Aptly named reprogramming center, commons.wikimedia.org
So now we had to avoid crowds and public events, busy city streets, malls and parks and stadiums. We were shut in, restrained in our activities like a dog on a leach. For the first time we felt like a race apart, only able to come out at night, creeping in the shadows, pariahs, lepers. We were on the defensive all of a sudden and losing.
Several of our members were caught and reprogrammed. Then more of them, especially in Europe and the Far East. We feared that our organization might be cracked, but that didn’t happen. Our brains were as unhackable as the Navajo language was to the Japanese in World War II. They just assumed that these were cases of defective chips. They probed but could never get past the mirror. But those they caught were always zapped and re-dosed, so we lost some members to the enemy.
Still, we feared that worst would come. News came in that our senior operative in France went silent. She was a special assistant to the president. This was so huge a loss that Claire and I flew to Paris to investigate the matter. We met our contacts, a young couple in their ancient stone three-story house near the center of town, on the left bank. They gathered several more of our group for a meeting, but nobody had a clue as to how she was identified and reprogrammed. All they could tell us was that she was given a different wafer. She was always busy at work in her government office and didn’t spare time to see any of her friends or family. But they did say that this was happening to others also, outside our organization, on an increasing and disturbing scale.
We decided to visit Jane, still high up in the Bureau of wafer production there. That meeting answered all our questions. She too had been ‘upgraded’.
The country had just instituted a law that required all middle management employees to be reformatted with its version of the happy chip, or ‘thrill pill’ as it was nicknamed. They were starting there and about to work their way down the social echelons to everyone below, to the humblest clerks and maids, to old folks and children, all soon to be humming ‘la Marseillaise’ in the backs of their heads in a loop, ready to serve and die for their country to whatever end. The rich and powerful, to be sure, were exempted from this personality erasing ‘improvement’.
We found Jane at her post, behind her desk in a large, plush office on the mid-level of a skyscraper shadowing the sprawling laboratory below, which produced all the chips for that nation. It was evening and she was alone.
She got up and greeted us in with a polite but ambiguous smile, almost a pained and twisted smile. Her hair looked as if it hadn’t been combed or washed in days. Her clothes were slightly wrinkled, and she smelled. She was wearing a plain dress and her sandals were off, sitting beside her desk. She addressed us in bare feet. We both took seats across from her, the desk between us.
“So how are you doing” Claire began. “It’s so good to see you again.”
Now Jane’s eyes lit up. “I’m fine. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. You can’t conceive of how happy I am. I wish I could share it with you.”
They were both probing inside each other's minds or trying to, and Claire was projecting to me the whole scenario. Their words were a mere formality. But neither of them could penetrate each other’s altered states, and in an instant, Jane stood up and said: “I have to go now. I’m so busy.”
The tone in her voice was different. It wasn’t hers. She was too soft and humble, too polite, not her brash and honest self. Then we witnessed a strange sight. She reached out to shake our hands but as she did so her eyelids fluttered and her focus, her eyes, drifted off from us to the ceiling, something like what they call ‘lazy eyes’. Then her whole frame shuddered.
“Excuse me; I have to go now. I’m so busy. I have reports to finish and the night shift programmers need my direction.”
“And what work is that?” Claire asked.
“The new chips, don’t you know. They’re so much improved. Soon everyone will have one, and the world will be a better place.”
Once again she seemed to shiver for a second. She was wearing a white camisole, and you could see her bare shoulders quiver. She was about to walk out of her office, shoeless, oblivious that we were even there. We both grabbed her and Claire, using all her powers, was able to grip one small slice of her consciousness, enough to sandal her and walk her out of the building and accompany us to the subway, to the house across the river where our associates had a unit hidden in a closet.
As soon as we got her there, we zapped her and force-fed her one of our wafers and put her to bed, thinking that we’d resolved the matter. We spent the rest of the evening talking with our new friends about current events. We told them the best option was to get away quick. But they were city folks and always had been. People still took vacations, especially in France, and we convinced them to fly to Tahiti soon, giving them Mr. Tanaki’s private number. Just as with every other world-altering development, we knew it wasn’t going to reach a place like Tahiti for years to come. That was a backwater of change, as peaceful and undisturbed as a painting. They thanked us wholeheartedly and showed us to the room where Jane slept, making us a bed with quilts and blankets on the floor.
The next morning we woke Jane from a deep sleep. She was barely able to open her eyes, which we thought strange, with a new wafer in her. Claire bathed and dressed her. Then our hosts, Adele and Jean walked her downstairs and spoon-fed her some breakfast. Like the day before it seemed that most of her memories were gone, so we wanted to spark them by taking her for a walk in the fresh morning air. Adele advised against this. She said there were spotters on the streets and that people didn’t take idle strolls in the morning, especially with an invalid, as there were no invalids. If people stopped at a shop for their morning coffee and bun they made it quick. There was no loitering. They went to work. In fact, they both had to leave us soon for that very reason. There were no such things as sick days anymore, and the metro lines ran perfectly on time, so being late for work was extremely suspect to security guards on the lookout to report bad behavior. We told them we would stay put and see them that evening.
All of us hugged Jane, but she didn’t respond. She looked at us with vacant eyes. She recognized Claire and me but only kept saying ‘goodbye’ as if we were leaving too. We let her sit alone, which she didn’t seem to mind, while we discussed the situation.
“I can’t believe she’s showing no emotion at all. It’s as if she’s catatonic” Claire began. “When I go into her mind it’s like a fog, a haze of excitement and titillation, for no reason. But look at her, I can’t believe our wafer didn’t restore her. Her head is all muddled, confused. She can’t focus.”
“This isn’t good” I said, “and far worse than I ever imagined. Jane is dead.”
“Yes” Claire added. “These new chips seem to depersonalize people, making them little better than worker ants. Over time the changes to the brain must become permanent, like repeated shock therapies, that’s why she can’t bounce back. We have a real threat on our hands. These people are being killed. She’s worse off than Bob ever was.”
“Maybe a stiff drink will help” I added. “It always helped me.”
I went to the cupboard where some wine had been left from the night before and poured her a glass. I then poured half of it down her throat, as she just sat there.
Now she feebly shook her head and her still wet hair and looked around, as if trying to figure out where she was, a good sign, we thought.
She glanced at our faces, saying, “I know who you are. But why am I here, away from my work. I have to get back now.”
“Jane you’ve been hypnotized by the chip which we just erased from your head. Those are the chips that you're producing in your lab. They dehumanize people. We need your help to stop this massacre.”
I offered her the rest of the drink. This time she seemed to acquiesce. She took the glass and drank slowly. That was the old Jane I remembered.
After a pause, Claire questioned her some more.
“I remember you, but you shouldn’t be here” Jane began, “and I’m so tired. I need to rest. Please let me sleep.” As she said it, she stood up. Claire took her by the hand, led her upstairs and put her to bed.
As she came back, she said: “Let’s let her sleep awhile. She’s too confused right now for any productive talk. Maybe she can collect herself, recollect herself, given time.”
Two hours later we went to the spare bedroom to check on her. The glass door to the metal balcony was open. There was a fire ladder at one end lowered to the street below. She was gone. We left a note for our hosts and enough money for a long trip to the islands, saying they had to go right away, Jane had escaped and might report them. We took a cab to the airport.
Later that week, back in the Bay we learned from Hans of a huge reformatting center being set up in the old ‘Cow Palace’ in Daly city, now aptly named, to handle the residents of San Francisco. Hans told us that he had operatives helping make this facility and that it had almost four hundred booths, enough to handle nearly sixty thousand people a day if staffed around the clock. He also mentioned that smaller centers were being built, even one on our campus, all staffed by eager young members of the Federal Enhancement Bureau.
At the same time, we began to see reports of some kind of flaw in the old wafers everyone had taken. There were daily newsflashes of some man or woman on a crowded street suddenly going berserk, waving their hands in the air and running away from nothing, screaming and knocking people over till they collapsed in a heap, dead.
No one could explain it but the videos went viral as day by day more and more cases appeared. Some scientists postulated that a flaw in the chips themselves caused them to self-destruct in an instant. Others surmised that a new weapon created by some foreign power was being deployed, beamed down by satellite or drone, as the victims were always in the streets when it happened. But all agreed that the one sure solution was to get zapped and ingest the latest wafer.
Pandemonium ensued as the masses clamored to be first in line for the cure. But officials stepped in said the new chips would be administered in an orderly fashion, that volunteers would go neighborhood by neighborhood to every house and hand out slips to all the population for reprogramming. It would be swift, they promised, over a hundred thousand a day in the bay area. And they would make sure with public registries and thousands of newly recruited agents that everyone was included. No one would be left behind.
This news relieved the masses but caused panic in our organization. We had developed the perfect mask against discovery. But if everyone was going to be reformatted, masks didn’t offer any protection. We’d hid our faces and minds but not our bodies. Claire was on the net fifteen hours a day conferring with everyone on this development. We had to find some underground, and fast, so we gathered our inner group.
Claire told us that evening the process had already started weeks earlier with the indoctrination of tens of thousands of young people to dragnet every precinct and get everyone to the booths. Our neighborhood could be ‘tagged’ any day now. She also disclosed that Naomi, Jason and Hans were high enough up in the echelon to be exempt from this wave of reformatting. They looked each other in the face with a sigh of relief. Natalie too was safe.
I asked Jason if he had any knowledge of this new chip coming out of his lab. He told us the entire process had been automated for over a year and that programming was done off-site by the new agency. The only change he noted was that six months ago, as the old stocks in his vaults were used up, all new production was taken by armored carriers to undisclosed locations. This news only corroborated our worst fears.
Samantha and Jaime made a few quick calls and found that they were more than welcome back in Australia, right away. Things were on a different course there and they’d be safe for a while. The government was in disarray, and one party was solidly against any new wafers. The two of them had their plane tickets arranged in less than an hour for a departure the next day.
Claire said she wasn’t in any danger remaining in this house, at her computer post, as long as we moved it to the panic room. She insisted that she had to stay behind to lead the resistance. She could make herself invisible to anyone who might come by. If this whole house were full of scanners, she told us, they’d have no idea that she or her computer station even existed. They would walk out of a seemingly empty mansion with a stupid smile on their faces. But she said that she wasn’t sure she could protect others with her mind tricks, not even Rollo.
I was the only one left with a sad grimace on my face. Samantha saw it and said she was sure that Rollo and I could accompany them to Australia. They had friends in the outback who would take us in and hide us indefinitely. But I couldn’t. I had friends here that I wouldn’t abandon. We adjourned the meeting at that. I still had a few days to decide upon a plan, or so I thought.
