By Michael W. Moss
Featured in Death March to Happiness
I was two hours off a shift and going mad.
The bot in the walls suggested that I adjust my meds. It was a diagnostic model with a business license for actual medical advice, not just one of those “talk to your random chatbot to see if Techtrazamodal™ is right for your bio-algorithm” ad blips that run on your optechs all day. Figured I’d take the advice since it autocharged me for the upgrade already.
My new script downloaded and was administered by the injector at the base of my neck. You don’t even feel a pinch anymore. New model is much nicer and three times as expensive and the upgrade is mandatory because they bricked the old model and some guy on the twelfth floor got a needle to the brain when he tried to sideload modded firmware, or at least that’s what the rumors in the “private” messages said.
New meds didn’t do shit for my problems though. Searing headache, adrenaline rush, and the residual burn on my retinas. The diagnostic log said mania, apophenia, paranoia. But it was my boxmate. When corporate gives you a box on the thirty second floor to eat, shit, and sleep in, you don’t get to question who they throw you in with.
Remy was well past his expiration date. I’d not seen anyone even a decade younger still working for corporate, but he had some kind of specialized skill they don’t train anymore and the algorithms can’t emulate. He never told me what it was. I didn’t care except that he worked off his debt far faster than I did mine.
He was fine, except for his manners, his farts, and his snoring. But that was all endorphins and ecstasy compared to his glowing eye.
It was his Optech optical unit, a different model than mine, older, obsolete, but he refused an upgrade. That line had so many bugs, faulty patches, zero day exploits. At the release, it boasted higher resolution, lower latency to the brain stem, “Like Your Organics, Only Better!” It was itchy and glitchy and cost a kidney you’d already sold at the company store.
I told him to turn off his feed but it was always on. He said it was off, glitched out, but I knew better. The little red diode blinked incessantly, watching, recording. No sense of privacy protocols. I stared at it, focused on it, set up a webcam feed to stream it to the darkwebnet protocols so others could analyze what nefarious acts he was perpetrating against me.
He snored while I sat there in the dark amidst the soft glow of rectangular torture devices, streaming deadscrolls and winding around spirals circling around the drain of deep depression positive feedback loops where digressions within digressions drag you down dead rabbit holes of obsessive cyclical psychotic expressions of ennui and fuck whatever it was I can’t remember it at the moment why are you wasting my time asking for details I can’t…
I can tell you this because it’s encrypted. I stabbed him clean with a kitchen knife utensil. The blood spurt and the trauma reaction killed me, but I didn’t feel it because that eye kept glowing even after the organic death and dismemberment plan I proposed and executed.
It took twenty-one minutes and forty three seconds point four zero five three eight to get through the chest hardware to the pump implant, according to the playback on my Optechs. I had to scrub that footage too. Overwrite with hours of staring at the walls your mind is climbing reverse in slow motion.
Auditory glitch—I keep hearing the pulse. I even turned off the signal in my ears but it still registered. Nothing showed up on the sensors, but it was definitely there. Dead waveform flatlined like Remy but the bass buzz of the pump kept bumping on a rhythm like a bad beat song from the yesteryears.
I buried the cardiac pump unit in a faraday under the floor panels down with the old wires and plastic cases, but I could still hear the signal. I’d cut the wires on the battery. Must be an older model with a redundant power supply. They don’t print them like they used to. I should have burned it but most of it would have remained. And the fire suppression would have ruined my hair and my crime.
The blip buzz knock at the door was expected, but disturbing. I wasn’t ready for what I anticipated. No prep prepared you for the inevitable inquisition.
“Corporate authority at the door, admit now.”
“You can’t come in,” I said confidently. “Privacy statute. I’m a free contract.”
I muted the feed.
The feed blared aloud, alive.
“We own your debt. We can do what we want. And we wrote the statute, including the corporate investigatory loophole.”
I stared at the feed as he stepped closer to the door and the lock clicked open. It didn’t even challenge him for a passcode or a handshake protocol.
He smirked as he walked through the open door.
“We manufactured your locks, your entire security sys. I know how often you have juicy shits.”
The three of them stepped in and I couldn’t consent because they didn’t care as they pushed past and chuckled at any resistance I hinted at.
They just stood there, glancing around, standing right over the panels where I’d meticulously unfastened the inaccessible floor panels to hide the horrific scene of obscene post-human remains I had been compelled to expel from the room.
As they lingered and scanned and articulated explanations among themselves, my irritation festered and pestered my mind and grew to a gruesome cacophony of rage and indignation at the insult they afforded me. It was over and they knew it but they tested and teased me, measuring the inevitable unease they instilled in me with their incessant presence and overmodest hints at possibly solving this obvious mystery of murder and mayhem and the damn cardiac pump unit I buried beneath us!
They could afford better sensors than anything I could conceive. Bloodiest edge of new parts on a corporate plan. I stared at the lead as he pretended to consider the modest clues that confronted him. His ears could pick up a fly fart two miles away. So I knew he could hear it. Just fucking with me for some reason.
“Fine, fine, it’s over, just stop the goddam unit from that infernal thumping. It’s right here!” I shouted as I started prying up the panels with the electrical drill wheezing away as they stood there, passively, arrogantly.
When I finished all the labor and dug up the panels that so poorly hid the corpse and they stared at my work and no doubt were about to detain me or execute me according to corporate statute, the head investigator just nodded as if he was appraising a self-assessment for an annual performance review.
One of the underlings reached down to the faraday and broke open the weak lock I had affixed. They took the dead pump and scanned it for functionality.
The third of them took me by the throat.
“It wasn’t damaged in the deed,” he said. “You’re lucky we can resell it to the next sucker who needs it.”
The three of them left me, left the scene, didn’t clean up the mess I had made.
Three minutes twenty seven seconds point three two later, I received a message informing me that I had been assessed all the debt that my boxmate had previously accrued and that corporate was pleased that I had accepted the settlement I’d only just clicked on.
I was two hours from my next shift and I didn’t imagine that I’d get any sleep before the bot screamed at me to get ready.