Amped

by Daniel H. Wilson

  The latest seizure is over. Meaning the next one is due any minute. I don’t see any end to it. Jim is still gone doing his traveling-doctor thing and the only people I know in Eden must think I’m a pathetic coward. Last night, with alcohol-fueled bravery, I decided to try and turn on my Zenith. Tried to find myself. But what I found out was who I am with a broken implant. A spastic invalid.

  On top of that, I’m hungover.

  A nasty goose egg throbs on my shin in time with my heart. I got it when my leg slammed into the almost empty vodka bottle, shooting it across the room and under the couch. The pain in my shin joins the dull aching cramp in my jaw and neck and the rest of my skinned-up body. That bottle hurt me a lot more than I hurt it.

  The plastic doorknob rattles.

  For an instant I hallucinate a vision of Lucy. She’s blond and lithe and gliding through the front door to check in on me. Only there is a soft darkness outside. Her face is indistinct, lost in black smoke. She can’t get inside. Her thin fingers rake the doorframe. But she falls out into the darkness. Gone.

  I try to call out, and a rope of drool drops sluglike from my lips. My stomach cramps and my cheek slides across the floor, smearing my face into the spit and old sticky footprints on the linoleum.

  The trailer comes back in focus.

  I roll my eyes back in my head and catch sight of the wood-paneled door shaking on its hinges. A gust of cool air hits my face as the recently repaired door is ripped open with a sound like masking tape coming off a new paint job.

  A skinny guy pokes his head inside, blocking the raw sunlight. He’s got a beat-up plastic bottle in one hand, sloshing with tobacco juice. He spits in it, eyes wide and searching.

  “Howdy ho,” he calls. “Jim? Ya here?”

  It’s Lyle Crosby. The laughing cowboy. The last person I want to see. But I’m in a bad spot right now and can’t be too choosy about the company I keep.

  Lyle’s eyes travel to my spot on the living room floor. He surprises me and cracks a gap-toothed smile, then laughs out loud. Steps inside and closes the door behind him.

  “Damn, buddy. You in here fooling with yourself? Don’t be embarrassed. Half the amp teenagers end up like this at one time or another. A little bit of self-experimentation never hurt anybody, except when it did.”

  Lyle chuckles at his own joke. Then he saunters around the manufactured room, his shark-black eyes mechanically taking in the wood-paneled walls and mangy La-Z-Boy recliner and particleboard bookshelves half filled with dog-eared Westerns and thick, yellowed histories of World War II.

  “I’m always telling Jim he needs a wife. Look at this place. No woman I know would put up with this crap.”

  Lyle grabs a Reader’s Digest from the coffee table and riffles the pages with the ball of his thumb. He tosses the digest on a stack of other magazines. They collapse in a waterfall, brittle pages slapping the floor next to my face.

  He snorts at the spitty snow angels I’ve been making.

  “Okay. Where’s your tools, buddy?” asks Lyle.

  All I can do is breathe loudly through my teeth.

  “Huh,” says Lyle. He studies the area around me, thoughtfully adjusting the pod of tobacco wedged in his mouth. Eyeing me, he sucks in his bottom lip and carefully dribbles spit into the plastic bottle.

  “Starting to worry me,” he says.

  With the toe of his boot, he nudges me over onto my back. My arms and face are scraped up and bruised, but Lyle doesn’t seem to notice or care. Those obsidian flakes in his face are trained on what I’m still holding in my left hand.

  Lyle gets very still. An unrecognizable emotion ripples across his sweat-slicked forehead. Concern. Or maybe anger. He spits again into his bottle, slow.

  “That a fact?” he asks, staring pointedly at the streaks of dried blood on my temple. “Used a fuckin’ ice pick? Damn, Jack. I guess you’re not fooling around, huh? You trying to kill yourself?”

  Not exactly.

  I look up at him, focused on keeping my eyes wide open, round, and imploring. Yeah, my spit-smudged face says. Yeah, I was shit-faced drunk and alone and I was angry. I thought if I turned on the Zenith I could walk outside and kick the living crap out of a guy named Billy. But it didn’t work and I messed it up bad and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I take it back, okay?

  A hint of ozone sneaks into my next gulp of air. Shit. It’s been years since my last one, but you never forget the feeling of a seizure coming on. In the seconds just before, it’s easy to get fixated on little things. And this one feels like a real grand mal because I can’t seem to tear my eyes away from the glint of that vodka bottle under the couch.

  “I get it,” says Lyle. “Couldn’t take it no more?”

  The trapped animal whimper comes out of me again and I can sense the storm gathering inside, feel the churning thunderclouds overhead sucking all the oxygen out of the air. I allow the panic into my eyes and wrench them up to meet Lyle’s dark face. In the universal language of pain I’m chanting, Please help me. Please, please, please, oh please, don’t let another one hit me.

  “People been talking about you around the park. Kind of was looking forward to meeting you, actually. Course, I didn’t think you were a coward at the time.”

  He spits tobacco, this time on the floor.

  “Life is tough though, huh? And for an amp, life is even tougher. Maybe you just couldn’t stand it no more. Working minimum wage. Got no lady. No respect. So I’ll venture to guess, and this is just conjecture here, but from the evidence … I’m supposing you’d had yourself enough. It came on down to a logical conclusion: Life as an amp ain’t worth living.”

  Lyle stoops over and sets the bottle of spit and tobacco down next to my head. Then he casually grabs a handful of my hair in his left hand. He pulls my head off the floor, groaning theatrically like he’s tired. Then he pulls harder, tugs my head up, painfully, so we’re face-to-face.

  “Know what, buddy?” he asks.

  Lyle studies my half-lidded eyes. I can smell the tobacco on his breath mingling with the stinging flakes of metal that signal the coming storm. The creases of dirt in his tatted-up neck stand out like fault lines, pecked by tattooed crow beaks and clouded with feathers. I can just make out the silhouetted nub of the implant on the side of his head.

  “I find that conclusion to be personally offensive.”

  And he decks me. Just sends down a right cross and bats it out of the park. A knuckle catches me on the eye, and I can feel the socket filling with blood.

  My head hits the ground like a dropped watermelon. A pathetic whining sound warbles out of my throat. When I push my eyes open, I can see the crumbs and dirt on the floor mixing with my slobber. A spattering of fat bright droplets of my blood sit on the floor, mutely reflecting a square of window light from some place up high that I can’t turn my head to see.

  Jim was right. Lyle is crazy. But being punched in the face is nothing compared to the electrical frenzy that’s about to slam into my brain like a Martian cyclone.

  “You wanna die?” Lyle asks me, real soft.

  I can’t tell whether it’s a question or an offer.

  Lyle looks at the door. At first I think he’s going to leave me here, but then he spins back around, and the hardened leather tip of a cowboy boot connects in the pit of my stomach. My body bounces in the air like so much rubber. No, no, no. I’m wailing with my eyes, but who can see? The first tremors of the seizure jitter through my limbs like aftershocks.

  “No problem,” mutters Lyle. And the boot comes again, harder this time.

  “Unless maybe you do want to live?” asks Lyle. He circles around, methodically kicking: legs, arms, back. He avoids my head.

  “Do you wanna live?”

  Air hisses from between my lips. I’m empty except for the pain. Lighter than nothing. Never felt this way before. I fold myself up into my head and swim with the air down the black river of my throat. Up and out and over the teeth and tongue. With all the mental
will I can muster, I reach down and tug on the dead meat of my tongue. I grab my molars and bend my jaw closed, and slowly but surely my voice comes. It’s almost inaudible but somehow Lyle hears.

  “Yes.”

  Lyle stops kicking. I listen to his heavy breathing and the sick trickle of tobacco juice and spit oozing into the plastic bottle. Then something lands next to my face with a thwap. Through a blur of tears I see a scabby brown satchel the size of a wallet.

  “That’s all you had to say, brother,” says Lyle. “That’s all you had to say.”

  I barely hear him. The storm is here. Thunderclouds burst and I feel ice-cold pinpricks of rain erupt all over my body. My limbs curl and I scream through clenched teeth. I’m lashed to a tree in a vicious storm that’s shredding me from the inside out.

  Lyle’s dirty boots creak faintly as he squats next to me. But that’s part of another world now. He can kick me to death and I’ll never feel it, because he could never hurt me as bad as I’m hurting myself.

  Somewhere far away, the laughing cowboy speaks to me. But my brain is broken. The sounds swell and ebb through my head like ripples on a pond, meaningless. And then, nothing.

  The storm dissipates. My tree wafts gently in the wind. And then my tree is gone and I’m back on the linoleum, smelling the ripe manure on Lyle’s boots. Above my head, his skinny arms move in precise jerks, tattoos flashing, a blurred confusion of flying, fighting crows. One of them has a flaming torch grasped in its claws.

  Lyle’s brown satchel is open and glistening with rows of delicate instruments. Beat-up implant maintenance tools. Familiar but filthy. I’ve only seen the sterilized, surgical steel versions in my father’s office.

  Lyle turns his head and smiles at me sort of crooked. He leans over and takes a closer look at my port. Some glint of recognition is in his eyes. Did he see the Zenith? Recognize it?

  With quick flicks of his wrist, he turns my implant back on. As he works, he speaks in a quick whisper: “Maybe I had you wrong, brother. It ain’t easy to trust the machine. Knowing it’s inside you. Been called the classic anxiety attack of the new century. Panic brewing way down in the reptile part of your brain, three hundred million years old. Older than language. The alien inside. Fear in you like claustrophobia. Leaves you clawing at the roof of your coffin. Except you don’t want out of it—you want it out of you.”

  A shiver pulses from my temple and spreads through my body. Lyle’s hands are moving in efficient bursts in my peripheral vision. I think of Nick and his cube as Lyle keeps talking.

  “Gotta understand the machine’s a part of you. Lose the amp, you lose your mind. Brain is the sum of its parts. Hindbrain’s got your instinct for survival. Limbic is where love and hate live. Neocortex has got your imagination in it. And your amp is another part. What it does is up to you.”

  A final twist of his hand.

  “Friggin’ ice pick,” he says, shaking his head. “Every amp should have his own tools. Doctors are illegal. Now, how’s that feel?”

  His words come into focus before my eyes do.

  “Better,” I whisper.

  Lyle’s hands go under my armpits like steel clamps. He drags me over to the recliner, rests my back up against it. He disappears for a second, then comes back and hands me a glass of water in a mason jar and some ice cubes wrapped in a fast-food napkin. I sip the water and press the ice to my face.

  I look up to thank Lyle and then stop flat. His face is serious, carved out of wood.

  “You got a Zenith, like me,” he says. “I can tell just by looking at the port. How the fuck did that happen?”

  Of course he would recognize it. It was wide open. I say nothing.

  “Fine, me first,” he says. “I was too smart for the army. Went to Special Forces. Volunteered to join a new operational detachment. Echo Squad. Watched a hundred other soldiers wash out. They were teaching us meditation, breathing techniques, visualization. Weird shit for the service. Twelve of us made it into the Zenith ODA. And when they told us we were going under the knife we said sir, yes, sir.”

  Lyle laughs and he sounds more genuine, less insane. I get the feeling he isn’t seeing me, just his memories. Old friends and comrades.

  “Me and the other boys showed up soldiers and they made us into a new breed,” he says, face darkening. “Twelve of us. Brothers. Only four of us left that I know of. Rest have been hunted down and killed.” He pauses. “So, let me ask you again. Where’d you get that Zenith?”

  Moving slowly, I set the mason jar on the floor. Biting my lip from the pain flaring in my ribs, I manage to shrug my shoulders. “Dad’s an implant doctor,” I say. “I got hurt bad when I was a teenager. He did what he had to do—to fix me.”

  I take a couple breaths, then continue. “I tried to turn it on.”

  Lyle tilts his head, thinking. “Turn it on?” he says. “Can’t use a friggin’ ice pick to turn it on. What’s the matter with you?”

  The realization settles on his face. “Wait one goddamn second. Nobody ever taught you to use it? You got a cherry turbocharged hot rod in your head and you never even started the engine?”

  I shake my head. Lyle stifles his excitement.

  “Well, goddamn. You are just shit out of luck, buddy. Did you hear me? Somebody is killing Zeniths. Somebody in the government. Murdering us one by one. Did you know that?”

  I nod.

  “Jim told you, huh?” asks Lyle. “Well, he may have built the hardware, but he don’t know jack about it. Not like I do. I’ll show you some shit that will curl your toes, son. I am going to wake you up.”

  I sip my water and jam the ice against my eye. Lyle is standing and pacing with excitement. Now, he stops and looks at me again, remembers what just happened.

  “Listen. That Zenith makes you live your life harder than regular people. Walk around with your eyes open wider. You see more, hear more, understand more.”

  Lyle grabs my shoulders, leans in.

  “There’s one thing that regulars know deep down and it scares the shit out of ’em. Being an amp don’t make you any less human, brother. Being an amp makes you more human.”

  He leans back on his haunches and I can see the gears spinning in his head as he scours my face for some evidence that I heard his message.

  “More human,” he repeats. “Don’t forget it.”

  “Thanks,” I manage to say.

  Lyle nods. He stands up and stuffs his tool satchel back into the waistband of his jeans. Grabs his plastic bottle.

  “No big deal. You just owe me your life is all.”

  Lyle stands in the doorway while an awkward second ticks by, like he’s making up his mind.

  “Get yourself cleaned up,” he says. “I’m going to show you what amps can do.”

  * * *

  OPINION

  Protecting the Endangered Human

  By JOSEPH VAUGHN

  Regardless of your ethical system, it is clear that neural implantation of this sort is a crime against humanity. I mean this statement in both the most general and most specific interpretation.

  Specifically, implantation beyond natural abilities (that is, the creation of those entities known as amps) constitutes a crime against humanity as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in that it is “part of a government policy” that “constitutes a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings.”

  These implantation techniques demolish the essence of what it means to be human. It is worse than assault, worse than rape, worse than torture—all odious acts that are committed against human beings and yet leave behind human beings. Implantation is an act against human beings that leaves behind an amp. It not only demolishes human dignity but precludes the victim from having the ability to experience human dignity.

  And this creates a dilemma for the rest of society. Membership in the human species is a prerequisite for the application and enforcement of human rights. By definition, an am
p is an entity not deserving of human rights. It is an entity who operates outside known ethical limits and thus threatens to topple the moral foundation that our civilization is built upon.

  “Oh, look at this sonofabitch,” says Lyle, gesturing with a program rolled tight in his fist. “This guy is priceless. He’s why we’re not sitting in the front row.”

  We’re just up the road from Eden in a crowded warehouse turned stadium. We sit on cramped folding chairs that surround a boxing ring wrapped in a chain-link fence. Below, the man thing Lyle is talking about strides toward the ring, bullish, strafed by glimmering spotlights. It moves with a kind of slow-motion massiveness, muscles rippling with each plodding step, meaty back gleaming wetly through the haze of cigarette smoke. Its head is lowered and eyes leveled on its adversary—the monster ignores the hundreds of mere mortals who are here to watch with wide eyes, to scream without hearing, and bet stolen money on a battle between, well, what?

  Something more than men. Not gods, surely. But titans.

  Lyle’s got three friends with us. The ones called Stilman and Daley sit together. They glance at me when they think I’m not looking. The third man, Valentine, doesn’t speak. Just watches warily. Freckles dot his face like a handful of thrown confetti. All three of these guys are as dense and muscular as Lyle is rangy. Sitting stock-still in the middle of this chaos, calm as monks.

  I can’t tell if they’re his buddies or his bodyguards or both.

  Around me, the crowd is mostly made up of pure humans, but every now and again I see an amp’s temple nub, sometimes along with the gleam of an artificial limb. Everybody here seems equally guilty. I get the feeling this event isn’t strictly legal.

  “Is this safe?” I ask Lyle, thinking of my close call on the drive out to Eden.

  The cowboy chuckles, glances at the other three men. “Relax,” he says. “I’d feel sorry for any cop who tries to stop us.”

  Over fuzzy speakers mounted somewhere up high, the announcer dramatically bellows a name. Sounds like “Brain.” In the ring, the titan opens its mouth and bellows. I can feel the roar in my chest. Lyle’s friends watch the man below without blinking, their eyes doing silent arithmetic.