DigiMan

Marc twisted the tap, and thick sludge came glopping from the spigot. He turned

it off, wrinkling his nose at the rancid smell. As the sludge drained away, the occasional

thick bubble burst from the puddle. The leasing company had promised to fix the filters

three days ago, but it was an expensive repair. As long as no one died, they could keep

pushing the maintenance further and further down the line.

Marc sighed and trudged into the bathroom. The shower was starting to collect

dust. Whether the water was running clear or not, Marc typically bathed in a

concentrated ray of UV-C light that scorched away any germs before wiping off with a

disposable CleanCloth™ and spraying on some deodorant. He’d almost forgotten the

sensation of warm water running over his skin. Almost—but not enough to kill the longing

for it.

He went through his routine, pulled on some plausibly clean clothes, and headed

out. He didn’t need water to bathe, but drinking was another matter.

“Out” was putting it generously. Marc lived in a complex with hundreds of

cramped apartments in the same building as just enough amenities to render leaving

the premises unnecessary. He tracked down the nearest beverage vendor. Twenty-

seven dollars for a bottle of water, and upwards of sixty if you wanted the real stuff,

flown in from one of the last remaining springs on Earth. He settled for a bottle filtered

from the same shit clogging his pipes, before wiring the vendor the funds. The

merchant shook his head.

“Prices are up.” The man’s voice was slick and greasy. He’d been born for this

profession. “Inflation, ya know.”

Marc cocked an eyebrow. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the

plumbing?” The vendor just gestured vaguely, a half-shrug that could have been

ignorance, apathy, or a disinterested stretch.

“Thirty bucks,” said the vendor. Haggling was useless. It was always a seller’s

market.

“Bitch,” muttered Marc as he wired over another three dollars. A twinge from

within his brain told him the funds had been processed, accepted, and were already

lining the vendor’s virtual pockets.

He snatched the bottle from the counter and turned. He could swear they got

smaller every time. Filtration technology had abated the water crisis of the 2040s, but

seventy years had gone by since then and the world had gotten lazy. Fresh water was

becoming ever harder to come by, and its retailers knew it. Marc cracked the seal and

took a sip, practically draining half of it in one small swallow. It tasted too clean,

sterilized beyond recognition with a cocktail of chemicals that allegedly were processed

out. Terabytes of legal proceedings indicated otherwise, and yet none had been held

accountable.

Marc checked his account. A sensor array within his occipital lobe let him

visualize it from the (dubious) privacy of his own mind. Funds were running lower than

usual, but unfortunately, the techno-utopia the ads never shut up about had done away

with traditional employment. Steady jobs were a sign of privilege, and despite the

bulging size of the world’s corporations, positions within them were few and far

between. People like Marc resorted to legally ambiguous methods to make ends meet.

Petty theft, data mining, minor infractions of the sort. Marc had never worked up the

courage to take on the underworld’s most lucrative offerings, but he packed a weapon

with him regardless. It gave him a sense of strength, overshadowed by the nagging

knowledge that were violence necessary, he’d be a charred crisp before he could toggle

off the safety. He ran his fingers over the handle jammed down his waistband. How long

had it been since he’d fired it? Likely the last time he’d hit the range, which was...

He really needed to practice.

Static rushed from out of nowhere, breaking Marc out of thought and piercing

through his auditory implants. He shook his head back and forth, but the noise

wouldn’t clear. He looked around, but no one else in the crowd of morose residents

seemed to hear it. Most people were fairly noise-blind—hard to avoid when your very

brain was trying to advertise to you.

He turned, and the sound shifted. A bit further, and it resolved slightly. The

more he turned, the more two distinct sounds emerged from the static as their

waveforms aligned. After turning almost the whole way around, he could hear a

synthetic hum ringing clearly in each ear. The hum flowed like the streams now so rare

around the world, drawing him forward.

Marc was standing before an abandoned skyscraper, or at least what passed for

one in the old days. Most of the windows were boarded, but one looked recently

bypassed. A fresh crack ran down the middle of a board, and the corner was clearly held

by mere fibers. Against his better judgment, he took a step forward. About halfway to

the building, he placed his hand gingerly on the butt of his weapon. It was hollow

security at best, and did little to quiet his mind. But it was something.

The board’s corner cracked right off at the slightest touch, leaving a gap just

wide enough to squeeze through. It was dark inside the building, with most lights long

out. The exit signs, on an emergency battery that could run for decades, still glowed

dimly, bathing everything in a pale red hue. As Marc started down the hall, the static

began to form again, and he turned to align himself. A door sat right before his face,

and he reached forward and pulled.

Nothing. The door had been locked years before and the mechanism left to rust.

A window sat next to the doorframe, its blinds ajar. The narrow line of sight into the

room piqued Marc’s interest enough to draw his weapon, angle it, and smash the butt

of the pistol through the glass.

A shard instantly grazed his arm and he winced. The movies always made it look

so clean, and he knew quite a few people who did this shit regularly. He really wasn’t

cut out for it. He crawled through the window, gasping irregularly at the pinpricks of

glass left behind. The room was dark and mostly empty, with the exception of a large

amorphous blob in the middle. Marc fumbled on the side of his gun for the light, then

pointed it at the blob.

A huge tarpaulin was spread over a Thing. “No dust,” he murmured. The tarp

must have been moved recently. Marc grabbed a corner and tugged. It barely moved. He

tugged again. A little further now. One more tug and the tarp came billowing down.

A Thing was still the best way to describe it, even once it was visible. A large

device, cables running down into the floor, panels and lights—all blacked out—covering

the side. Marc walked around the Thing, looking for any clue: a light, a logo, an on

switch...something. One thing was obvious: the sound was emanating from this. As

long as Marc stood facing it, from any direction, the sound remained clear. Turn

towards the wall, and the static built up again, almost to the point of overwhelm.

Here was some kind of lever—bright red and at a 90 degree angle to the other

machinery next to it. Marc grabbed it and pulled. It resisted, but not in a way that

suggested disuse. He could feel it straining to move, but catching on a safety.

Eventually it gave, and he fell backwards as the machinery whirred to life.

Even activated, the Thing lent no hint as to what it might be. Lights came to life,

their purpose unknown. Panels activated, but displayed nothing except a TyleTech

logo. There was one question answered at least. The sound in Marc’s head was still

there, and now harmonizing. It rose in pitch and added new layers that filled his brain.

His vision blurred, and he grabbed the machine to hold himself up. The longer the

sound went on, the more it felt as if Marc’s brain cells were disconnecting.

Before long, he could no longer handle the harmonies, and was just about to keel

over when it all stopped. The lights and panels stayed on, but his brain was beautifully

silent. He took a deep breath, enjoying the sudden clarity in his ears. He looked down at

the machine again. He hadn’t noticed before, but there were little nodules spaced

evenly around the Thing’s metal rims. He leaned in to peer at one.

A puff of smoke blew out from it, catching Marc fully in the face. One by one, the

others started, and the room slowly began to fill with not smoke, he realized, but gas.

He coughed and beat around his face to clear his breath, and started stumbling for the

door. He wasted a good five seconds trying to open the door from inside before

remembering the rusted lock and diving out the window again. The glass cut him again,

on the leg this time, but he was too focused on escaping the gas to care. He bolted down

the hall, through the cracked board, and tore off down the street towards home.

Back in his complex, he spent another ten precious dollars on pre-boiled water.

It was a little less clean, but a lot less expensive, and its only pollutants could easily be

removed on a stove. He needed something hot to calm him down.

Marc collapsed in a chair by the window as he waited for the kettle to finish. He

stared out at the night skyline—Jesus, it was night already. How long had he been

fucking with that machine? The buildings always looked better at night, when the dirt

and disrepair couldn’t be seen so easily. Neon signs and office lighting held the night

views together.

A flash of movement caught Marc’s eye. A shadow flitted out of a window across

the street, then floated upward. A brief ray of light from a passing aerobus shone

against it, revealing a metal exterior. Then the light was gone, and the shadow with it.

Marc wondered about this for a second, before fatigue swept his bones and he lay back

his head. Within minutes, he was out cold, the kettle forgotten.

*******

Marc opened his eyes, and blinked away a blur. A patch of his vision was

missing—just a small smudge in the corner of his left eye, but noticeable. It was fully

dead, black like pixels on a monitor. He blinked again. Nothing. He pulled himself up

out of his chair, groaning as his stiff muscles strained. He limped to the bathroom and

stared in the mirror. His eye looked normal enough. He pried his eyelids apart just to be

sure. Everything seemed in order.

He turned on the holovision. The projection jumped to life, but the audio was

unusually tinny. He tweaked the settings a bit, but nothing made a difference. On a

hunch, he started making noise himself—clanging some dishes, drumming the counter,

even picking up the ancient, dusty guitar from the corner and strumming a few keyless

chords. Everything came through the same filter.

Marc called up his cochlear settings in his occipital implant. No software needed

to be updated, no settings were off. He ran a diagnostic. A few seconds later, the report

came back. Everything was functioning as normal...but there was more of it. The audio

implants now covered about an inch more of his brain than before.

“What the fuck?” he said aloud. How could this even happen? Metal was

different from organic material, quite notably for its lack of ability to grow. He racked

his brain. Maybe skullhackers—roving gangoons who hacked directly into people’s

brains to steal their financial information and anything else of value. Yet Marc’s

account remained intact. Sparse, sure, but that was no different from usual. Besides,

skullhack victims usually got iced out afterwards. Marc was still breathing, at least for

now.

So no skullhacks. That exhausted Marc’s ideas, though his thoughts weren’t

exactly coming clear and steady. The only other possibility was that machine. Marc

suspected the gas hadn’t just been smoke or a chemical fume. Whatever it was, it had

been placed there deliberately. But he couldn’t quite connect the dots. Could this gas

make implants multiply? Was that remotely possible? The more he thought about it,

the crazier he knew it sounded. It was entirely likely the diagnostic was just wrong. If

he had the funds, he could go see a doctor, but few had the money for that these days.

Universal healthcare was an oxymoron in 2112.

An itch tickled Marc’s nose, and he sneezed. When he looked up, he was back in

the room with the machine. He stumbled, and felt his voice involuntarily release

wordless noise, tinged with a digitized filter. He grabbed at one of the panels on the

machine’s side. He missed, and scraped his fingertips across the edge of the metal.

Marc winced, hissed, and tried again, successfully this time. He swiped at the screen

with little rhyme or reason, trying to bring up any kind of clue as to what the machine

was. He sat there for what could have been thirty seconds or three hours, scrolling

through datum after datum that meant nothing to him.

Then Marc saw it. A graphic, already halfway through, animated almost too

simply, as if in an instructional video for toddlers. The image of a brain sat on the

screen, and then gradually, it shifted. The folds of the cerebrum resolved into metallic

lobes, the brain stem into a coaxial cable sheath. The graphic restarted, and showed a

cloud entering a head before initiating the change. Zoom in on the cloud, and there

were tiny little nanites, rebuilding the brain cell by cell.

Marc fell back and landed on the floor of his apartment. His door was open, and

the sun was setting, but he had no way of knowing if he had really gone back to the

machine or if it had all taken place in his mind. He crawled to the kitchen and pulled

himself up to the counter. His weight fell unevenly, and he slumped over, leaving

streaks on the dusty surface. He looked closer, and saw that his fingers matted the dust

with blood. He turned his hand over, and saw the scrape marks from the edge of the

machine.

So it was real then. His head reeled, and with it he felt his vision pixelate. When

it resolved, it stayed a little grainier than before. He shook his head, but it only made it

worse. The dust on the counter vibrated, levitated. It pulsed in the same patternless

rhythm as the noise in his head.

Outside, another shadow in the same building as last night, two floors higher

this time.

Marc looked down at his hands. They alone flickered. The rest of his vision was

unstable, but his hands actively fragmented, artifacts corrupting their image. He

squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his hands together to convince himself it wasn’t

real. He could feel them, whole and intact, minus the abrasions, but when he looked

again, they shivered and shook even more.

Marc’s ears clanged with a synthesized cacophony, so much so he couldn’t hear

anything. He crawled to the wall and leaned against it. His neck twinged, and he felt as

if it were seizing up. He pressed a hand against his throat. The only movement was his

pulse, regular and measured—uncommonly so even without regard to his predicament.

Another shadow, this time leaving the building next to the first. Marc thought he

saw tentacles dangling from it.

He attempted another diagnostic. This one struggled for awhile, and he felt heat

in his head. A beep: “Diagnostic failed.” But not before Marc caught the image of his

brain, now more than halfway overrun with circuitry.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Having a computer for a brain sounded pretty cool.

As a kid, Marc’s favorite show had been DigiMan, about a cyborg with a computer for a

brain. DigiMan was made of flesh, and lived among normal people, but when duty

called, he let his robotic side out.

DigiMan was cool.

DigiMan was a

Initializing...

work of fiction though. Anything looks cool when there are no

conseq s

uence

.

Initialization complete. Alerting harvester.

*******

The shadow floated up to the window, one prehensile manipulator sliding the window open. Metal and flesh ground together. Nerve endings, long blunted with a chemical cocktail, screamed in pain that would never be processed. The shadow had never known any other sensation. It remained unbothered, unfazed, uninterested.

A man lay on the floor, unconscious, but gently twitching.

The door was open. That would not do. TyleTech demanded secrecy. It mattered not who

knew, in fact the more the better to keep the rats in line. But who saw was a different story. The greatest strength of fear was uncertainty.

The shadow pulsed, not unlike a squid, and propelled itself to the door, pushing

it closed. Now for the main event.

Marc didn’t notice as the shadow came through the window. He didn’t notice as

the light landed on it, revealing it in full for the first time: a technorganic harvester, its

sensor array designed, most deliberately, to invoke terror. Tentacle-like appendages

hung from beneath it—clippers, scythes, hands.

Marc didn’t notice as the harvester closed the door and turned back towards him. He didn’t notice as it floated down to eye level with him. And he most certainly didn’t notice as, in one swift motion, the harvester sliced open his skull, removed the computer that once was a brain, and floated silently back out the window.

by Christopher Pipitone