Sleepwalk

Disturbingly beautiful science fiction by a new IEET contributor. What’s it about? “Catastrophic implications of a literal technological virus that finds its host in human brain tissue.”

“Ankle’s covered in bug bites.” 

“Yup.  The left, above the arch”.

“How can you guess?”

“Her entire sensory perception is uploadable.”

I can’t move.  I hear this; the conversation between two men I have never met, talking about me.

“See?  She’s responding to the hold jacket.  That’s where she can feel her ankle swelling from mosquitoes.”

I don’t remember how I got here.  That happens sometimes.  At least it does now.  Two weeks ago I awoke in my friend’s room, with a gash behind my ear that hurt vaguely, before all pain stopped completely.  I feel mosquitoes on my left ankle; but it’s not bad.  It’s really not anything.

“How about when you send signals?  Does it change the received uploads?”

“Yes, it does.  Very temporarily.  Then it’s like her brain repairs the damage”.

I can see them when I can turn my head slightly.  The bonds allow just enough for that.  These men haven’t been fixed.  They need Voices.

Voices can come from anywhere.  They sing out from their cell phones, I’ve heard them in car engines, lap tops.  They are easy to construct.  The Voice inside my head takes away pain.  It gives me two perfect sets of instructions: how to make more Voices from computers so that they are small and look like a finger nail and how they can be put inside the brains of Others so that they are fixed and can go to make more of us.

“Mom, I need…” I said when I got home from my friend’s house.  Sometime, I’m not sure when.

“…surgical instruments?”  She’s so cool sometimes. “You’ll also need tranquilizer injections.  I have those” she said. She had a gash, too. All sewn up with black stitches.  The skull is the tricky part; requires a chisel. 

There are three un-fixed people here.  Two that are speaking, one who is dozing in and out of half-rest.  There might be a fourth- a child… that one’s fixed, I think, undergone surgery…

“See that?  She can send signals to Abbey.”

“What is it saying to her?”  The adult who had been almost asleep is fully awake now, angry.  Making sounds that can only mean pain.  I can’t see him, but I want to explain that once he has a Voice, and to the other two, they will be fine… Abbey’s fine, now, she shouldn’t be tied down like me…

“Jeff, I don’t think they’re communicating any complex messages.  It’s more a response signal meaning ‘one-of-us?’, Neurons send similar impulses.”

“Make it fix Abbey!  If it can make her sick, why can’t you make it repair her?!”

“I’m trying to reprogram her, Jeff.  Like I told Sayer, there’s this thing where her brain treats new information like an injury, and actually starts undoing it.  Reverting to where it was…”

Jeff is in so much anguish.  I can’t speak, but I wish I could tell him and the other two how much better this is.  They’d see and want to join me and Abbey.

“I need Tylenol.”  The one who was called Sayer said.  If I could fix him, he would never need Tylenol again.  Why am I not allowed to speak?

“The entire north side of the state is infected, I think.  Is there anyway you can wait to do a supply run? I’d like to find a few more safe areas.”

We’re in a forest.  It isn’t cold.  They have a lap top.  It has a strange Voice.  It does not say sometimes what other Voices say.  Sometimes it feels like I’m being sapped by it, that I’m inside it and not reversed so that it speaks to me.

“Whenever I send a hard drive alteration, her pain sequences light up.” Sayer speaks.  “If I can fix that, her immune system will be less likely to shoot it down.  I’ll be able to send it to Abbey.” 

So.  I am a guinea pig.  To try and destroy the one thing that fixed everything for what will be everyone.  If only these three actually went to the North Side.  We’re all so happy there.

“You can tell that her ‘thinking’ is so repetitive”.

My thinking is not ‘repetitive’.  It is focused.

“That’s the crux of this problem.  It creates a thought cycle that doesn’t allow a range of perception.  When her pain cycles light up; so does a multitude of emotion. Her brain is dependent on the chip now; cutting it out would mean she’ll bleed out, drop into a coma.” The one who is not Sayer, or Jeff, says.

“It.  That thing is an ‘it’, not a ‘her’.” Jeff said.  His accusation would have bothered me once, except that I know that I am right.  I’m not sure why he hates me so.  I was not the one who fixed the little girl Abbey.  If I was he should be grateful.  Though perhaps I was.  I don’t remember everything.  It’s so like sleepwalking.  Something I did when I was 5 years old.  I would wake up somewhere having done things I don’t remember, often wandered out into the cold and not felt it.

“There’s still someone there, Jeff.  There’s still someone like Abbey.”

Jeff shrieks.  I don’t hear the words.  Maybe they aren’t words.  The first time in two weeks I feel something I would have labeled as ‘regret’.  It soon fades.

“Every now and then, I get a funny response like that, Jeff.”  The one who is not Sayer says.  “It breaks the thought cycle.”

A moment passes. Specifically one minute and 41 seconds.  I feel it.  I can count it as regularly as any clock.

I see a man’s face arched over me, and when he speaks I know he is “Jeff”.

“Abbey’s like you.  Maybe a little younger.”  He says quietly.  “She’s very small, and when she tried to operate on someone, they nearly collapsed her head with a tire iron.”

She was doing what she is supposed to be doing.  Why can’t I explain this?

“She can still move though, a little.  Before she was assaulted with the iron she would speak to me and I didn’t recognize the person talking.  It’s like how you are now, very flat, very sad.”

I am not sad!  Why does he not know that Abbey and I can help him?  I hear Sayer and the third one chattering about a flux in wave patterns, but I can’t concentrate on them now.

“She isn’t dead.  Yet.” Jeff continues.  “But because she can’t really understand physical hurt anymore, she’ll keep going until nothing’s left.”  He is still speaking, but his tone becomes distant, and astonishingly, I feel the gauze that wraps my wrists and neck loosening.  The hold jacket unhinged.  “I miss the person that was once there.  I’m not sure who was put in her place.”

“Miss” is not the correct term!  One can not “miss” someone who has not left!  Who has simply improved!

My head is reeling.  This should not be happening.  I hear Sayer and the third one talk about some threshold that would have made more sense a moment ago, I think.

“The same must be true for you.  There is someone who must miss you.”  Jeff has undone the bonds, so I sit up, and I want to explain to him the Wonder of this New Voice, but I see, for the first time, that my body is a wreck.  That at some point, all my “surgical” attempts completely soaked my clothes in gore; that they reek beyond all sanity.  I turn my head, because Jeff is guiding my chin, gently; and I see a child, or most of one, sleeping peacefully with a craterous ruin for a face.  The Voice is now a shrill keening in my ears, a terrible case of tinnitus, nothing more.  I feel the wrap of gauze in my mouth pulled away, and it is all I can do to keep from screaming.