Electrocution.
The meal revitalized me. My limbs felt weary, aching in fact from the work I'd done. But my mind was active and I wanted to use it. I sat at my table and pondered the question of how I might best jolt my spouse. I glanced around the debris in our room but nothing clicked. The allure of that open suitcase in the next unit was too great to resist, so there I went. It was full of clothes, a man's and a woman's. It also had a paperback, a Heinlein, 'The Green Hills of Earth' and a full bottle of Scotch. Things were looking up. I could read and enjoy both together. The only other unusual item was a baseball cap. I hadn't seen or thought of one in eons. I took all three items home. No one was going to come back for them.
I set the artifacts from the past on my table just to admire them. The cap brought a recollection to mind, the way they used to terminate prisoners. If I could attach two flat pieces of metal or maybe tin foil to its rim, near where the temples lay, and then a length of wire to each, I'd have my device.
In a half hour it was done. Once again I broke into the smoke detector in our ceiling. I had two tabs of metal and by yanking hard on the wire that fed it, ripping the plaster in the ceiling and dropping some on Mary, I cut off five feet of wire. I would finish the contraption the next day. Even that short burst of effort had tired me again.
Though it was late afternoon I still had hours to fill. My plan was to stay awake til our food cube spit out our daily allotment. From now on, I decided, we were going to ingest two a day, to gain weight and repair our bodies. I would feed Mary's to her when she did her evening pirouettes. I opened the bottle and took a swig of the Scotch. It was an exhilarating experience, tingling through all my limbs. Then I opened my notebook to where I'd left off, some ten pages into it and read the last few. 'What an accomplishment' I thought,' so long and so well composed. What a feat of literary parturition. I've got to continue it.'
And so I did, my memory crisp and clear.
"One of the most intoxicating features of our new mind power was called the proximity gate. This was a flood gate, where cascades of information, joyful, surreal experiences took place between two people, holding hands. It was like a mind melt where you saw and felt the full tide of mental sensations in your partner, just as your own and they yours. For lovers a whole new plateau in bonding opened up. And with practice and time, men began to think and feel exactly like their women partners and the women like men. It had a bonding and homogenizing effect upon everybody who tried it.
It was as if the human race had discovered a strange, new, heady wine, and we were carried away by its intoxication, made childlike and foolish under its influence. How easy then, for those few still sober, to manipulate and control our world.
It’s well-known that the human mind is a frontier unto itself, and like the universe, mostly unexplored. It used to have recesses that no one but its own self could enter. But not any more.
Now, when I have thoughts or dreams, I know they are my own. I'm Jack Cade.
Having the best of both worlds in this situation I pitied the poor souls who could never leave this new theater in their heads. By this I mean almost all my fellow mortals. In the first year I kept up a discreet acquaintance with my friend and some of his comrades, and we would meet in the few remaining restaurants and Internet cafés, to talk a few minutes and compare notes. Then we would go home, switch back and go into the mind sink and telepathic modes, lie down on an unmade bed in our ragged apartments beside our mindless spouses, to blend in with every other unit in every dwelling in the city and every city in the world.
By now most people had almost entirely abandoned the use of their voice, except the few moments they awoke and shared a meal with their mate or child, not in the catatonic state they usually performed all bodily functions. Sometimes extreme emotions from a dream would compel Mary to shake me and wake me up. The faculty was still there. We’d sit up, she’d tell her tale, then glancing briefly at our decrepit room, the pealing wallpaper and trash strewn floor, she closed her eyes again and in an instant be in her other world, her body sagging flat onto the bed, her head not even finding a pillow.
This was my spouse, Mary. Both of our university careers had vanished at the same time, when pretty much all public institutions shut down. We became totally redundant. We tried to look useful, tapping into the Net of ongoing human activity, sending out countless proposals hourly, all over the Web, for the reward.
The gifted among us became rich in credits, playing along with the best of the telemarketers, now operating totally cerebral, some of them amassing huge fortunes overnight by simply interconnecting similar parties. To see a connection of interest or viability in our brave new world and to put the relevant links together under your own guiding template made you a ‘captain of industry’, and you became known as an ‘omniscit’, or ‘hack’.
One byproduct of this new worldwide interconnection was that our government, like the dinosaur, almost disappeared. It shrank to a lizard of its former size while the technology of the private sector bloomed and grew out of control, all by itself. It still existed, maintaining a skeleton crew for the public and civil services we still used occasionally, and a small policing force ready for the very rare case in which some person went crazy. International politics became a thing of the past. Huge armies were disbanded."
This completed a page in my notebook. When I turned the leaf I saw a note written in blue, not black, in a different handwriting. It was John and I remembered he had once visited this apartment, a few days after we moved in. I even think it was him who told me to keep a journal with me at all costs.
"We have wind of a new plan to downsize the Net drastically. There are too many people on it, supplying nothing useful, and the cost of maintaining them is too great. Crematoriums are being built and they think they can just direct us there one by one to be terminated. Emily found this out. She recently acquired control of an abandoned military base. We have plenty of weapons, but we need your help and others like you, if you can get the people for us. I’ll see you soon. John."
Now I had another mystery before me. At this point Mary rose from our evening bed and performed her somnanbulant routine. I waited the few minutes, watching her delighted with a new gleam in my eye. At the right moment I went to the kitchen and retrieved our two eggs, consuming mine and lovingly proffering hers to her mouth. We lay down in bed together, hugging.
