…I am probably the first and last person to record the effects that the Downfall has had on this city. Please, if you can get this report out to anyone–any media or law enforcement whatsoever–do it. If it gets you killed–then your death will not be in vain. Please. I have documented countless lives being rotted out from the inside. When subjected to enough stress, people’s heads break apart into terrifying pieces after becoming uprooted from reality. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The chips capture everything. It can twist the warm words of loved ones into malice-filled hate. It can wrench the relationships between brother and father, between mother and daughter, between lover and lover–into nothing more than flame and ash where there was once passion and happiness. The Osiris project was a mistake.
I put down the pen and looked up at the stool next to me. Sitting on it, was me. He was hunched over with his head resting on his hands, and his elbows were resting on his knees. His eyes were half closed in a sort of tired glare, and his mouth was in a loose frown with the sides slightly pulling at the sides of his lips.
You know that nobody’s ever going to read that, right? Everyone in this city is either insane, dead, or mutilating other survivors.
I glared at him–at me–silently. We’ve seen them all.
I cut him off, “I’m not you.”
And yet, I make the decisions here, no?
I clamped my eyes shut, trying to block him out.
Tell me. Why is it that you’re so obsessed with everyone else’s life. Is it because you don’t want to face yours? Do you suck people’s brains out with morbid fascination maybe because you’re too scared to see what’s going on in yours?
“No.”
Then what? He said. Then what?
I could feel the tears welling up from the corners of my eyes.
I will always be here. Until the day you die. I will always be here. I could feel the hot air of his breath on my ear, and I snapped open my eyes, whipping my head towards the breath. My teeth were clenched hard behind my lips.
He was sitting back on the stool, and for a moment, I thought I could see a slight tug on the side of his mouth.
You’re optimistic, aren’t you?
“Yes,” I said. My hand was on the hard drive on the table in front of me.
That’s what got everyone else killed.
The survivors–the non-chipheads–the ones that didn’t get the now-malfunctioning Osiris implants began to hate us soon after most of the dementia set in.
The story went like this: Non-chipheads–let’s call then NCs, around the beginning of the Downfall, when the blood red jets would boom over the city, dropping hell and fire over their failed science experiment, would all hole up in the basements or compounds or whatever they needed to hide from the death from above. The chipheads would hide out with their families, afraid that if they would tell them about their implants, their loved ones would push them out into the streets to be reduced to ash by the bombs.
The Osiris Corps. was very outspoken about the fact that their implants were malfunctioning as soon as the problems began.
They were also very, very outspoken that the victims of their fuck-all-failed idea would eventually go crazy and try to kill everyone around them–including themselves.
Sometimes, you’d hear the screams of people being forced out the doors of their own homes by girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands and wives who had just discovered that their loved ones had an implant, and were shoving them out into the street to be bombed to death.
Other times. You’d see confused children being pushed up the stairs of an improvised basement bunker and onto the road, unaware that their parents were trying to save themselves from the horror of watching their offspring turn into psychotic hollows.
I managed to hole myself up in the library when all of this first started happening. I could see all of the chaos below from where I had stood by the big glass windows.
If there is such thing as a God… Well, it sure was a sick joke that he pulled off, making us.
II.
What do you think the fastest way to get to know someone in a post-apocalyptic hellscape of a city? Guess for me. Friendship? Tender love and care? No. Neither of those things. You see, the fastest way to get to know someone in this city is through their skull.
Early on in the game, during the riots, I was able to corner a guard, smash his face in with a crowbar, and nab his chip reader.
Now, these thing are really cool. Medical and military grade chip readers consist of a small, square hard drive, and a common USB cable that’s attached to a long needle.
The needle inserts into your ear, jams forward through your cranium and your brain, slots into your chip, and downloads all of your conscious memories–from the day you were implanted–into the hard drive. Which can then be accessed by any computer with a USB port and a video player. It’s a wonderful device, really.
Here’s the only caveat. It can only be used on post-mortem chipheads. Try it on a live one and it’ll crack their skull, shred their brain, and kill them.
Pleasant, no? Obviously, I’d never seen it done on a live chiphead, but I took pride in being somewhat of a specialist in downloading the memories of the dead. It’s a hobby of mine. Both to keep me busy and to keep me sane. It’s also the main way that I compiled my report. I would drag bodies into the library from the various parts of the city, grab my chip reader, plug it right into their ears, and bam. All the post-implant life experiences they ever had right on the blue-tinted, minimally powered Dell monitor right in front of me.
I would stare for hours at the footage– watching post-op, love-making, arguments, breakups, progressive degeneration of cohesive thought. And then, I’d watch him or her faceplant onto the pavement when the chip sapped the remaining power that he or she needed to make a single heartbeat. Done and done. A whole life as film reel, suddenly snipped short on a frame and left to spin on the projector as it clicked around the spool. Reborn from surgery with false promises and hope and delivered into death with neither.
III.
I was panning through videos again. It was late.
My depression sat, looking bored and tired. He was sitting backwards on one of those thinly cushioned, wheeled library chairs. His head was resting in his arms, and his eyes were half open.
I can’t sleep until you do, you know.
I know.
What are you even hoping to find in this footage? Your report’s done.
I know.
I kept scrolling. Panning through the footage. I stopped as a new video opened. I felt like watching one.
A man, hugging the camera. A first person view from a woman. The man’s kissing her, saying something as she rolls into what looks like a hospital waiting room, sitting in a wheelchair. She has a floral patient’s gown on.
“Please refrain from walking for at least six hours post-op,” echoes in my ears as I watch. On the footage, the man smiles as she glances back, walking behind her and wheeling her chair along. There was no audio on this one.
Cut to: Making love. Him mouthing the words “I love you” on top of her.
Cut.
Black.
The man’s yelling. His eyes are red and there’s the sheen of tears on his cheeks.
First person arms make angry gestures. She flips him off, storms away, and slams a door.
Cut.
The moon streams in from the huge, studio-apartment window, catching the metal in her hand with a white glow. Her knuckles are white.
She’s holding a knife to his throat, and he’s sleeping. She slowly, slowly brings it back. And then she drives it into the bottom of his jaw as hard as she she can. His eyes snap open. He gurgles, blood foaming out of his mouth. His eyes lock onto the camera. Onto her.
She lets go of the knife, and he’s writhing, thrashing on the bed and grabbing for it as the red slowly drains out of him, flowering onto the sheets. Five. Ten. Twenty seconds pass.
His eyes roll back and he goes limp, his back arching sharply as the last shreds of life bleed into the sheets. The camera backs away from the bed.
Cut.
Moonlight still streams into the apartment.
She walks over to a window, unlatches it, and stares at the street below that’s all but deserted, save for a few ant cars here and there that ignore the stoplights.
And then, the camera tumbles out the window.
Down.
Down.
Cut.
The video ends. I blink.
I rub my eyes, and look down at the figure on the floor that I set up with the chip-decoder’s needle in its ear–her ear.
What do we do when we realize that there’s a thin line between obsession and realism, and when we cross that line we either become consumed with the end, or we fall into complacent despair? What do people do when their goals are figured out to take years and years and countless disappointments, failures, and shortcomings?
How did people even function in the old world? Humans are such glass-fragile creatures–how did we ever get anything done without getting horribly depressed at the sheer meaninglessness of our existence? We go in one direction for so long, only to find out that it was an alleyway.
What are we to do then? When we’ve dedicated so much of our hope, our happiness, our willpower–to one thing, and one thing in particular? We used to live on this rock for eighty-some years. But now…now I’m not sure how long I have to live. I put my own head into my hands, glancing over at the hard drive.
“Who’s going to even see this?” I muttered.
Silence answered in kind.
I sighed, closing my eyes.
IV.
I was standing in front of the coffeemaker, listening to it gurgle as it pushed steaming hot water through the spigot and over the ground beans sitting in the filter. Waiting.
Staring at the black plastic that was going to give me my daily dose of caffeine.
The clock ticked.
“Daddy?”
The clock ticked. And I pulled the carafe out from under the drip spout. Suddenly, the gurgling stopped. I tipped the aluminum container, and obsidian poured into my cup.
“Daddy?”
I could feel a little hand pulling at my shirt.
“Mm?” I blinked. Sounds seemed to suddenly become sharp again, as I looked down at the little face below me. “What is it, hun?”
“There’s a big, scary, red man at the door. He says he wants to talk to you.”
My eyes snapped open. Not because of the caffeine.
“Honey…” I said. “You didn’t open the door for him, did you?” She just stared and blinked at me. I wasn’t her fault, she wouldn’t have known.
V.
I opened my eyes and looked up, squinting at the blue glare in front of me and feeling my face with my hands. Keyboard marks. I must have fallen asleep as I was panning through the videos. Or maybe the chip inside of me had temporarily shorted my brain.
I can’t remember much before I was implanted–a side effect of the surgery. But that’s beside the point. My time as a slow, Alzheimer’s-esque victim has also taught me many things: Be grateful for what you have, because tomorrow it might just be rubble. Make good memories with the people you meet, because tomorrow they might have gone through stage-four degeneration and essentially have become a babbling corpse.
Grim, I know. But what else do we have, now? When the rest of the world around you is dead and dying, you can’t help but stop to notice that the only things alive and well are the flowers that are growing out from the cracks in the concrete. I tend to look too far ahead for my own good, though, and sometimes it’s hard for me not to get sucked into my work. I’ve dragged countless bodies in from the streets and jammed countless needles into many countless ears. Each time I watch one, it’s like I’m taking a syringe to the person’s life, pulling the plunger, and then injecting it into my own veins; it’s like I absorb a part of them. That previous statement is partially true, too.
Due to the nature of my malfunctioning implant, I often times can’t discern between the suicide that spelled the end of a mangled body that I found on the street, and another lonely night of decoding in the library.
Oh.
That’s another thing. I’ve based my operations completely out of this semi-ruined building. I used to be a librarian back in the old world, so… I guess it just feels like home. Books smell just like a lover that’s come home after months to me.
Soothing and peaceful. Familiar. So, I decided to set up shop here.
The structure resembles that of a giant, three-dimensional letter I. The slender base is made up of a concrete, rectangular pillar with elevators that take you up to the bookshelves and the actual library itself, which makes up the top, wider part of the ‘I’. The elevator was obliterated by the bombs, so now I have to climb the stairs–or… what used to be the stairs.
Huge windows used to wrap around the part of the library with the bookshelves, so that whenever I was there before the city got bombed out, it looked like it was just me, the books, and the city’s skyline stretching out over infinity.
After the bombs–well–most of the windows are blown out now, the ceiling’s gone, and a good third of the entire structure was vertically sheared off by the force of the blasts.
That’s okay though. I managed to hook up a computer to a tiny, gas-generator which I need to fill up every few days. The place is still homely enough, anyway. And besides. I have all the time in the world now. Why not learn something new before the malfunctioning chip inside of my head kills me?
VI.
I’m scrolling through video after video of decoded chip information. I’ve propped up a small line of bodies on the far wall of the library to entertain myself. I had set them in the few remaining chairs and placed books on them, to make the place feel a little more…lively…as I scrolled through their broken lives, now ripped from the vessels that lived them in the first place.
My eyes hurt. I’m tired. I can feel the skin sagging down under them, making little, dark pillows of skin. The pressure behind my face won’t let up, either. It feels like someone’s pushing my eyes out from the inside of my skull and trying to pop them right out of my head.
I glanced over at my depression. He was lying, spread eagled on the floor next to a body with a book placed over its face to make it look like it was sleeping. The only thing that betrayed it’s peaceful appearance was the dried blood that had crusted on its right ear where I had inserted the needle.
What would it feel like to just jam that needle into your own ear? Do you think you’d be able to see your memories up on that monitor there?
I slowly pivoted my chair around. I had my eyes closed, and I had let my chin droop down to my chest
“If I did that, I’d die.”
So? He said, weakly waving his arm in little circles above him.
“If I die, you go, too.”
Really? But What does death feel like? I wonder…?
…
You don’t know, do you?
I’ve seen it.
I lift my head from my chest and open my eyes.
“I’m going for a walk”
* * *
There are days where I question which of us is actually in control of my body. My depression, given form and voice by the chip inside of my head, or me?
I try to remember back to a time where I didn’t feel like I had to fight myself for control of my own stream of thought.
I’ve extensively documented the effects that the malfunctioning Osiris chips have upon subject’s brains.
Stage one entails simple, little memory blackouts. You blink, and suddenly you can’t remember how that tomato got chopped on the cutting board in front of you, but you’re still holding the knife.
Eventually, the blackouts progress longer. And longer. And soon, you’re losing minutes, hours, days.
After week three, the chip begins to break the rest of your brain. Then come the hallucinations. Fears, anxieties, and any previous mental health history you may have had becomes personified and given human form.
Only you can see it.
And it can torment one and only one person: You. It knows everything about you. Where you live. How many people you’ve fucked. And how many people you’ve hurt. It will tear your head apart from the inside. It will find you in your most vulnerable moments and tell you you’re nothing but dirt.
It sticks around for the remainder of your time on this earth, and the blackouts just keep getting worse. Soon, you won’t even remember how that knife got to cutting your wrists.
By about week three and a half, the chip begins to completely disintegrate the rest of your brain as it leeches the remainder of your body’s electrical impulses. This causes parts of the brain to die from atrophy and hemorrhaging as your blood vessels stop repairing themselves, and instead, they go into survival mode to feebly attempt to keep you alive.
Eventually, you’re seeing visions of the devil and you bleed your brains out of your ears and your tear ducts.
Death follows promptly.
Me?
I still have a chip. It’s still eating my brain.
By my records, I was a relatively “late adopter” according to the Osiris jargon. I’m already getting my hallucinations and short-but-slowly progressing blackouts, so… I think I have about four days to live. Guess I’d better make them count.
VII.
Sometime during my walk, I must have blacked out, because that’s the only thing that could explain what’s happening to me right now.
It feels like somebody just kicked me in the head, and my ears are ringing. At first, I can’t see anything. Then I realize my eyes are closed, so I open them.
There’s distant shouting, like somebody, no, many people are yelling through a thick pillow at me.
I open my eyes and flex my face and it’s all pain.
The ground is sideways. I’m looking at a street from an ant’s perspective. Huge pebbles. Gigantic people. A lot of gigantic people.
I grunt and roll over, feeling the gravel crunch under my back. At first I just let my arm flop down next to me, but I quickly pulled it close to prevent the foot that suddenly slammed down on the exact spot where my hand was a second ago.
I blink and sit up.
People are running. Everywhere. Fires and smoke are raging out of the windows of the surrounding buildings. The blood red cube of the Osiris Corps. hangs tattered from a banner on a nearby blasted-out building. It’s been shredded and is now waving in the hot wind.
I look to my left just in time to see a kid, probably no older than seventeen, get sucker punched in the nose by a big black glove, sending blood splattering onto the pavement.
Almost in slow motion, I see him spin. I see his eyes losing consciousness and closing as he slams into the asphalt.
I feel a pang, and I feel my mouth open and the air blast from my lungs in a yell, but I only make a sound like I’m yelling underwater.
A big boot stomps on his back, and two, red, riot-gear clad arms wrench the kid’s arms behind him and bind his wrists with a zip tie.
I push myself up, scraping my hands with the broken glass and pebbles that strew the streets, and I try to throw myself at the guard, but something grabs my wrist from behind.
I turn around. A row of gleaming teeth greets me through a black balaclava and a plastic riot visor.
Something sharp is jammed into my stomach, and I feel myself go rigid at first, and then limp, all the strength draining out of my limbs.
As my eyes close, I can see the kid being thrown into a red armored car with a cube painted on the side. I feel myself being hoisted up, and someone next to my ear whispers,
“Welcome to the Osiris project.”
VIII.
I’ve made an executive decision to donate the rest of my ailing mind to science. If nothing else in this world, I refuse to just be another rotting corpse who didn’t do anything to help further something bigger than myself, whether that “thing” be the Downfall of the Osiris Corps. or not.
After my walk-slash-blackout, I woke up in the library on the first floor, next to the demolished elevator shaft.
The broken tile dug into my back as I sat up.
My depression was sitting on the half-splintered security desk, swinging his legs.
You’re up.
I am.
You’re planning something.
You’d best believe I’m planning something.
I made my way up the mangled metal stair, climbing, climbing. Taking three at a time.
I threw open the door, and I, me, my depression, was already sitting in front of the terminal.
I grabbed the decoder needle from the desk, and poised it a few centimeters away from my ear. My thumb was hovering over the little red button on the handle that would send the needle into my ear, through my skull, and into the Osiris chip, instantly pulling all the raw data that it had collected. Then, it would send it to the small portable hard drive that had my entire report on it. He just sat, staring back.
Don’t do it.
“This isn’t suicide, though. I’m going to live forever,” I said. “Now, move.”