The chip's progress. Hieronymus Bosch en.wikipedia.org
Fast forward nine months and I was home alone. Bob lived with us for a week but was moved to a smaller house. Claire said he liked it much better there and she thought I shouldn’t be around the example of a mind so shattered. I was busy most of each day arranging my books and readying the house for the baby soon to come. I wanted everything in its place, clean and in order. It had to be perfect.
Claire would come by once a month after she visited the lab on the hill. It was a growing complex now run by Naomi and Jason. He directed the day to day operations while Naomi oversaw the constant expansions. They were producing thousands of wafers a day with five hundred employees, a huge improvement. I was so proud of their promotions. Naomi also conducted one-day seminars to doctors at the university. They were flown in from all over the country and were the ones tasked with taking the binders of wafers back to their towns and cities to administer them. As medical experts, it was only right that they be the ones to distribute the tabs to those most in need, that is, after they dosed themselves and the powerful and the rich. It was ironic that with each chip passed out, they were losing one more client. They were rapidly putting themselves out of a job.
Natalie was back in Sacramento helping the governor, and married to the lieutenant governor, helping him plan an election campaign which he was almost sure of winning. But Claire had the best success of all.
She lived in Washington most of the time, a private counsel to the president. But like I said she would visit the lab once a month to collect folders of chips and always stop by to see me, though she couldn’t stay more than one night, she was so busy. But she would always greet me with a big kiss as she came in and then sit with me and ask how the house was coming along and say how happy we’d be when the baby arrived. She hired a day maid for me who set everything back in order, the way it used to be, with my help. The maid also took care of my meals and the house was spotless.
You see, everything was back to normal now. Power was restored everywhere, and all the cars were rolling again. The store shelves were full of food and goods, factories were up and running, schools open and baseball games played in ballparks. Television was back, and it was my favorite pastime, watching the news reports, where I’d sometimes catch a glimpse of Samantha. She was in Australia working with the Prime Minister, and when he was in the news, she was often there beside him. I also loved watching long series, the new romance channels. These sometimes kept me up late into the night; they were so intricate and spellbinding. But I digress.
It wasn’t all perfect. I did miss Claire every time she’d leave and I’d be melancholy for a day or two. Also, in the library, arranging my books, sometimes an old habit would crop up, the desire to read one. But when it did a horrible confusion would invade me, like a panic attack. I couldn’t decide which one to read; there were so many. It was like looking at a long, strange menu in a restaurant, and you’re all in a flutter not knowing what to choose, the indecision on your part soon turning to embarrassment, painfully so.
It was on one of these occasions that everything changed. I’d been feeling blue all day and went to my office and sat in the chair. It seemed like there was a big black hole in my life getting larger each day, and the thought came to me of possibly ending it. Then another thought came to me. I wondered if I still had the revolver in the wall safe behind me. I opened it, and there was no gun or money. I’d given all that to Claire when we left for the island. But there was a single envelope and in it the two wafers we’d left behind, two strong ones. I ate both of them without a second’s hesitation.
Within an hour my recovery began. Lights lit up in my head everywhere, and I could see in a flash all the loops, the scripts and codes, all the routines and subroutines running in my head, all foreign, all Claire’s work. It was a nightmare scene like the last plate of ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch, with all sorts of half vegetable, half human forms, like strange insects crawling all over inside my partially gutted frame.
I put a dead stop to them, like crushing a bug on the floor with your shoe. But I didn’t destroy them. I partitioned them so that I could dissect and study every detail of her brilliant coding, every dot and dash. Within a few hours I began to see how it worked. Then I set myself the Herculean task of refining them into my weapons, with even better sophistication and stealth, using all the experience I’d suffered, and weave for her a trap of infinite complexity, at levels she’d never dreamed of. But she would dream. She would dream for me because I was planning to return the favor.
This was the Samson and Delilah story all over, only in this one, left in my prison cell so long, I regained my sight as well as my strength. I burst out of the house and spent a whole week at the local libraries studying programming by day and perfecting my scripts and plans by nights. She was going to walk through the front door and give me her usual kiss, that’s how she checked on me to see if everything in my head was still running the way she wanted. I think she must have had a lingering fear that I would come out of my trance someday because I was the only one who had an inkling of its existence, from what she’d explained to me in the early days out of love, and when she was sick, out of weakness. But this time she was going to get a surprise that would change her life.
I knew the exact day and hour, almost the minute, give or take a few for traffic, when she would enter. She was punctual like that now that she was so important. She arrived, and with outstretched arms, we hugged one another and then kissed. It was a kiss that lasted half an hour. She wasn’t expecting the assault; it was a surprise attack across every portion of her mind all at once. It put her into a wild panic, and she was caught off guard. With my intense focus, the likes of which she’d never seen, I assailed her consciousness. In a moment she was overwhelmed, and I was in. She had formidable defences inside her head. I revisited the hallway and the veil, this time ripping it to shreds. There was no crying child behind it. That had been a ruse all along. There were only longer, winding lanes and more doors and many more beyond that which my codes battered down one by one until I burst into her inner sanctum, her id, her control room, where I handily took the helm and reprogrammed her entire brain, a thousand avatars of me doing all the work just as instructed.
I’d won her back. Claire was my loving soulmate again. After the kiss, she decided right then and there never to leave this house again, at least not without my nod, and never for long, she loved it so much. She forgot about the world and her former career. She just wanted to be with me and have children and cook and clean for me until they came.
And that’s what she did starting that day. The first thing on our agenda was to make love, to have a baby, as something had gone wrong with the earlier pregnancy as she tearfully explained to me for the first time. That afternoon after lunch and a vintage bottle of wine on the back deck she started a garden in the backyard, changing into some pretty red shorts and a tank top Naomi had long ago left behind. She threw her business dress and high heels into the garbage, saying she would never wear them again. After that, before dinner she insisted that the kitchen floor needed cleaning, getting down on her elbows and knees with a brush and soap bucket, her face inches away from her task, pretty posture, while I sat at the kitchen table and watched and made small talk. Then dinner and more wine on the deck holding hands, gazing at the stars in the still dark Bay Area, then off to bed.
It was like this for a week with very few interruptions. I spent hours reading again, no more TV, while she managed the house and yard, taking frequent breaks just to talk over old times, old friends and Scout and how we both longed to see her again.
We had two visitors. I knew they’d come and was ready to greet them. The first was Naomi on the morning after our reunion and then Natalie a day later. They wanted to talk to her, so I led them in. When they did see her and how happy she was they held hands and understood right away what a good life she’d finally found. They wanted it too, as she described it in pure, telepathic joy. She asked them to tell all their friends and for them to inform others so that the word would spread around the globe. They both left mesmerized by her message and ready to proselytize.
But after they left, I began to wonder what it would have been like, a world completely under women’s spells and all the men their happy, smiling slaves, looking up to their angelic splendor in awe, dependent on them for life itself, which if you thought about it was the female ultimatum. It dawned upon me that I was creating the flip image of such a world equally lopsided and unfair, one that could never be fair.
And I wasn’t happy with her in this Frankenstein state, this creature of mine. It wasn’t Claire. It was a doll with me pulling strings or setting her on autopilot to navigate long lists of chores while I read my books. I had to find some way to restore her to her human self and at the same time end this war of mind domination, this battle of the sexes. If I just freed her from all the loops and leashes I had her tangled up in she might be back at me the next day, devising her own scripts to ensnare me again and I didn’t want to live a life constantly on the alert against such traps.
I knew for now I had the upper hand and was savvy to her playbook and all her tricks, her code signatures. I could spot them at the door so to speak, and not let them deploy. But who knows, a year or two from now I might drop my guard through complacency, or she might forge over time new weapons I might not see. How do you ensure peace without the alarming costs of nuclear arsenals, star war shields, fleets, submarines, drones and standing armies? It seemed a dilemma. But I had to do something because with her in this state in my house I was more alone than ever.
I began at that moment peeling away, one by one, the deceptions with which I’d restrained her. I knew that I had overdone it. But when I came out of my recent trance, she seemed like some giant, some Leviathan, so I tethered every facet of her mind.
‘Like Gulliver, in Lilliput,
Tied down with strings, from head to foot.’
As I undid the scripts a few at a time over the following hours, like peeling an onion, she slowly came out of her daze, the fog I had created, and began to be able to realize where she was and what had happened to her. I kept her on a few tight leashes, backdoor commands that could heel her in a second but she was a person again, and I was able to approach and talk to her and even reason with her. For the first time in a long time, we had a mutual conversation.
“Roland” she began, “You don’t know what you did to me. I was at the bottom of a deep well, in freezing water, slowly drowning, my identity, my soul, clutching with bleeding fingernails to stone walls to keep my head above water, my arms aching in pain. Didn’t you hear my cries?”
“No Claire I made you a mute, you only thought you were screaming.”
“But why?”
“Because you put me in a similar pit, making me rearrange my books every day like a dunce, knowing it and unable to stop. Only you held me in that hell for nine months. Do you know how long you’ve been in yours?”
“Yes, eight days and four hours and nine minutes.”
“Well good for you Claire. I’m glad to see you still have your perfect track of time, and punctuality has always been one of your virtues. But don’t you agree with me, how mental bondage is a nightmare?”
“Yes I see it now in its full scope, and I’m sorry, deeply sorry, for what I did to you. I was such a fool, it all got out of hand, bent out of shape and turned into a monster. You remember at the beginning how I only wanted to lull you to sleep, to ease your worries.”
“Yes I do, and in the following days how you continued to perfect your spells and bewitch me. What can you tell me to make me believe that you’d never do that again, no matter how badly I might sometimes lapse as a human being or treat you slightingly?”
“I’ll stop the takeover, the ‘X’ invasion.”
“What are you talking about Claire, chromosomes?”
“In a way. We’ve been implanting scripts right in the wafers, my plan for woman to run the world. They contain instructions, which only females can see, that reveal all the codes I devised to control you, the programs they can then deploy to invisibly soothe men, lulling them into a soft and warm cradle, with a sense of pure, childish happiness, addictive in its ecstasy, so the men become eager to be ‘managed’.
“And what about children” I said. “They’ll see it and resent it.”
“No they won’t. The girls will be practising it over their boy counterparts from the earliest ages, as soon as they are dosed.”
“There had to be some flaw in this plot” I thought wildly. But it was hard to argue against a plan that had worked so flawlessly upon me. Then an idea flashed.
“What about gays?” I asked.
‘No difference, one’s always’ dominant. But it will be the more feminine one that sees the codes” she said. “With two women, they might both use the scripts on each other; it doesn’t matter. Remember, the process gives just as much pleasure to the controller as to the controlled. We built that in, in case some women feel reluctant to influence their male partners. They won’t be able to resist the all-consuming joy it gives them, as powerful as the biological urge suckle one’s newborn babe, over and over again.”
“So now you’re enslaving the entire human race, men and women, making them do exactly what you want, without a choice.”
“It had to be done that way for women to climb out of the dark, confined room they’ve been forced to inhabit the last ten thousand years. They’ve been demeaned and made so meek most wouldn’t dare use the new tools they’re being given.”
“Since I put you into my cocoon nine months ago we’ve manufactured and distributed over five million of these wafers, from here and Tahiti and Australia, Japan, Argentina, England, with more labs cropping up all over because the conflicts are dying down. Everyone knows about the technology, and countries that were at war are putting down their weapons so they don’t fall behind in this human re-engineering. It’s bigger than the war. Probably two or three million women across the world right now have their ‘significant others’ in the palms of their hands, smiling, happy, peaceful hubbies.”
“But I can stop all of that in an instant. I built in a backdoor that allows me to erase that programming and only I have the key. If you release me, I’ll be able to release them. And to prove it, I’ll show you with the closest example, Jason and Naomi. You’ll see it right away in his eyes when the programs stop. He’ll feel it too and tell you. How’s that for a trade-off, five million for one.”
“I think I countered that chess move when I sent Naomi and Natalie out of our house with your sweet message of blissful, spousal fidelity.”
“No you didn’t. I had enough spite left in my consciousness to lampoon your orders for women to submit to the idea of a slave housewife. It was so much against nature. I don’t think Naomi and Natalie are going to get much of an accolade if they deliver this picturesque message, which they might. They’re more likely to get snickers and jeers and put it to rest.”
“You’re probably up to your tricks Claire, but I’ll give you this, you might be feeling remorse so I’ll give you a chance. Let’s try it out. You can’t touch me with any mind games for a long time to come. So let’s invite Naomi and Jason to our house and when they’re sitting here in the living room undo your spell and I’ll unleash you, as my partner, to try it all over again. I can monitor the whole event from every angle and see all the changes in their minds. If you do this for me, for them, I’ll forgive you and love you enough to let you make it up to me.
Around seven o’clock the pair arrived. But it was a strange scene because Naomi was holding Jason’s hand without leading him. Claire stood up before the two, blinked an eye and Jason shook his head and said: “What the heck just happened to me.”
So I stood up and released my strings on Claire.
Then Naomi broke down. “Claire, we’ve got to find a better way. I won’t be a part of this anymore, the constant manipulation, the lying.”
“I know” Claire replied. “After what Roland put me through these last days I hate it too. Let’s shut it all down. I still have my black box tucked away. I should open it.”
“What’s that?” We all asked.
“A virus that can shut us all down. It would start a chain reaction, and we’d be lights out in an instant, the four of us, human again.”
“Why didn’t you do that to yourself when I had you trapped, Claire?”
“I tried, but I couldn’t get to it. Now I can.”
“There’s got to be a better way” Naomi began. “It’s not just our problem, its everyone’s Claire. Could you insert this into a new wafer, like a time bomb?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s go to the lab right now, to central programming and add your virus so that every wafer from now on will auto-destruct after twenty-four hours. That way people will get all the benefits for a day, the restored health, and be done with it, free from games.”
“That’s a brilliant idea, Naomi,’ Claire replied, ‘and I can tuck my virus in such a way that anyone they come in contact with on their day of glory will be infected and in twenty-four hours also purged, spreading it to others in that time space. The world could be free of this whole mess in a matter of weeks, with everyone human again.”
We rushed to the lab, which was working around the clock and Claire went to work reprogramming the design computers in the control room. When she was done and knew it was done, she said: “Now let’s hold hands one last time and finish it forever.”
We did as she asked and she opened the box. I felt the same tremor as I had on the night of the blast, momentary, and then the calm, the quiet.
Later that night, as I lay beside her in the dark, I said: “My god Claire, this all seems like a nightmare.”
“All technology is a nightmare, Roland. It seems innocent enough at first, like any newborn babe. But it could be the next Stalin or Hitler, or perhaps a Gandhi, while its mother suckles it and sings lullabies. Only time will tell. And as it grows and influences us, it also changes us, and we come under its power. Some of the changes may be good, others bad, but we’ll never know until it’s too late and can’t be undone.”
“I hope we undid a lot tonight” I replied.
“No I think we just set it on another course, another trajectory” she said, “and we’ll have to wait and see what happens next.”
I sighed. “If only we hadn’t rushed up the hill on the evening of the blast and retrieved those chips, none of this would ever have happened.”
“But darling” she responded, “then you would never have thought up your clever plan of sending the people to the valley, saving millions of lives.”
“Your right Claire, but you’re the clever one.”
The lights were out, but there were most definitely two people at home, in Roland house.
Or perhaps you might say there were three since it was an avatar that Roland was embracing as he drifted asleep, an avatar of Claire. She lay there too in a deep meditative trance, on his other side, hard at work spinning out the vivid scenes and crisp conversations that filled Rolland’s head.
