The Intruder

by Greg Krehbiel

  * * *

  When he came to he had a dull pain in his temple and his head was swimming. He tried to pull himself up but a hand restrained him.

  "Don't try to move yet," a female voice explained. "In a minute you can lie on your back. After your head clears, Dr. Berry will give you your first implant lesson."

  Jeremy felt nauseated and didn't want to speak. He relaxed against the pads on the implanting device and opened his eyes, expecting to see a wicked piece of medical equipment inches from his face, but he saw nothing at all.

  "I can't see," he said, hoping he wouldn't throw up, and suddenly afraid that he had gone blind.

  "The room is dark," the woman said. "Don't worry, you're fine. The microfilaments are all in place, but your eye will be sensitive to light for about an hour. Here," she said, placing one hand behind his head and another on his shoulder, "let's try to sit you up very gently, okay?"

  He complied, again feeling a rush of dizziness and nausea, but it cleared soon enough. The nurse gently lowered him onto his back.

  "Rest here a few minutes. I'll be back to check on you soon."

  He heard a soft click and noticed a pale green light around the floor boards -- just enough for the nurse to see her way out. He closed his eyes and thought about nothing, wandering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness.

  * * *

  "How do you feel?" Dr. Berry's voice broke the silence. Jeremy wasn't certain if he had been sleeping or not.

  "When I lay still I feel okay, except for a dull ache on the left side. I'm not sure if I should try to sit up."

  His youthful confidence was subdued now. He didn't feel like the brash young man who wanted to charge ahead. He felt like the sick school boy who wants to be pampered.

  "Don't sit up yet. Let's see how you do with light first. Are your eyes open?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell me if they begin to hurt," she said as she slowly raised the intensity of the ceiling lights. Jeremy looked steadily at the instrument table against the side wall. He remembered that a few of the handles were different colors, and he wanted to watch them change from shades of gray in the darkness to their natural colors as the light increased, but he never got that far.

  "Ah, that's beginning to hurt," he said when it was just light enough for the white walls of the room to appear a dull gray.

  "That's good. Try to sit up now, slowly, and see how you feel."

  He took a deep breath and cautiously sat up, keeping his hands ready to catch himself if he fainted.

  "I'm okay. Better than I thought," he said. "Does everybody go through this when they get these things?"

  "Not everybody does it this way, remember? If you're patient, and let the implant secrete the microfilaments at its normal rate, there's no discomfort at all.

  "Are you ready to start with some basic lessons?" she asked.

  Jeremy nodded and then shook his head, confused.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "Your lips are red."

  Dr. Berry looked confused by the comment.

  "You can't see colors in the dark. You stopped turning up the lights when everything was still black and white, but I can see colors now." He wondered if the implants had altered his vision.

  Laughter and surprise touched the corners of Dr. Berry's eyes.

  "That's because I didn't stop turning up the lights. I just set them on a more gradual increase."

  Jeremy nodded and laughed at himself. "Okay, I'll stop playing junior detective."

  Dr. Berry reached for his temple with her index finger. He noticed a subtle, fresh, floral scent as her arm passed by.

  "Okay, this is the start-up switch and the emergency off button," she said as she rubbed her finger around the circumference of a lentil-sized disk. "Put your hand here so you can feel it." He did, and could just feel it under his skin.

  Dr. Berry pushed his finger down, compressing the switch. There was a sudden buzz in his head, followed by a moment of dizziness and confusion while Dr. Berry's hands gently held his head still.

  "It's alright," she said, much as she had the other day. "Just relax. Everything's fine. It'll pass."

  The sensations that filled his head when the implant turned on were like nothing he had experienced before. It felt as if he were extremely drunk, and yet more wide-awake and alert than he had ever been. His head swam, but he felt as if all his senses were more keen, more acutely aware of everything they felt. Nothing in his line of sight changed, but he was sure he could discern more colors and detail in everything he saw. Even the skin of Dr. Berry's arm seemed to hide a myriad of hues and shades that he had never experienced before, and every pore and hair on her skin was sharply in focus.

  But almost as suddenly as it began, the altered vision faded and colors returned to normal. The sensation was not unlike a rush of adrenaline, which sharpened the senses for a time, but quickly faded. He wondered if he had really seen those things, or if it was a trick of the implant. He was tempted to think that for a moment he saw things as they really were, and was now disappointed that his normal vision had returned.

  As the odd sensations faded, he noticed something that looked exactly like the screen of Dr. Berry's workstation floating in the air about two feet in front of him. He reached out to touch it, and then stopped, realizing it was an image from the implant.

  "So you can see it," Dr. Berry said. "Good. I'm going to ask you a series of questions about what you see. Are you ready?"

  Jeremy nodded.

  "Is it moving or still?" she asked.

  "Still up and down, jiggling slightly left to right."

  "You'll learn to control that. Is it translucent or opaque?"

  "I'm not, ... I think it's translucent, but it changes. When I try to look at it, it seems opaque, but I can look straight through it if I try."

  "Very good. Can you read the date and time in the upper right-hand corner?"

  "Barely. Eleven ten a.m. June 5th, 2065, I think."

  "Very good. Now I'm going to lead you through some of the set-up programs, but that means I need to be able to see what you're seeing, or rather, what you're supposed to be seeing."

  She picked up a portable terminal from the cart that held the implanting device and powered it up. Jeremy watched the screen as Dr. Berry keyed in a series of commands. The screen on the terminal changed to match what he was seeing in his own, internal monitor. It was odd to see both screens at the same time.

  "First, Jeremy, you need to send the 'cursor' command."

  He hadn't used that one, but the procedure was simple enough. He had to think the word with the proper command accent. He had chosen for his command accent his father's tone of voice when he was calling Jeremy, or one of the animals, in from the fields. His voice had a characteristic ring to it, and Jeremy could imagine it easily, but, as with so many other command words, it was a little hard to imagine his father yelling 'cursor,' so he pretended it was the name of one of the goats.

  Immediately a bright orange dot with a subtle, dim cross-hair appeared in the center of both screens -- the one in his left eye and the one on the terminal. He tried to move it with his eyes and it shot to the left of the screen. He tried to compensate and it continued to jump around, out of control.

  "That's the idea. Practice that for a while. I'm going to get us both a glass of water. You're supposed to drink a lot of fluids for the next 24 hours while the implant tries to talk to your brain."

  * * *

  The nausea and discomfort from the implant faded quickly as Jeremy continued the hour-long training session. He finished the introductory lesson and learned how to find the remaining five lessons in the self-tutor program, which he could finish on his own time. Dr. Berry was about to usher him out the door, but he had one more question.

  "How do I sever the link with that terminal over there?" It still displayed an exact replica of what he saw on his implant, and he found it disconcerting to be monitored like that. People in the Community were in
stinctively resistant to the idea of submitting to someone else's supervision and care.

  "What are you planning on watching tonight, Mr. Mitchell, that you don't want your doctor to see?"

  "That's really not the point, is it?" he asked, becoming slightly suspicious. "Am I supposed to leave that connection on?"

  "Why don't you leave it on for a little while. It's my job to monitor how well you adapt to the implant, especially for these first few days. I'll check in on you from time to time today, but you can cut it off before you go to sleep. You can shut off everything with 'clear all,' but the right way to do it is to place the connection in your active window and send 'discard.' You'll still be in diagnostic mode with me, but I won't be able to see everything you're doing."

  He didn't like being in diagnostic mode either, but he didn't want to push things too far. He nodded his assent, smiled at Dr. Berry and went to say good-bye to talk to Dr. Jenkins. He'd neglected to see him last time, as he'd asked, and wanted to make it up. Besides, in the Community you never left until you said goodbye to everyone you knew.

  * * *

  "Occasional dizziness is an understatement," Jeremy said aloud to no one in particular as he walked down the five brick stairs from the landing of Dr. Berry's office to the concrete sidewalk. His mental focus on the implant training lessons had taken his attention away from his discomfort, but now that he was back on the street, it was returning.

  He gripped the black, wrought-iron handrail and steadied himself, taking a few breaths to clear his head. He tried looking around, up and down the street, afraid that even casual head movements might bring the nausea back.

  Satisfied that he was okay for the moment, he started walking carefully south, towards the Armory and Alehouse, which was ten blocks away. The dull throb in his left temple made him wonder if he should get a taxi, as Dr. Jenkins had almost insisted.

  I'll just go slow.

  But his short interview with Dr. Jenkins had left him a few things to think about. He seemed unnaturally curious about Jeremy's case, and asked him to report anything unusual.

  Either implant psychosis is more common than Dr. Berry has led on, or there's something else strange about me.

  He suddenly remembered Dr. Berry's comment that he had a slightly enlarged occipital region. Might that be a cause for concern?

  A sudden jab of pain took his attention back to his implant. Dr. Jenkins told him that the best medicine for the pain was going through the training exercises. He had a theory, he told Jeremy, that using the very portions of the brain that were affected by the implant ameliorated the side effects.

  Jeremy was relieved to discover that all the commands he had learned for the audio implants were subsumed into the functions of the visual implant, but they were magnified. When he put the command accent on 'send,' a blank screen, like a sheet of note paper, appeared directly ahead at about chest level. As he thought a message, the words typed across the page. But the entire image was translucent, as if the page were a lightly frosted glass and the letters were light streaks of charcoal. If he concentrated on the paper, it would become more substantial, almost blocking his vision of the things beyond, but never quite, since the images from the implant were only in one eye. The paper seemed opaque when he closed his right eye and concentrated on it, but he couldn't be certain, for as soon as he tried to see the things behind the paper the image would fade. The implant knew what he was looking at and automatically adjusted its imaging system to compensate.

  "Hey mister, would you mind standing someplace else," a voice said.

  Jeremy looked up and realized he was standing in loading zone. He had no idea how long he had been there, looking at one thing or another with one or both eyes. He gave the driver a sheepish grin and moved along.

  * * *

  He walked for hours, finding it easier and easier as the day went on. As he became more proficient with the cursor, he began to follow links all over the hole. He could hardly believe how much information was out there.

  In the late afternoon he found a library of old movies. Some of them were things he had watched with his parents, and since the copyright had expired, they were available free of charge. He sat on a park bench and watched "To Catch a Thief."

  Chapter 4

  "Where's my appetite?" Jeremy said to the ceiling as he lay in bed at 7:30 -- an uncharacteristically late hour for him to rise. In the Community he would have been up by 5:30 to see to his father's goats before heading off to work. But he wasn't expected at the university until 10:00 -- so late in the day, he thought -- and he didn't have much to do until then.

  Well, I guess I better eat, he decided as he rolled out of bed and made his way toward the shower. In five minutes he was washed, dressed and out the door. He left the Armory and Alehouse and headed south on North Capital Street to a restaurant he had seen on one of his walks. It looked clean, popular and cheap, and that was what he wanted. After a few minutes he spied the telltale emblem -- two yellow curved structures that formed an 'm.' It almost smelled like breakfast at his dad's house, just a little more sanitized.

  The rush-hour traffic had stacked the street three deep with hovercars in both the north-bound and south-bound lanes. Jeremy stared for a few minutes at the odd site. One row of vehicles remained at ground level, the next lined up at 15 and the next 30 feet off the ground. Each row formed a perfect line, as if the cars were riding on an invisible road. Most of the windows were dark, but every once in a while Jeremy could see a rider through the window, as if he was in his own little world, drinking a cup of coffee or just staring -- probably reading the news on his implant, Jeremy thought -- or napping. The vehicles passed each other like cogs in a huge machine, and not at all like people.

  Horses are better than hovercars, Jeremy thought. At least you could smell the air and see the world and talk to your neighbor when you were on the back of a horse. The stark contrast between riding Billy, his Palomino, and sitting in one of these automated contraptions seemed like an icon of the reason the Community broke off from Society. It wasn't as if the Community couldn't have built a hovercar -- it had the scientific knowledge and the mechanical capability -- it just wasn't the way people in the Community chose to live. They had machines for some jobs, but for most things, horses or other animals were simply better; more personal, more natural, more humanizing. You couldn't be kind to a hovercar, or care how it felt on a cold winter's day. Jeremy was sure the lack of horses had a darkening effect on the collective mind of Society.

  Technology simply wasn't the answer to everything. The Community knew that; Society didn't. In Society, technology was the unquestioned means to achieve any goal. More than that, technology often separated goals from their natural means. If someone in Society was concerned about his weight, he ate specially engineered diet food. In the Community, he just ate less, or he lived with being fat. No-alcohol beer, caffeine-free coffee, fake sugar and fat, contraception -- they were all Society's efforts to strip the undesired elements from the natural world. The Community hadn't rejected that principle per se -- they used suntan lotion to protect their skin -- it just wasn't the way they saw life. Life was a matter of participating with the natural order -- cultivating it and training it -- not cheating it, or breaking it into its parts and rearranging it.

  As he thought about these things, walking itself became a kind of sacrament to Jeremy. It was his affirmation of Community values -- of living life the way it ought to be lived -- in the midst of hovercars.

  He also realized that his walks were getting a little easier. He was less distracted by the implant, but there were still a few things to get used to. Ghost images, for example. Sometimes, especially on his first day, noise in the communications signal came through the implant as strange, black blobs. As his brain learned to communicate with the implant, and since the implant was connected to his optic nerve, the "noise" was visible. The first time he saw one he thought it was a huge bird. Dr. Berry assured him that they were common and would go away
after a while.

  As Jeremy passed the huge yellow 'm,' he wondered what he was supposed to do to get some food. He entered slowly and looked around, trying to take in as much as possible. To his relief, there was a printed menu on the wall near the kitchen. He supposed he could have ordered ahead of time with his implant, but he wasn't sure how all that worked yet. Besides, he was in no hurry, and he craved some kind of human interaction, even if it was just placing an order.

  He decided on coffee, juice and a muffin, and he chose to pay with cash: he didn't need it anymore, and he wanted to use up what he had left. When Jeremy offered his coins, the attendant smiled at the novelty, and Jeremy noticed that several other people in the restaurant watched as he handed over the three blue disks. The attendant looked at them carefully, as if he hadn't seen any for a long time, and then handed back two yellows and one red. Jeremy took his change and his food and sat down, ignoring the eyes that followed him to his seat. He looked up, on pretense of watching the passers-by through the window, but intending to cow some of the more curious spectators into minding their own business.

  The packaging on his breakfast had him fooled, but he wasn't willing to fumble with the coffee while half the restaurant was watching him out of the corner of their eye, so he started with the juice, which was more straight-forward. When he was confident that interest in his visit had worn thin, he began to experiment with the white plastic lid on the coffee cup. He wasn't getting anywhere.

  "Hi. Can I help?" a friendly female voice interrupted.

  Jeremy looked up to see a slightly bedraggled but cheerful-looking girl -- or was she a woman? -- smiling at him. He motioned to the chair opposite the small table. "Please, join me," he said, craving some company. Besides, she was pretty, if a little young. Jeremy still hadn't met many people in Society.

  "Thanks," she said, and took the coffee cup out of his hand, tilting it so the cap faced him. "You do it like this," she said as she held the bottom steady and twisted the top in a counter-clockwise direction. Steam poured out of a half-inch hole on one side as she handed him the opened cup.