fucking operators nor the reality-bending hallucinations of the dreamers.
She set the trays on the table. As she sat down, her dad tented his book and picked up his sandwich. “So,” he asked without preamble, “you liking that ‘We?’”
She looked up at him, his cane resting against the empty chair like a severed spear. Ahab. And like his namesake, he quested for a leviathan: the revolution, his eyes scanning horizon after horizon of printed text. But unlike the mad Ahab, his sailing days were over. No revolution had surfaced from the dry and papery deep. He was the lamed lighthouse keeper: close enough to taste the sea salt, but shallow enough to swim to shore.
He had taught her how to give her emotion rein in the hypothetical and the fantastical, to hook it on the quizzical horn of an “if” and keep apart from it: prodding, analyzing. Her mother had taught her how to exist in herself, to laugh and learn from her dreams, to revel in the poetry of the everyday. But her mother was gone now.
“You in there?” He angled his head to peer up at her.
She looked up, snapping from her reverie. “Uh, yeah.”
“So, ‘We.’ What do you think?” When he had caught her eye he seemed to lose interest in retaining it and bit hard into his sandwich, chewing.
She looked down and picked up her sandwich, jumpstarting her brain. “Totally weird. But amazing.”
“Has he fallen for her yet?” he asked, taking a bite of his sandwich.
“Yes. But now she’s MIA,” she says. “It’s kind of a hard book to read, actually. The whole language register is totally rational and dry, but he’s talking about all these intense emotions. Just kinda strikes you as wrong. You know what I mean?”
“Mmm, no,” he said, contrary. “It strikes me as right.”
“C’mon, dad,” she rolled her eyes. “There are certain words that connect to your limbic system and other ones to your neocortex. He’s using all the wrong ones.”
“Exactly,” he made brief and piercing eye contact. “D-503 has no emotional lexicon because his whole world has become mechanical, pseudo-rational. He’s a genius to invent a new way of talking.” He had baited and caught her attention now.
“No, D-whatever-his-number is not a genius. Zamyatin is. D is just doing what the brain does when half your language is cut out: filling it back in,” she said, taking a bite of from her sandwich.
Ahab smiled drily, “There you go,” he turned his own book back over and starting to read. Sol sighed and followed suit. Alone together, papering off the world.