he wind rippled through the golden grain, heavy heads bowed. The young man watched and prayed his prayer, a silent, nameless thing, yellow and flecked with black. The Mind nagged at him like an uncompleted game of chess, pulling him back. It was less overwhelming out here, but he knew that the closer he got to the city the stronger it would become.
He sighed, looking down. He was already late. He looked back up and then turned toward his old car, rust crescent moons above the wheel wells, the sun already sinking toward the horizon. There was no use delaying.
He drove down the empty country road, past row upon row of identical corn and soy alive with people whose movements were sped-up and precise: operated. A auto-tractor slept in a pool of its own rust, as still as one of the old motionless vids. Operateds did the work of the machines now.
A brown-skinned female moved from plant to plant, snapping the necks of corn to tear it from the cornstalk, with even, strong motions that rippled through the muscles of her arm. He felt a thrill rush through him as he watched her muscle-taut body move with that uncanny grace that hinted at mechanism. Just like he would look if he was operated twelve hours a day.
She must have felt his stare because she glanced up and locked onto his eyes. Hot tarry pools with a dull shine. His heat went cold with shame. He wasn’t the least bit prejudiced, but sometimes the eyes of the operated were less than human.
Now his mind turned toward home, and he again felt the nagging equation unbalanced in him, and he knew that the Mind was telling him that his parents were waiting with dinner. The Mind hated him out here with the vacs and the grain fields, but it had to push against him with subtlety. A will must be molded, not broken.
After all, if he could fully distinguish between himself and the Mind, his body could reject it and he’d become a vac. Operated.
They said that when the Mind withdrew from an operator, the personal mind desiccated, collapsing like a tomato dried of its innards.
He reached over for his baseball cap from the seat and put it on. It had an almost-complete circle on it: the same symbol woven through the indecipherable book he carried everywhere with him.
He remembered when he bought the cap how the old vac had mocked him, “That ‘C’ for Cubs. But I don’t figger you know ‘bout Cubbies.” His green eyes had squinted as mouth pulled tight in contempt.
“What’re Cubs?” he had asked.
The old vac just snorted and looked at the ground on the right. “Thirty bucks if you want it.”
He had taken it. He didn’t know what the “C” was. But he pulled it down low over his eyes against the sun and enjoyed the tightness against his skull. Isaac liked to think it was a talisman woven into the cloth with spells of power, impervious to penetration from the Mind.
I’m a mystic. He shivered. He played a dangerous game, he knew. He didn’t want to reject the Mind; he just wanted to be free and to understand the world. To break out of the tiny prison cell of symbols; to break out of the same answers he got time and time again, answer he knew were wrong.
He felt a dull resentment in his chest. Once, people had real personalities completely apart from the Mind. Whole lives with private thoughts.
As his car traveled closer to the city, his emotions gnawed at him with anxious anticipation. The Mind.
The teeth-crowded buildings of the Cinturón loomed up, marking the divide between thinspace and thick, and he braced himself to drive through into the great maw of the thickspace where the Mind’s power over him would increase until his sense of separation from it would fade to nothing.
Isaac was an integro who lived in the thickspace, and his brain was a node on the mindnet, processing data for the Mind in dreams.
As for vacs, their dreams were an escape. Those that could afford it packed into the Cinturón’s buildings at edge of the thickspace as tight as the soldered innards of a mindscreen, cadging the dreaming datastream before it dissipated.
He drove until he reached the edge of the city and the Mind’s bandwidth increased with a trickle of data. The Mind’s pull was a dull, digestive hunger now, totally limbic. He fought the urge to mash down on the accelerator and hurry past the Cinturón and plunge into the abyss of forgetting. He slowed to thirty miles-per-hour, cutting into the hunger with his will.
At the end of the thinspace, the buildings dropped off like the edge of a cliff and in their shadows spread grassy lawns and neat bungalows set on spaghetti-noodle streets that wound and twined pleasantly. His colonized emotions spread like an eager plant toward the sun, chasing the anxious hunger of the thinspace out of him like water turned vapor.
This was the part he hated the most. The submissiveness that he could not control, a bladder giving way to a warm flood of liquid. It was disgusting to him.
The hunger he could bear, but the sweetness of release to the Mind: the soothing warmth that ran through his whole body… Ugh. Chemicals. Even through the near sexual pleasure of reconnection he felt a conquering wave of revulsion.
A flush of pride came on him at his revulsion. Maybe he could think for himself after all. But then, he wasn’t even fully inside the thickspace.
The datastream picked up speed as he got closer to his home connection and he began to calm, the alien sense of the Mind beginning to merge into his thoughts until it faded and disappeared.