Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

BIOSIn the bleak gray light of a February morning, I carefully took the ancientfountain pen in hand and signed. I was gone. Far gone, completely removed fromreality, and yet part of me watched the ink from the pen soak onto the paper withfascination as I stared, deadpan and uncaring, at the droning functionary whoreminded me that under charter law I had five minutes to reconsider my decisionand withdraw my name from the ledger. Failing that, he continued, I forfeited allrights constitutionally granted to citizens and would become property of the statein perpetuity. The burnished copper railing reflected my gaunt visage, eyesburning brightly from sunken sockets. I looked away. I felt bathed in thatparticular light of heroism that shines on those with nothing left to lose. Everycitizen knew the secret appeal of the Bureau of Investigation Other / Scientificto those left standing in the aftermath of some sort of devastating protractedemotional fallout or another. I was joining the ranks of hundreds before me whohad disappeared from everything they had ever known into the mystery and secretsof governmental research. It was not a decision undergone lightly. The bureau isnot a career, or a club. It is an extraction. They promise nothing. They takeeverything. Legally you cease to exist; legally you never existed. Any marriage,any legal obligation to a family is rendered null and void upon acceptance, andthey don't reject applicants. BIOS at least, didn’t bother to sit down over a niceleisurely psychological assessment and inquire deeply into my family history, orfinancial circumstances. Maybe they don’t care. It’s rumored many join for themoney, some do it for the prestige of joining an elite organization. Others simplyto die.The only certainty was that nobody ever came back. Grandfather never did. And inthis world of unremitting, unforgiving capitalism and the ever-mounting reality ofa police state, it was the last bastion of the gentleman’s demise, an honorableexit for those who have quit the fight. And that was what I sought. To leave thisworld, and hope to wash away the shame of my failures with the final act.I remember selling the last of my possessions, depositing the credit in anautomatic transfer account set for the moment of my legal death. It was for her -who else. It was a thoroughly stupid, sentimental, and wasted act. But it was toolate to change all of that now. I walked into the solid white marble room that I'dseen in so many newscasts, the object of endless fantasizing over these past fewmonths of increasing moral depravity. I had wanted nothing more than to bebaptized in the cloth of a new order, my sins forgiven and my remains interredamong the righteous.That was what I hoped for – a quick, straightforward trade. My life, my future forthe last remaining scrap of honor available to me. Yet before the ink on thatledger had dried, I was brutally reminded that hope is the foremost flaw of man. Iwas drugged. Isolation, followed by an interrogation via vidscreen; a violent andsweaty man screaming obscenities and threatening removal from the program forimagined slights against the Bureau, alleging infiltration from the corporatesector. Deranged, paranoid madness. It was all for show – they accept everybody.What was this compared to what I had endured. The formalities over, the questionremained of surviving the training. The program was explicitly designed to destroythe soul of a man, to whittle his psyche down to a barely functioning nub capableof enduring ceaseless tedium, to inculcate an innate level of stoicism andendurance more machine than man. But no machine could ever hope to match theviolence of whispered lies, the agony of unrequited love. My life became aceaseless storm of training machines, computers, guidance programs. Excruciatingcomputer programs, designed to mimic the war simulation games of my youth, buteach utilizing spreadsheets, reams of accurate data on physics, navigation.Agonizing physical exercise, augmented by the standard electrotherapy, followed by

rapid learning immersion and neuronal enhancement in a perpetual cycle, designedto let my mind and body take turns in a cycle of regeneration and annihilation.Gleaming white enamel plasteel walls everywhere I went; new, completely fresh. Ihad no idea where I was, but it was clear this had been commissioned by agovernmental organization oblivious to cost. I'd never seen such clean hardware,and the software was elegance itself, human coded. A rarity. It integrated rightinto my feed immediately, none of the usual lag.The burning muscles, the sleep deprivation, the hunger, the enormous amounts ofraw data, exercises, tests; you would have thought it would begin to take the edgeoff the pain. It did. Sometimes. But it never left me, it just burrowed moredeeply into my chest. Sometimes I pretended the source of the hollow cramping inmy stomach was the unidentifiable soyblend pablum. At other times, it would hitwithout warning. I would wake up, my face soaked with tears, and shakesoundlessly. But mentally I was preparing for the end. The worst was when Ihallucinated, saw that day again. Her face. His hands. Their moans. Caught aglimpse of that fucking scarf she loved, discarded on the floor by the bed."Never love a woman more than yourself," I could almost hear the stern voice of mygrandfather. It hurt to smile. I'm sorry, grandfather. The curse of the Roma hadclaimed us both.It went on like this for some time. My body grew harder, and my face became a maskof iron. I didn't let my mind go into those places anymore. Couldn’t afford to. Itwould just hurt more – every time. The programs had assessed my basic competencyin computers, coding, physics, and were working on the final portions of whatseemed to be trajectories, launch sequences. I was going into space. The saga ofthe ancient gypsy kings knew no bounds. The old man would be pleased my demisewould fall into accord with the ancient rites of parting. Sailing away, reachingfor the horizon to try and change my skein of fate. Sick of clock cycles and datarecursion, I began to estimate the passage of time by the organic growth of mybeard. Ragged, scratchy, and short at first, it had evened out, smoothed, andlengthened to a respectable Russian woodsman. Never handsome, I took pride in thisrejection of the values I had been raised with, that had failed me so abruptly.Grown naturally it constituted an archaism, just like myself, the last of thefree-born children. My fur became an edifice, a monument to my determination andstrength. A negation of my former place in humanity.I had expected another interrogation, an acceptance of the mission, some form ofinteraction with a representative of BIOS. Instead, I woke up groggy andcompletely disoriented, in deep space. I had no concept of how much time hadpassed. It was so typical of the bureaucracy – no need to bother with theformalities, my life had been signed away. Sedated, launched, reprogrammed. Ittook me a while to wake up enough to notice the absence of my beard. Those fuckingmachines. Everything always automated. No need for individuality, no expressionsof free will, no preference. Just inevitability. I lifted one hand up to stroke myface, and instead saw gleaming black. The plasteel covered my entire body. Acompletely automated, exorbitantly expensive suit at that. Impossibly thin, techat least decades ahead of civilian sector. Flexed right with my muscles. You couldtell it had been crafted by nanomachines, maybe even in one of the first tierindustrial nations. As far as I could tell it was completely dermally integrated.In other words, not removable. Skin tight, for easier seal against vacuum. Like asecond hide. Sometimes I forget it's there.Nothing prepared me for the silence. The engineers had outdone themselves in theirrelentless quest to purge all moving parts from the spacecraft. Vibrations,humming - everything was silent. The torrential roar of the blood in my ears, eventhe sound of my breathing was driving me insane. At times I began to hear a

deafening, soaring ring, like an opera sung by light. I'm not altogether certainas to when I began to talk aloud, but frequently I stared through the plasglasinto the twinkling void, conversing with my gaunt reflection. For the first timesince the marble room, I could see the reflection of my lensed eyes, and thecrazed, dead madness within.She once told me the stars emit waves of energy on frequencies that can betransposed into an aural range by a machine. No. That's what the astralogue said.She said that the stars sing, for those of us who care to listen. I tried hard tolisten to the stars that night. I should have tried harder to listen to her. I hadgrown too complacent. A beautiful woman, I had never thought it possible. Shebegan to speak of something else, but my eyes began to stray from her face, andafter a while her words drifted into something deeper.Memories like this had to be the worst part. The anger, the pain, the desperation.Almost worse than the phantoms. I had to filter the sensory perceptions of mybody, as ancient neuronal connections snapped from sheer sensory deprivation. Myonly notice was the dying flare as synapses gave into one last orgy of electricalimpulse. Tasting the rich velvet of a chocolate cake with sweet cream. Coffee. Andmost maddeningly of all, the ineffable scent of the only girl I have ever loved.Hair products, phemerones, and something intangible. I would snap intoconsciousness painfully priaptic and it with a shuddering jolt, my world wouldcollapse. Again, and again all the little memories and smells. Torture. Becausethere are no real scents on this craft. There are no real feelings. Only the skincrawling with nanomachines, enclosed by plasteel, plasglass, carbon nanotubes. Myskin was harvested for sweat, for hair, for skin cell by cell to feed to theharnessed bacterial colonies. Pouches would bulge with moisture, excrementfiltered. I had become an entirely self sustaining ecosystem. It doesn't taste asbad as you would think.There was nothing to do but wait. The guidance systems took care of everything.They had even woken me up too far away from any planets to identify my location,but from the dim angry glare of Sol I knew it was too far out for a planetarymission.I hit up the neuronal pathways for autopharmacy as frequently as possible, barelyenough apart to avoid dependency. Sedatives, painkillers, muscle relaxants. Mymind was coming on strong from having been shut out for months. The nightmaresbegan to grow in intensity.“I don’t have to go, you know. I could stay here. It would be fine. It’s justsomething I thought would be fun. I probably won’t get a chance like it again. Canyou imagine how pretty it will be this time of the year?”“Da. No, I understand.”“I’ve always wanted to go, to see how it is. I can’t imagine staying here all mylife. That would be so boring! It won’t be for long. I’ll be back before you knowit.” She laughed.“Right? – no, I can’t imagine. Sounds like fun. I hope you enjoy it.” Pause. “Whenare you leaving?”Her name was Bella. More than anything I can still feel the awful impact of thehammer blow. I kept my voice calm as the world burned. By the time she hung upthe phone I was more dead than alive. For a few hours I sat there, utterlyfascinated by the blank, white wall. I knew that as soon as I moved, it would