“Mr. Waverly?” she says.
“Yes, the Waverly appointment,” says Timothy. “This is Dominic. He’ll be yours this afternoon.”
Mannequins line the wall displaying the latest Adware—implants, SmartMed fashion, URL codes for upgrades and free app downloads. Timothy points out a mannequin with demo wiring—the iLux is beautiful, a net of gold wires set on a bioinorganic plate that rests on the skull, wire points that will grow naturally with the brain.
“This is what Waverly picked for you,” says Timothy. “I hope you like it—it’s already bought and paid for—”
“You can’t be serious,” I say. “The iLux? That’s too much—”
“Think of it as a show of support for the good work you’ll do,” says Timothy. “One of the perks I mentioned. Think of the iLux as your company car—”
I sign in, fill out the consent forms—in prouder days I may have balked at a gift like this, wondering at the quid pro quo, but now I accept iLux like I’d accept air to breathe. Agatha asks if I’m ready and leads us down sterile halls into a rear room. A dentist’s chair. I relax my weight into it, Agatha lowering the seat cushion and reclining me backward until I’m looking up at her, the ceiling lights like bright saucers in my eyes, the smell of her breath mints and makeup wafting down to me. She drapes a paper bib over me, tucking it into my shirt collar.
“Please turn off password protect for the transfer,” she says, and when I do, an alert surfaces about our mutual friend—Gavril. Agatha smiles, friends me. “You know Gav?” she says and I tell her he’s my cousin.
“He’s amazing,” she says. “I’m such an obsessive about his work. This one time he actually stopped me on the sidewalk and asked to take my picture—I almost died. The girl I was with couldn’t believe it—”
“He’s a good guy,” I tell her.
Timothy sits on the couch, settling in with paperwork on his tablet. Agatha shaves what stubble is left on my head, then preps me with an alcohol rub and applies a local anesthetic. As my scalp numbs it feels like my consciousness lifts several inches above my body, that I’m still aware of my legs and arms, but everything feels below me, down on the chair.
“Are you comfortable?” Agatha says.
“Very much, yes, thank you,” I tell her.
“Can you feel this?”
“What?”
“Any pressure of any kind?”
“No,” I say.
“Good—”
She leaves the room for a moment, wheeling in the surgeon arm when she returns—it’s chrome with a multipronged hand that she positions over my head. She flips a switch—glaring light—and lowers goggles over her eyes.
“Ready?” she asks.
“I’m ready—”
Her profile vids blink out as she cuts my current Adware. Unplugged. I feel pressure now—or imagine I can, hearing the quiet rotors of the surgeon arm operate. I feel the wick and whir when the arm slits me open and feel the liquid rush like a distant tickle and the towels Agatha holds against my neck to catch blood. Timothy’s watching the procedure, interested. Grinding, a spritz of something cold—an ice water bath or a chemosuture. The surgeon arm spools out the old Adware from my brain like winding spaghetti onto a fork, the old wires slipping out easily with only minor tugs and nudges, pinching a bit. Nothing to cause pain. It’s an odd sensation but not entirely unpleasant. Agatha makes a comment and laughs, but I miss what she’s said over the sound of the machine.
Agatha changes out my paper bib and dabs up more blood. The arm’s swiveled to a different needle, perforating my skull—I understand how this works, what’s happening. Jostling from the pressure and soon the arm begins stitching in the iLux, Agatha feeding the surgeon arm the gold netting like threading bullets into a machine gun. The surgeon arm replaces my scalp and sutures the wound with its heat needle—new scars from the operation, grids of scar tissue cutting across the scars already up there. The Adware boots. I lose my vision. The blindness is temporary but disconcerting—this total blindness is always disconcerting. I feel the surgeon arm swipe out the old retinal lenses and replace them with the Meopta lenses.
Timothy says, “Looks good.”
Agatha’s moving—a sink turns on. She’s talking, removing each tool from the surgeon arm—click, click. My hearing diminishes, but soon iLux appears in gold cursive on a field of black. The Adware welcomes me and begins transferring my account settings, using Focal Networks as the default for hosting information. When the progress bar fills, I open my eyes.
“How do you like it?” says Agatha.
Definition higher than reality—I understand what that pitch means, now—yes. The world was low-res and fuzzy before, like I’d been viewing the world through Vaseline goggles until now, everything suddenly so clear. Agatha’s face—glistening lips, wisps of hair, long mascara-thick lashes.
“I love it,” I tell her. “This is incredible—”
The world is designed—orderly apps, housed in spherical graphics. The augs are accessible but unobtrusive: date, time, weather, GPS mapping, social networking. Agatha’s profile populates my vision—her cheer vids spooling in half-light, but when my thought shifts to one it becomes opaque. The retinal cam is already autostoring imagery of Agatha, placing her in my address book, autodictating where and when we’d met, autocopying pics and vids from her profile that had caught my attention in the split second I’d scanned through them. FaceRank interprets my vitals, tracks changes in my baseline, places her near the top of recent looks, just below my memory of Twiggy. When I look at Timothy, the Adware captures his face but autocell populates info because he lacks a profile, the iLux interacting smoothly with my thoughts before they’ve even become my conscious thoughts.
Timothy signs that I’ve been successfully discharged and that he’s taking me home. He lifts my arm around his shoulder and helps me from the clinic—it’s difficult to walk, like my numbed consciousness floats a foot or so in front of me. Wide steps, unsure of where my foot will land and constantly surprised at the suddenness of pavement. Timothy eases me into the Fiat. He tells me to close my eyes so I don’t get motion sickness and vomit in his car. I close my eyes. He turns corners tightly, my body swaying in the passenger seat—I’m clutching the seat belt harness for support, nauseous from the heightened sense perception.
“Go ahead and try to sleep,” he tells me. “You don’t need to stay awake—”
I try to relax, consider sleep, but instead of sleep I load the City—the load time’s negligible, the processing speed of the iLux incredible. The Parkway East, the iLux defaulting to the highest resolution, rendering the City indistinguishable from reality, through the tunnel—
A rain-murky evening. The Starbucks at the corner of Craig and Forbes, a bare-breasted mermaid logo on glass. People drift through the café, once captured inadvertently on security cameras or retinal cams, their profiles pulled from cloud storage, archived in the City because of the Right to Remember Act and used to populate these places, even these minor corners of the City. Ghosts living their scant bit of electronic existence in a perpetual loop, ordering coffee forever, sitting at café tables forever, repeating the same conversations forever, trying to hurry home through the rain but ending up back in line for coffee. They seem to look at me, interact with me. I watch them through the rain-streaked windows holding umbrellas, their skin absurdly white in the failing light, like deep-sea fish swimming through the depths. They’ll disappear from existence as soon as they’re out of my view, until someone else is here to see them. Students from the Catholic schools and Carnegie Mellon and Chatham wait in line—the sound of steam in milk, of shouted orders, May I call?—every table filled, faces illuminated in the pale blue of laptop glow. Hannah Massey is here—she’s here, waiting in line to order a drink. Archived here from when she was still alive.