Utopian Uprising: Prisoner of the Mind

by Brian Craft

“Flick your finger next to it.” GL stares with wide-eyed anticipation. “Don’t touch it.”

  Orion flicks his finger over the edge of his shirt, and the loose fabric moves to follow him like a magnet moving another magnet from inches away.

  “That shit,” GL says.

  He holds his hand over the shirt, careful to not touch it. It wiggles slightly as if some little mouse is burrowing underneath. He waves his fingers back and forth very slowly and the fabric arches upward, quaking slightly, and the shirt gravitates toward his fingertips where it sticks against his skin.

  He looks over at GL. “I couldn’t do that before.”

  “Now you can,” she replies.

  He leans his back against the glass and rubs his temples gingerly. Memories still jockey for position in his mindscape. He can’t concentrate for long and even the little trick with his shirt seemed to amplify the scattered fragments in his mind.

  “What do you remember?” GL asks. “After you got out of Icarus.”

  Orion inhales deeply, welcoming the question into his head with the chance to jog his own mind. As memories return to him he relays what happened. Their escape, the wild memories flying around in the Exam Room, and Iris smashing the controls. Then he comes to the critical event. “No one ever fought for me like that. She smashed the panel to try and release me. She screamed, then this incredible slicing pain carved right through my brain like a meat cleaver, over and over, like a thousand times in an instant. Right after, an unbelievable sensation of pure ecstasy took over and carried me away. I could see stars swirling in unbelievable numbers and entering my eyes to swarm in my head, my ears filled with this high pitch ring that grew louder and louder until it’s all I knew. The entire collected sensation zipped like a lightning bolt down my spine and I could feel it penetrate each cell of my whole body individually. It seemed to last a thousand years. Then in the next second, nothing.”

  GL stares at him, inspecting him like a curiosity at a freak show. He expression is a mix of confusion and amazement. “Well you been laying there soaking up whatever happened, for about three days,” GL says. “They haven’t let anyone out of their cells since. Except Iris.”

  Iris. He winces, forcing his eyes shut. The thought of her cuts through everything. Her memory clarifies his mind. “Is she okay?” he asks.

  “Are any of us?” she replies.

  “I know about her,” Orion says.

  “What does that mean?” GL asks.

  “I have memories of her life in my head,” he replies. “I can see parts of her. What’s important to her. What happened.”

  “You fried your brain, kid,” she states.

  “I know what’s happening here.” He turns to look at GL. “I know what Burroughs is doing. Those sessions in the exam room, he’s deleting memories from us and saving them in his computer. He’s reordering our remaining memories so he can open holes, rework things to create new streamlined pathways. He has thousands of people here. In this building. Millions of their memories.”

  “You telling me those are in your skull now?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he states certainly. “They’re just regular people. Citizens with lives and dreams and jobs and families.”

  “And fears,” she adds.

  “And fears,” he agrees. “I see their thoughts, hopes, and desperation. I know about them. I’m in their bedrooms and at their jobs. I’m present inside their minds, in their memories.”

  “I never heard of anything like that before. Are you still you?” she asks tentatively.

  Orion stares away into space as if he’s seeing a thousand lives through the lens of his mind. “I’m still me,” he says. “And I’m them.”

  “What the hell are we doing here?” GL presses.

  Orion snaps back to the present. "He's building his Icarus machine with us, but others are plugged into the building itself. The whole thing is a broadcaster for Icarus."

  “For Burroughs,” she corrects.

  "He's taking the telemetry of Hivemind to a whole new level," he continues. "All the mood enhancement and sleep boosting have been paving the way. He wants to turn the entire city into a permanent sleepwalking clockwork. People turned into pieces in the machine." His own last statement gives him pause. "Resource management. With him in charge."

  “Slaves,” she says, putting a specific point on it.

  “I saw in Burroughs thoughts, too,” he says. “I was in his head.”

  “How do you know you’re not imagining this entire thing?” she replies. “You been laying there like a zombie for days, talking shit, making no sense. I mean you just told me you saw galaxies in your brain. Not to mention all the shit Burroughs plugs into us. Convince me. Convince me you’re not a burned-out circuit. Or worse.”

  "Joshua," Orion states. "That's your boy's name, isn't it?"

  “How do you know that? I never told you his name,” she glances around his cell like she’s looking for someone else, someone watching, and then shuts the window between them.

  Orion looks at the glass where her eyes disappeared, and a large clear circle appears without him touching the glass. GL grips her knees to her chest protectively and stares back at him, searching briefly for where he’s contacting the surface.

  “What the hell are you?” GL barks. “Get out of my cell!”

  “I have memories from your life in my head, too,” he informs her. “I see them. I see you in the data center at Societal Services. I see you see me in the hallway.”

  She moves close, unsure what to make of this. Her fear and tension grind her lips together and drive daggers through her eyes. If the glass wasn’t there, she might spring on him.

  “No,” he states.

  “No what?” she snaps.

  “I’m not working for Burroughs,” he says. “And you’re not dreaming. Or inside Icarus.”

  GL’s expression softens as she glances briefly over her shoulders before snapping her gaze back on him. She asks, “How did you know I’m thinking that?”

  “He deleted our core memories to create a void he can fill,” Orion explains. “Then he reordered things to rewire us. He’s evolving our minds to plug into Icarus like perfectly clean, clear circuits. Channels. Burroughs unlocked something in me. Probably in all of us. You too. Then Icarus opened a door to the revolution.”

  “I heard you,” she whispers, moving closer to the glass like she is ready to tell a secret. Her hands pressed against the glass, her eyes wide. “Clear, clear, clear.”

  “Minds as one,” he agrees. “Burroughs opened the door to telepathy. You and me and Iris and the others walked through. We are the first.”

  “You’re shittin’ me,” she argues. “That’s not possible.”

  “What’s even better is that we should only be able to do these things inside Icarus. With its amplification,” Orion says, “but we kept our memories.” He shows the scar on his hand.

  GL mirrors his move by showing her own scars. “He didn’t know,” she says.

  “We stayed ourselves, and that’s the key,” he says.

  “And your shirt?” GL asks, motioning to his hand and shirt. “What’s with that trick?”

  “Icarus opened a door, and by accident, Iris flooded a million memories, emotions, and ideas into my brain from a thousand people,” he offers. “I think that amplified me without the machines. Maybe I’m Icarus now.” His eyes get wide thinking about the prospect. “My brain has taken a leap.”

  “Jesus,” GL states. Her amazement is impossible to hide.

  Orion moves to the door and instantly a window clears in front of him without having to touch it. Light radiates through from the chamber outside, illuminating his face and forcing him to squint into the light. He scans across the other cells. "We need to escape. And burn this building out in the process."

  “And what good will that do?” GL says, muddying his idea. “We’re still in the city, and they control everything. He’ll build another machine, and they’ll fill it again.”


  “Then we’ll tell everyone,” he replies. As he turns, the clear window follows his eyesight around the room until he lands on GL. “You started this resistance,” he smiles. “Gloria.”

  “I got news for you, Super-brain,” she says, then moves close to knock on the glass between them. “We’re trapped in the maze. And the monster is still in here with us.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Millions of city lights stretch for miles across the urban landscape. The collected glow casts an ever-present orange tinge throughout the night sky like a shroud that covers the stars and reminds the populace that their imaginations have nowhere to wander.

  Night after night, the metropolis evolves deeper into the clockwork precision that is both blessing and curse. Limited resources are metered out with meticulous precision so that everyone maintains at least a toehold on survival. A latent fear percolated by the Planners through propaganda and hearsay keeps the masses in line and following the tracks that have been laid for them to follow. Minor luxuries and entertainment polish the surface of life enough that citizens remain content, but not so much that they forget their station and think to disobey, lest the sheen might disappear.

  Disconnection from each other ensures that no citizen questions the order and destabilizes a system marching toward perfection. But a gap is forming among them. At the top, as has always been through history, the privileged live by different rules. And some are starting to see the difference.

  Burroughs skulks the in darkness of the Icarus master control room. The faint glow of holographic brain models exposes him lurking in the shadows like a solitary ghost haunting an ancient castle.

  He paces past the spectral holograms and the two-way mirror that doubles as a monitor, replaying Orion’s first session in Icarus. The doctor studies the brain models as they evolve through the sequence, groups of glittering sparks show him pathways and way stations in their minds. He’s anticipating the moment they break from his desired path, ready to pounce on any aberration that led the team to destabilize.

  The video replay reaches the point where Orion jumps from his chair, and then the image resets to the beginning of the session and plays again. Burroughs frustration is obvious as he grinds his palms across the control panel’s smooth surface. He stabs his finger into several digital switches, and the brain model highlights become fewer. He’s isolating specific aspects, honing in like his inspections of the closed-circuit monitors spying into the city.

  The video plays again with the same results.

  Burroughs’s mouth twists and pushes up to scrunch his nose, his rage filled eyes glaring with utmost intensity into Orion’s model. He holds his hands in midair around the brain, knuckles angled and fingers straining like he desires more than anything to crush the life out of it, but can’t because it’s sacred. His expression shifts toward pleasure as he closes his fingers through the hologram, relishing his own torment, grabbing nothing but air and forcing himself to face the fact that he’s failing.

  A bright light shines through the video on the two-way mirror, it’s coming from inside Icarus. Burroughs eliminates the image so he can see who or what is inside the torus. Peering through the window, he sees that the liquidy energy stream, designed to encapsulate occupants of the chairs, has been initiated. And someone is inside it.

  The door to Icarus slides silently open, and Burroughs steps quietly inside. Inching closer to chair #1, he can see through the energy field highlights and realizes that Nurse Mina is blissfully enjoying the stimulation that the field generates. All the little hairs on her arms and face are standing on end, reaching for the source, dancing like tiny blades of grass in a light breeze. The nerves of her body are alive and pulsating with pure energy.

  Burroughs bends closer and realizes she’s smiling. It’s a deviant act, but one so surprising and oddly seductive that Burroughs is dumbfounded. “Mina?” he asks calmly.

  Startled, Mina’s eyes flutter open. Her finger flicks a small remote by her hand, and the energy field recedes into the pillar above her. “Doctor. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t alone,” she says in her most sultry voice as she composes herself. Her hands sliding slowly down her clothes feigning that she’s straightening them, but obviously encouraging the titillating sensation left over from Icarus. Her breath even stutters here and there before she finally relents, smiling bashfully.

  Burroughs finally shakes the scene off. “I’m compelled to ask what you’re doing,” he inquires.

  “Oh, nothing really.” She wiggles her fingers and toes, and then adds, “It feels… Well, maybe you should try it.”

  He considers that for a long moment, but her alluring deviance is distracting. It opens a lucid gap in this thinking. Through that gap, an idea leaps in and hits him. It straightens him. He disengages from Mina, his attention ardently fixated on the vision in his mind.

  He finally breaks his own mental spell and spins to exit, then spins back to her. He carefully extends his index finger, reaching toward her like he’s about to run it through the icing on a cake, and ever so lightly taps the back of Mina’s hand. A tiny blue static-electric spark zaps them both.

  “Ouch!” she yelps. Cringing back from him.

  Burroughs darts toward the control room.

  Mina walks into master control in time to see Burroughs enlarge Iris's video image until her face fills the screen. Below, he retains only Orion and Iris's brain models. The experiment replays and Burroughs becomes entranced while watching, unconsciously swimming his hand back and forth through her brain hologram like he is casting a spell.

  He adjusts the controls until most of the highlights in the brains have been suppressed. He draws closer and closer to Iris, searching for something in particular. Then he sees her lips move ever so slightly, and a corresponding highlight appears in her brain model. Burroughs loops the video seconds before her lips move, and replays it over and over. Watching her lips repeat, then repeat, and then repeat until finally, he understands.

  “She’s speaking,” he whispers like he discovered a juicy secret and doesn’t want to scare it away. He addresses the computer, “Show me parallel brain activity in chair #1 and #6.” A parallel highlight appears in their brains each time Iris speaks. “And he’s listening,” he says.

  “What’s she saying?” Mina asks.

  “The what is not what matters,” he replies. “He’s keying on her like I suspected. But she’s unconditioned, she has her mind intact the way she presented it to me, and it compelled him to do something most would not. I’m going to customize her a bit to help me nudge his deviation in the right direction.” Burroughs freezes the video on Orion’s face. “He’ll follow her, and I’ll slip him into a virtual time loop so appealing to his senses and intoxicating to his mind that he’ll coil around it forever and ever.”

  He claps his hands straight through Orion’s hologram brain. The snap announcing his exit as he dashes toward the door, leaving everything active in master control.

  He exits to the waiting elevator, the doors glide shut and it descends into the darkness.

  …

  Far across the city, Director Pace rides the maglev through the high-rises and crowded streets. His attention is drawn away from the clockwork precision of vehicles, lights, and order, to the faces of the people filling the spaces in between. The omnipresent Hivebeam running through the transport reminds him that what’s coming is undeniable. The future of everything in the city could be in the hands just of one man. The question is, who is that man?

  The transport glides into the station at Societal Services, and Pace exits. He allows himself his own slight eccentricity tonight as he walks slowly, hands angled enough so people will brush against him. It’s the tiniest of connections with a human that’s over in the wink of a thought.

  He enters the enormous dome through the rotating doors, on his way to Hivemind.

  A droning hum emanates through the hallway outside Hivemind. Third Shift is about to take over as Second Shift animates
and prepares to reclaim their vacant minds. The techs scurry around with precision and routine. Nothing ever changes here.

  Pace casually walks toward the main entrance to the Hive chamber. As the last member filters out, and the next ninety-nine enter to replace them, Pace interjects to hold back the last Hivemember, chair # 99.

  “I’ve arranged for you to have the night off, Chair ninety-nine,” he states plainly to the Hivemember without even looking at him. “You’ll be credited for the cycle. Return tomorrow for your regular shift.”

  As the slightly confused Hivemember turns and walks away, one of the techs interrupts Pace. “Sir, is there something wrong?”

  “No. Nothing’s wrong.” He walks toward the Hivechamber. A nod beckons the tech to follow. Pace stops and stands over the empty chair at the outermost loop of the spiral, considering it for a long moment.

  “Director?” the tech tries to interrupt.

  “I’m going to drive chair ninety-nine for this shift,” Pace states. The tech looks at him like it’s wholly unforeseen. “I want to know what it’s like,” Pace says.

  He climbs in the chair and lays back.

  Unsure how to challenge more, the tech quickly and quietly preps Pace for Hivebeam, whispering to Pace, "Try to relax. Let it take you. Don't resist." Then he exits, leaving Pace to traverse the next seconds alone.

  His eyes dart around the room, following other Hivemembers as they enter. Their faces seem oddly unfamiliar and foreign tonight. He fidgets under the restraints trying to settle himself.

  Moments later, with all ninety-nine members of Third Shift in seated and set, the lights dim and the droning hum rises. The combination sweetens the very air around Pace until it feels like the cozy embrace of a warm blanket. His heart monitor thumps faster in anticipation of what’s next. His eyes grow wide and turn upward to the titanium ceiling that has begun to glow.

  The Hivebeam activates above Director Pace and projects into his forehead, and his mind is gone.

  …

  Burroughs enters his office alone and walks to the window overlooking the city, his city. The dome of Societal Services glows in the distance, and he traces the brightest thread of the Hivebeam as it branches like the pathways in a mind map.