I
A worker sat at the bottom of the stairs putting on his hole-ridden socks over his bruised and blistered feet. He had sometimes wondered why his feet had seen so much wear and tear, why his socks developed such great holes so quickly, and why the boilersuit he wore and the shoes that he was about to put on over his feet would become tattier after each day of work.
His name was Michael, and he assumed his job had something to do with manual labour. He was quite broad and strong, and those qualities would surely never be put to waste by the corporation he worked for: Terrahol. Still, he never knew for sure, for he was never awake or aware of himself when he was working.
He remembered from some evening a few nights before that his partner, Anna, had asked him whether the runners experienced the same thing. She asked whether they, too, would find themselves perplexed by the manner of their own state. Michael replied that he wasn’t sure. As humble workers, he thought, they could not even begin to imagine the daily routine of their superiors.
After putting on his shoes, Michael looked around him. The hallway within which he perched was lit by a dingy yellow bulb that hung from a fraying cable above. It exposed the grottiness of the place. The walls were cracked and painted a sickly brown. Damp had accumulated, and mould was forming in the corner of the ceiling. Spurred by Anna’s previous enquiries, Michael wondered whether the runners would find themselves in such a place. A home where the stench of damp and the sight of ugly, crack-ridden walls were as familiar to them as they were to him.
It was these thoughts that occupied him before the sudden sound of a knock. Michael arose and made for the door opposite him. He undid a rusty old latch and pulled the knob. The hinges whined as he swung it open. The glow of the morning sun, which hung low in the sky, flooded through into the hallway. With it, a large man was revealed on the other side.
He looked not unlike Michael. He was tall and broad. He wore the same boilersuit as Michael, which was as tatty as his own. His facial features were hard, and he was in his mid-thirties but looked close to fifty. His expression was one of, apart from anything else, exhaustion. Yet, his eyes captured something of an innocence. It was as if his body had been through hell, but his eyes had only seen a fraction of the turmoil. It was a familiar sight to Michael. He saw a similar thing in the mirror. His eyes looked as though they had been neglected, but not traumatised, or at least not as traumatised as the poor state of his body would otherwise indicate.
‘Morning, Michael,’ announced the visitor.
‘Hi Ted,’ Michael replied almost robotically.
‘Cor blimey,’ Ted spluttered suddenly, ‘looks to be a bright one today!’
Michael hardly reacted before uttering despondently, ‘not that we’ll see much of it.’
Despite his apparent weariness, Ted let out a small chuckle, his rotten old teeth rattling as he did, before placing a hand on Michael’s shoulder.
‘Dear old neighbour of mine,’ he exclaimed, ‘you must look on the bright side of things.’
He proceeded to tap at a small lump on the back of his neck, a lump which Michael and all the workers also sported.
‘At least this thing does all the work.’
II
From within the countless rows of old and dingy terraced housing, where they lived, Michael and Ted walked side-by-side through one of the streets. The whole place looked and smelled of abundant filth and decay. Yet, to them, it was simply the world in which home resided.
‘How’s yer lad?’ Ted asked as they both walked side-by-side down the street.
Michael smiled. ‘Oh, Paul? He’s good, been doing a lot of art at home recently.’
With some fondness, he remembered the evening before. He had arrived back home from work and was greeted by his son, who immediately planted a painting in Michael’s face that he had created earlier with his mother.
‘Look, Dad, look!’ Paul cried excitedly before even saying hello, ‘I made a painting! It’s a house, Dad, do you like it?’
Michael smiled and gently took hold of the small, slightly crumpled piece of paper that Paul had demanded soak up all his father’s vision. On it, he observed scruffy-looking painted shapes that resembled windows, a door, a roof, and the main body of a house. It was all painted in a watery black paint, and looked especially uninspired, but Michael was warmed entirely by it. It was not often that Michael would see anything discernible as art.
‘It’s brilliant, Paul!’
Michael found a nail jutting out of one of the crumbling walls in the hallway and poked it through the top of the painting.
‘There, now whenever anyone comes in here, they’ll see your art, Paul!’
It would have seemed impossible a few moments earlier for Paul’s grin to get any larger, but somehow it did as he looked up at the picture that now decorated the dilapidated place.
As Michael looked back at Paul’s face, his excitement and joy at the moment, he felt his heart sink into the ground. Paul was turning twelve years old soon, and that meant that, like Michael, Ted, Anna, and all the other workers, he’d too find a lump in the back of his neck, and Paul’s childhood would abruptly end.
III
‘Do you plan on having children, Ted?’ Michael asked.
‘One day,’ Ted replied, ‘won’t be much good of me not to, eh?’
‘Sometimes,’ Michael uttered, his head looking down at the pavement that glided past as they walked, ‘Anna asks me why we had Paul. Once upon a time, I would have said something like that, that it wouldn’t be much good of us not to.’
‘Well, it’s the way it is, isn’t it?’
‘But he’s our boy. Our son. As he’s grown, we’ve come to love him. It seems so wrong to say that we didn’t want him, and that we had him only because we felt a responsibility to.’
Ted didn’t respond. His face contorted into a strange shape. It was obvious to Michael that Ted couldn’t fathom what he meant. To want a child rather than to merely have a child seemed so bizarre for someone of their class.
‘Let me put it this way,’ Michael continued, ‘we’re friends, right? And we have little purpose in each other’s lives except that we’re fond of one another’s company. We both have partners, too. We have them, beyond the fact that we can have children with them, because we enjoy our being around them. So why do we see our children as lumps of flesh not to be connected with?’
Ted thought for a moment. As he did so, they came to the end of the street, and opposite them, across the road, was the local programming centre where they were both headed. It was an entirely ugly-looking building with no architectural effort put in whatsoever—such things, after all, were thought only appreciable by the runner class. It was an almost featureless white metal box, save for the slightly rusted edges, with a few windows littered about its façade. Ted looked at it for a moment and then returned his attention to Michael.
‘Having children is simply a means of replenishing the stock,’ he said coldly, ‘they’re like cattle, Michael. Nothing more, nothing less.’
IV
At the front of the programming centre was a big metal door that was rusted like the rest of the place. It was propped open with a small wooden wedge, and through the doorway, an accumulating crowd of workers, including Michael and Ted, passed.
Inside was a large, busy space lit intensely with white tubes of neon that stretched across the ceiling. It was about as white and as metal and as featureless as the exterior of the place. Workers bustled about the place as one large crowd, so much so that it was difficult to move without having to shuffle between countless shoulders and arms.
Michael had always been going to the same programming centre all his life, and he could well remember the dread and anxiety that he felt about the place when he was young. It was as if the environment reached into your soul and extracted any sense of hope.
Before long, Michael and Ted had separated. At the far end of the space, there were about half a dozen queues of workers standing. They, like him and Ted, sported boilersuits and boots that looked worse for wear. The ages varied incredibly. There was a handful there who looked almost seventy. Their mobility was lacking, their spines drooped forward, their hands trembled, their skin was thin and wrinkled, and they looked already exhausted. Moreover, a few of the others were plainly children who had only just come of age and could only have been about twelve or thirteen.
He looked at the children and could only see Paul. Soon, the boy, too, would no longer be able to stay at school and would find himself here. These thoughts clawed at Michael, but he pressed on through the busy crowd of people without a moment of hesitation. He pushed and shoved until he reached the end of one of the queues. Above the queue, a large sign hung with the word ‘Terrahol’ emblazoned across it in a bold and brutal font.
The various queues led into different archways. Each archway looked like a metal detector you’d find at airport security. One by one, workers would step through them. As they did, a sensor in the roof of the arch would scan the lump on the back of the worker’s neck, causing the worker’s nature to transform completely.
Any looseness in their body would dissipate. Rigidness would consume them. All human expression would depart, and they’d simply walk forward robotically with legs and arms moving in such a way as to maximise efficiency. For within the back of their necks was an implant. A chip. And in this activation room, under the archways, their chips were activated, their programs were uploaded, their jobs for the day were decided, and their autonomy was lost.
A worker was only good when unconscious. Their minds were considered by all, including the workers themselves, to be crude and unintelligent. Only their bodies were of value, and with the invention of the chip, their associated wills were no longer, as it was considered, a burden.
V
The last thing Michael remembered before his chip activated was the faint buzzing of the back of his neck as he looked before him. The queues went into small doorways through which Michael couldn’t easily see, but he assumed that was where he and the others would get carted off to work.
The sensation of working while the chip was activated could only be described as feeling deeply asleep. No noise or sound or sensation could wake you, only the deactivation of the chip. On occasion, while working, Michael would dream. He would dream of his childhood. Particularly, his parents. It was harder for them. The artificial intelligence that they used in the programming was more rudimentary at that point, and the chips themselves tended to break down.
They sometimes crashed, and if it happened in the middle of work, the worker would suddenly come to their senses and awaken to find themselves in the job. This was most distressing for some of the corporations, as they had some of the workers working on things that they’d prefer no one in the working class knew about. As his father’s experience had taught him, however, Michael well knew that the nightmare scenario was not to have the chip break down during work hours, but for it to act up beyond those hours.
Michael’s father had a particularly faulty chip, and it would, without provocation, start discharging signals into his brain. They would cause sudden and severe emotional and sensual misery. You knew they were about to come when you saw him, regardless of what he was doing beforehand, go oddly stiff and quiet. His eyes would glaze over, and his expression would freeze. The chip would momentarily numb his father, and his senses and his feelings would neglect him. After a few seconds of this apparent tranquillity, his father would suddenly cry and shriek. The chip, working incorrectly and without having a program, would force his father, for at least a few minutes, to suddenly feel everything that he had been briefly shielded from with an overwhelming intensity.
These experiences were traumatic for Michael. He remembered them from when he was a boy, and he would dream about them as an adult as he worked. He wished he could forget, but he couldn’t. Regularly, he’d have visions of his father, wailing awfully for help as everything he felt, emotionally and physically, overpowered him. The screams were terrible, and the way his father would scrunch his face in the agony he felt remained persistently in Michael’s mind.
He knew that the chips that they used now were of a better quality than then, but he still feared it might happen to him anyway. He still feared that, like his father, his chip would turn into a sort of torture device from which he could not escape.
VI
Michael awoke, as he had done innumerable times before, to find himself standing beneath another archway, but this time in the deactivation room. While he was unconscious for all of it, his day of work was over now, and he could go home.
He always disliked the hour after his deactivation and reawakening; his boilersuit would be moist with sweat, his eyes would feel slightly strained, his head would have a dull ache, and, worst of all as far as Michael was concerned, a funny taste would linger in his mouth. It was unlike anything else he had ever tasted. Something extremely sour and wholly disgusting. He had come to assume that the taste came from whatever they fed him while under the influence of the chip. All he knew was that whatever caused it was utterly gruesome.
Michael took a shaky step forward. The chip was programmed to prevent him from collapsing as soon as he awoke, but now he had to command his body and guide it to the exit. The room was much like the activation room. White, bright, and clinical. The door which led to the rows of terraces within which Michael lived was much like that which he had entered earlier in the day, rusty and propped open with a wedge.
Among the crowd of other workers who had also been deactivated, he pushed his way towards freedom. The air outside could hardly be called fresh; it was polluted and stank of something abominable around the suburbs where he lived, but it was better than the hot, stale air of the deactivation room. As he passed through the doorway, the air hit suddenly, and for all the stink and impurity of it, he took in a lungful and savoured it.
He didn’t bother to wait for Ted. The exact minute within the hour that they finished could vary wildly depending on where they were sent for work. And so, he crossed the road opposite the programming centre and reached the top of the street, this time, alone. As he did so, he saw something unusual.
Across the road, next to the programming centre, was a large patch of grass, upon which two men in suits were eyeing up the area, surrounded by a group of others in boilersuits who stood rigidly and protectively around the men in suits. The sight of workers at work was not too unusual for Michael; he’d see them packing on the buses outside the programming centre as they were driven away to their places of labour. If he needed to go to the local convenience shop, he would see one behind the till. On occasion, he’d see some sweeping the roads, repairing lampposts, or delivering mail. All with blank expressions on their faces. All unresponsive to stimuli. All entirely consumed in the purposes to which they were programmed.
The unusual element was the men in suits. They stood around pensively, one with folded arms, the other stroking his chin. Their clothes were clean, their faces were spotless, and their hair was tidy. Indeed, one of them had seemed to take a fancy to some sort of hair product that gave the man a slick haircut where no fibre looked out of place. Altogether, their appearance was entirely alien to Michael.
Furthermore, their expressions were not blank; one of them was frowning, and the other, the one with the distinctive haircut, seemed to have a more leisurely disposition as they stood discussing something with one another intermittently. As soon as he saw them, Michael knew they were runners.
He stopped and watched them for a moment. Though they were pensive, and though it must have been something of importance (anything involving runners was considered so), he noticed they had no stress or anxiety about them that Michael and the rest of his class had become used to. One of them must have shared a joke of some sort, and they both laughed genuinely. Michael watched as someone might stare at an animal in a zoo. As they chortled, one of them lifted their head quite randomly and caught Michael’s gaze. In a moment of surging embarrassment, Michael disregarded his curiosity and carried on down the street.
As a worker, you did not often see runners, at least not while you were awake. They lived in the big city centres, places of opulence, wealth, and status. They were not places for workers except for those with activated chips. Michael only knew about the city centres through old magazines and picture books he had from years gone by. Had he the money, he might have been able to purchase newer books or newer magazines with pictures taken more recently. He may even have been able to afford a television through which he could see the world as it was, not as it had been years ago. There was no rule against workers owning these things; they just never had enough money to afford them.
As Michael walked further down the street, his feet already feeling tired and sore from the day that had preceded, he thought about the runner who looked at him. He wondered if, after Michael had turned his back, the runner kept staring at him in just as much wonder as Michael stared at the runners. There were other workers about. Perhaps the runner thought nothing of it. Or perhaps, Michael thought, the runner regarded him with disdain for having looked at him. The runner must think of the workers as lowly, putrid things who were only necessary for their labour. He must have thought of Michael’s unregulated thinking as a waste of resources.
VII
Eventually, he approached his home. Before stepping forth to the front door, he looked at the place. His home, like all the others around, was covered in soot and dirt. Like earlier, he wondered if runners lived in such squalor. The cracks between the bricks had been filled with filth, and the pollution had darkened the red bricks into a dark brown. His eyes wandered to the windows. They were severely in need of a thorough clean, and the wooden frames around them were completely rotted.
Finally, he took a step forth, standing just in front of the front door. Like the window frames, it was wooden and rotted, though it had been covered over recently with a cheap green paint that was already starting to peel away. Once, there were squares of glass towards the top of the door that allowed a little light into their hallway, but they had since been smashed and replaced with bits of cardboard.
Gently, Michael knocked on the door. After only a moment, footsteps could be heard from the other side, and the movement of the lock behind the battered old doorknob began to sound. Gradually, the door opened and revealed a small boy dressed in a dirty old shirt and trousers. He had big blue eyes that peered innocuously through untidy, long brown hair. It was Paul.
After just a second of seeing his father, Paul lunged excitedly towards him. Michael, despite the aches and pains that now resided in his overworked body, caught the boy and held him in his arms.
‘Dad!’ the boy shouted delightfully.
‘Hey matey, had a good day?’ Michael replied, masking all weariness about him.
Paul, with great thrill, proceeded to inform his father of his day of exploits. He mentioned nothing about school; Paul’s excitement was always focused on his activities afterwards with his mother. For workers, school was little more than a few hours of being lectured to by very unemotive teachers, who themselves were workers under the influence of the chip.
The purpose of the school was to drill into the inner psyche of the child their place in the world. For workers, it was total subordination to the runners. The curious aspect is that worker children had this philosophy drilled into them, yet they seemed to possess, at least at a surface level, ignorance of it. Despite the teachings of the school, they still had something of a childish optimism about the future. This was why, despite the nature of his school life, he managed to continue to find joy in the world around him, even if there wasn’t much around to find that joy in.
One could wonder why schools had chosen to allow children a false sense of optimism while concurrently instilling the class boundaries in their subconscious, but it was something Michael never considered. All he knew was that children were happy until they turned twelve years of age, at which point childhood was over.
As Paul continued, with unrestrained enthusiasm, to explain how he played with his dirty old toys in the kitchen with his mother earlier, Michael saw Anna slowly enter the hallway from the kitchen. She did as she would always do after he arrived, she would simply stand, smile, and wait for Paul to finish obsessing over the day. This time, however, something was different. Michael couldn’t tell for sure. Maybe her eyes were not so bright, or her smile was not so great, but something was wrong.
VIII
Not long after arriving back home, Paul had gone upstairs to his room to continue playing with whatever bits and pieces he had to play with. Alone with Anna in the kitchen, Michael found himself leaning on the doorframe, watching Anna as she frantically tried to clean the place as much as she could. It seemed like a losing battle to maintain any sense of cleanliness about the place. All that could be used to clean the counters were old bits of cloth, and the floor could only be wiped with a splash of water from the sink and a mop that looked as decrepit and worn out as the rest of the house.
Michael, after watching Anna for a moment, took a few slow steps forward until he could place a hand on her shoulder.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said calmly.
Anna looked up at Michael as she was midway through mopping the floor. She gave a sort of smile that twitched slightly, as if it was a struggle for her to produce such an expression.
‘Nothing,’ she said with an unnerving eagerness, ‘nothing at all!’
Anna looked back down at the ground and continued scrubbing with the mop. Michael lifted his hand from her shoulder and stood, continuing to watch her as she cleaned obsessively. Before long, she stopped, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from one of her pockets, and pressed it firmly into Michael’s hands before returning to her cleaning.
Michael unfurled the paper. It was a letter addressed to Paul. He neglected to read another word of the letter, but he knew entirely its contents. Only one letter could be expected for Paul at this stage in his life; after all, he was nearly twelve.
‘Will be three in the morning on his birthday,’ Anna said coldly.
His thoughts scattered into a thousand pieces, and he couldn’t focus. He was, for a moment, transported beyond the walls of the kitchen and to some place dark and hopeless. It was confirmed. Paul would be chipped, and the boy’s childhood would come to an end.
Noticing Michael’s disassociation, Anna waved a hand in front of his face until he flickered back into life.
‘Huh?’ he spluttered, ‘sorry. Just… I don’t know.’
Anna frowned slightly, then turned back to cleaning. By now, she had run a piece of old fabric under the water in the sink and was wiping the counters, all of which were smothered in stains and marks that would not be expunged through any amount of housekeeping.
‘No point worrying about it,’ she said, ‘it’s how things are.’
Michael could feel his muscles tense, as if trying to contain an energy that he’d use to break anything he saw before him. He wanted to scream at Anna. He wanted to shout in unrestrained anger at her comment. Why was it fair? How could it be how things are? He wanted to growl and spit and shriek. Losing his child’s childhood in such a way made him feel as though he was losing his child altogether.
But he stopped himself. For all his emotional outrage at the thought of Paul being chipped sooner rather than later, his mind remained rational to all of it. Anna’s words were the words of truth. He knew as well as she did that this was how it was. They were workers, not runners, and this was their lot in life.
Before Michael could respond to Anna in any meaningful way, she looked up at him. A glance of entire understanding. She had plainly wrestled with similar thoughts the entire afternoon, but instead of making any particular comment on the fact, she simply finished her cleaning and announced that she needed to get ready for her night shift work.
IX
Michael couldn’t rid himself of Paul’s cries as the chip was implanted into him. In Michael’s head, the sound of Paul’s shrieks mixed with that of his memories of his father as his chip malfunctioned. He was entirely haunted. In some, slightly selfish way, Michael had hoped Anna would be the one to accompany the boy. However, given Anna’s nighttime shifts, and given Paul’s appointment being in the early hours of the morning (little concern was given towards the hours workers were appointed for these things), that was not to be.
On any other night, Michael and Paul would have been asleep in their little terraced pigeonhole; though workers would feel like they were asleep when their chips were activated, they still found their bodies needed that additional rest later. Michael often wondered how Anna managed to sleep so little during the day. She’d spend a few hours asleep while Paul was at school, and then she, or at least her body, would spend the rest of the hours wide awake.
This was one of the things Michael thought about as he walked Paul home. How things would all suddenly become so different. How Paul would soon spend so little of the day being mentally aware. Michael pondered that it may have been for the best. Given the conditions in which they lived. Given the challenges they faced to simply enjoy life. Michael wondered if it was indeed better to spend most of the hours of the day unconscious rather than awake.
Now that Paul was chipped, he would no longer attend school and was immediately placed on the labour register, ready for one of the corporations to select and employ him. Since Paul was still quite small, he’d likely be used for jobs that involved being in small spaces, like crawling inside machine ducts, repairing cables and wires in cramped underground tunnels, checking for leaks in narrow water lines, and other such work.
Michael looked down at Paul, whose face was utterly devoid of anything. The boy did not appear immediately sad or worried, but his childishness had gone. The back of his neck was now home to the unmistakable lump of the chip. Having only just been implanted, the lump sported a small cut through which the chip had been placed. The cut had been glued shut afterwards, but it remained red and swollen.
Michael couldn’t help but observe it and the pain it must have been inflicting on the boy. Yet, Paul’s expression continued to neglect any sort of emotion. His eyelids drooped in tiredness, and his mouth was just a thin line between his cheeks that were now quite rosy in the bitingly cold night.
‘Here,’ Michael suddenly uttered as they passed a local overnight convenience store, ‘I have a penny or two to spare, let’s get something nice.’
Paul stopped not far before Michael, when once the boy would have jumped excitedly at such a proposition, he simply rotated himself robotically to look at the storefront. Before, the boy would have looked in awe at the possible treats inside, like chocolate or fizzy drinks, but now he seemed to focus more on the condition of the store that housed them all.
The shop was built into one of the terraced houses, and its facade consisted of a doorway and a plethora of windows within which sat a few items that one could hope to purchase at the place. It was as old and as shabby as the rest of the terraced block. The door and window frames were falling apart, a few of the windows themselves were smashed, and those which weren’t were either cracked or smudged. It never bothered the boy before, but Michael could tell Paul’s whole perception of the world had changed.
As they stepped in, they were greeted with rows upon rows of shelves holding various bits and pieces. It was mostly essentials that were available to buy, like canned foods, cleaning liquids and utensils, and other similar items. The goods themselves looked pristine, but the shelves on which they were perched were dilapidated, like the rest of the shop. Some were held up with bits of tape or fast-acting glue, some had been haphazardly nailed into place, and some of the shelves were using products underneath as their support. At the very back of the shop, in a small corner which was hardly lit by the lights which flickered dimly about the place, were the shelves with the luxury items.
They both wandered over to the dimly lit corner. As they approached, Michael became increasingly anxious that this spontaneous excursion into the shop could bring something of the old child back. Once arriving at the luxury items, Michael knelt next to Paul and began speaking to him timidly.
‘So, matey, you can have any of the lollipops or fizzy drinks.’
‘What about the chocolate?’ Paul uttered coldly.
Michael didn’t answer immediately. He dove his hand into his pocket and felt around for any change. What he retrieved were two small copper coins, both of which had begun to oxidise and turn green.
‘Sorry matey,’ Michael sighed heavily.
Paul didn’t seem to react at first, but then, slowly, he reached out and pulled one of the lollipops from the shelf. It was bright red, Paul’s favourite colour. Michael smiled hopefully and returned to his feet, gently placing a hand on Paul’s back.
‘Come on, let’s buy you it.’
They turned towards the till at the end of the row of shelves, and Paul froze. Michael looked at Paul, noticing the boy’s hand clutching the lollipop. White knuckles. Paul’s expression remained unemotional, but his hands were tightly clenched, and his gaze would not shift.
‘Paul? What’s wrong?’
Michael had not yet noticed what Paul had.
‘Mum…’
Michael turned and followed the boy’s gaze to the till. Attending to the till, Michael realised immediately, was Anna.
Horror pierced through Michael’s body. This was her night shift. The chip had been activated, and both could see her looking at them blankly. Through the eyes where once they found a partner and a mother, they now found a program. They blinked, with each equally spaced by a few seconds. Her soul was closed, but her body remained upright. She observed them. Scanned them. Waited for them.
Michael wanted to take Paul’s hand and run. Run before the thing which looked like Anna could speak. Before it could ask them if they needed some help, or whether they needed a bag, or how much money they’d need to pay for the lollipop. She would do so as if they were never previously known to her. As if she had never met them before. As if she had never cared for them. As if they were nothing to her.
Michael looked back at Paul. Afraid now, not just at this unholy sight, but by how the boy would react to seeing what it truly meant to be chipped. Paul still exhibited little expression on his face, but he grew ever paler, and his knuckles grew ever whiter.
X
‘In you go,’ Michael said softly to Paul, attempting to disguise any of his own anxiety.
Paul shuffled in through the front door quietly. His face remained devoid of emotion. In the darkness, Michael ran his hand across the wall. He found a familiar crack and followed it, eventually finding the light switch he knew was at the end.
He switched it on, and the room was once more consumed by a dingy yellow light, and he looked at Paul. Paul simply stood in the middle of their hallway, looking around at the poor condition of the place as if it were the first time he noticed. The painting the boy had made before was still hanging precariously on one of the walls, but it generated no pride or glee that it once would have.
Michael was increasingly fraught inside. His dismay was mounting more solidly now. With the absence of the shock of seeing Anna earlier, or the anxiety of being with Paul when he was chipped, he now remained only with a deepened feeling of loss. To his dismay, Michael, also looking at the painting, realised he’d never see a new painting from Paul again.
Michael took off his jacket, dirty and old like everything else, and hung it on a warped hook that dangled loosely from the wall. He helped Paul take off his own jacket and then knelt to Paul’s height. Placing both hands on Paul’s shoulders and looking Paul straight into his eyes, Michael, through turmoil, began to speak.
‘Things will be different. I know you know that. Your life will never be the same. It will be hard. God, it will be hard. But I tell you. I promise you. For as long as we live, your Mum and I will love you. We will always love you. When things hurt. When things get painful. When you wonder why you’re still alive. Remember that. It’ll make all the difference. I promise.’
For the first time since he was chipped, Paul’s eyes began to water.
XI
A week later, Paul had received his employment, and he was walking with his father to the programming centre for the first time. Unusually, Ted wasn’t with them. Michael had asked him to go on before them. Ted didn’t understand, but did as Michael asked, regardless.
Paul’s hand shook in Michael’s. They watched as the great white metal box at the end of the street grew and grew before them, until they were just across the road from it. Periodically, Michael would peer down at his boy and watch his expression. There was something of a deep fear crossed with an ultimate resignation in him. His eyes were wide and fixed on the building in front of them.
‘Hey,’ Michael whispered, squeezing the boy’s hand, ‘I’m right here, it’ll be okay.’
Paul looked up at his father, gave a small, brave smile, and nodded.
‘Yeah, I’ll be okay, Dad,’ the boy said, his voice trembling slightly.
They crossed the road and vied through the crowd to get through the small doorway into the activation room. Michael could feel the eyes of the others around him. He could sense them, seeing the rawness of the wound at the back of Paul’s neck. He felt the pity and the condolence in their expressions as sure as he felt the ground beneath his feet. All the workers had gone through this. All the workers remember when their chips were implanted. All the workers remember the week they spent in limbo, between school and work, waiting for one of the corporations to employ them. All the workers remember the first time they came to the activation centre. All the workers looked back on those memories as if they were traumatic, not least because they were.
They arrived in the activation room. Before them, like Michael had known all his life, the place was rammed with other workers moving about to get into their queues. Michael, still holding his hand, guided Paul through the mass of bodies. The brightness of the white neon lights seemed to overwhelm the boy. He had probably never been somewhere in his life where the lights were working so well. Nevertheless, Michael gently moved him towards the queue for Paul’s own employer corporation: Helowell.
While waiting for his own chip to be activated in the Terrahol queue, Michael looked to his left slightly. He could see Paul gradually getting closer and closer to the archway that would activate his chip for the first time. Michael’s focus could not be averted in that moment. Not long before his own had to be activated, he watched as Paul finally made it to the front of his queue and stood in the archway. Nothing happened. Then suddenly, Paul, Michael’s little boy, who only just over a week ago was so full of life and childish optimism, went rigid. Entirely rigid. Inhumanly rigid. And with no wasted energy, the boy walked calmly forward.
Michael had little time to process what he had just seen before he found himself beneath the archway with his own chip starting to buzz. And, just as suddenly as Paul went rigid and lifeless, so did Michael.
XII
Michael dreamt. His mind was swimming in unconscious thought as his body was being operated by the chip. He was dreaming of life at home, sitting around the dinner table in the kitchen with Anna and Paul. All was peaceful and wonderful. Unusually, the kitchen was clean and bright. There was not a crack or a streak of dirt or a stray cobweb to be seen. The food on the table was plentiful, more than any of them had seen in their lifetimes.
Michael took a bite of whatever was on the plate before him. He couldn’t discern what any of the food was. At one moment, there seemed to be rich meats, and at another, fruits of awesome juiciness. Nevertheless, he took a bite, and it was divine. Utterly divine. He looked at the others.
Anna had regained some youthfulness in her complexion. She had seemed to have been released from her bondage of stress and anxiety. She was not merely Michael’s partner. Through some miracle, they could afford to be wedded. Their son looked equally as peaceful and at ease. His bright eyes that screamed with optimism and childlike wonder about the world had returned. What heaven was this? What world did Michael inhabit?
He, instinctively, raised his hand and felt the back of his neck. Smooth. Entirely smooth. No lump. No evidence of a chip. Nothing. Just smooth skin under his fingers. As liberated as one could feel in a dream, Michael was. He felt himself smile at the others. It was different this time. He had smiled before. He had smiled many times, but at all times, they had masked some unease. He had become used to smiles that ran only skin deep, but this was deeper. This smile was genuine. This smile was wholesome in its delight and comfort.
This must be how runners felt. How they saw the world. This must be what it was like to live with entire agency. Entire freedom. Entire control. Blissful, wonderful, control. In that moment of paradise, Michael awoke.
Wholly unlike the dreamland in which he had inhabited moments ago, Michael found himself in a dark, dank space that smelt of something vile and revolting. Sounds invaded his ears of loud banging, drilling, clanging, and other such harmonies. Small windows near the ceiling, all covered in dirt and muck, allowed only a sliver of natural light into the room.
He was surrounded by other workers, all in rows amongst conveyor belts that moved various bits of machinery that were being worked on. All were completely rigid and inhuman in their robotic movements as they held and used various kinds of tools and apparatus. Michael felt his chip buzz slightly in his neck before it gradually stopped. He looked down at his hand; he, too, was holding something. It was something Michael had never seen before, a short metal rod attached to the ceiling by a dusty old cable. He could feel a heat emanating from the tip of the rod, and bits of molten metal dripped from the end.
In a slight daze after waking up so suddenly, Michael couldn’t tell whether he was dreaming or whether he was in the world of the living. Within a few short moments, however, with the usually awful taste now becoming more and more apparent to him in his mouth, he realised he had awoken into a world of which he should not have been aware. His chip had malfunctioned, just like his father’s used to, and he stood in complete awareness and control of himself.
Michael looked about him. The entire place was abhorrent. The floor was smothered in grime and filth. Excrement from some small rodent littered the place. If Michael moved his feet, the soles of his shoes seemed to squelch on the ground he stood on. Of all the things Michael had wondered about the conditions in which he worked, he had not assumed they would be this horrendous.
‘Good god,’ Michael whispered to himself, realising the world about him in growing horror.
The robotic workers around him seemed to have no such issue with the place. They worked as they had been programmed by the chips to. It was as if everyone were operating as a single system. The twisting of screwdrivers, the hitting of hammers, and the running of drills all seemed to happen in unison. Even the breathing of the workers seemed to be entirely in sync.
Finally, Michael looked down towards the conveyor belt before him. Passing by were small squares of metal, with bits of circuitry and wiring attached to them. Plainly, Michael thought, he was using the strange rod in his hand to do something to them. Perhaps it was something to do with the wiring or the strange circuitry on them.
He picked one of the small squares up and felt it with his fingers. Suddenly, the small square had become altogether familiar to him. He had felt something similar countless times before. If he were to run his hand across the back of his neck again, he would feel the unmistakable lump caused by something not unlike the circuitry in his hand. Michael realised he was working on a conveyor belt of chips that would eventually be inserted into the necks of other workers.
He held the chip for a moment. So small and so delicate, yet so powerful. At that moment, Michael heard gleeful laughter pass from beyond a doorway that sat at the end of the room. They must have been runners. On the other side of the door, it would probably have been paradise, as Michael had dreamed. This was not something lost to Michael, as he thought about the runners, who must have had little care for the conditions in which he and the other workers worked. He thought about the runners he remembered laughing as they surveyed the grass near the programming centre, and the lack of world weariness about their faces.
Then, quickly, he thought of the face of his partner, Anna, whose own face had been aged by the unforgiving society in which they lived. He thought of his own face he’d catch in the mirror before leaving for work. The lines were etched deep into his forehead. Countless wrinkles full of ingrained dirt. And his eyes. When before he would have regarded his eyes as fresh compared to his battered and bruised body, he knew that he’d now find some new weariness about them whenever he looked again in the mirror. He thought of the shrieks of his father in pain as his own chip failed him. The traumatised screams that’d come from his old lips. And finally, he thought of his son. Paul. The boy whose childhood had been so awfully stripped away simply because he was born into the wrong class.
A realisation came to Michael. He realised, even though he was unsure entirely what the rod in his hand was for, he could use it to sabotage the chips before him. They were so small and so delicate. It would be easy. And the impact could be extraordinary. Should he sabotage the whole stock, he’d potentially disrupt a good chunk of the system. Hundreds or even thousands of sabotaged chips could be inserted into workers if Michael did this right. The runners, Michael knew, would never realise anything was wrong with the chips until they were activated. No worker, in the runner’s mind, could be capable of such an act of resistance.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have led to much. Perhaps it wouldn’t have led to anything. But Michael, at the very least, was suddenly enamoured by the prospect of beating the runners at their game. At outwitting them now that he had control over his thoughts.
Still, Michael had to battle the programming. Not that which was installed on the chip, but that which was beaten into him by a lifetime of oppression. To be able to rebel, Michael had to first put aside all acceptance that he was, in fact, inferior to the runners. He had spent his existence believing so. He had resigned to it even before he realised any different.
He firmed his grasp of the rod and placed the chip back down on the belt before him. He positioned the rod and held it barely an inch above the chip. He imagined himself ramming the rod into the chip. He imagined the smoke billowing from the tip of the metal tool as it burned into the circuitry. He hesitated. His hand shook. He thought to himself, ‘Should I be less than the runners, then this act would be foolish, as all acts of a conscious worker are. Should I be equal to them…’
He thought and he wondered. His hand quivered. His decision, without the influence of the chip, was finally made.