“I felt trapped in a third-rate sci-fi film, an absurd dystopia. Those with implants flourished like kings.” From Matt Nagin’s forthcoming collection of short stories, The Book of Outcasts, a tale that serves as a warning about Artificial Intelligence’s all-consuming potential…
by: Matt Nagin
I was six months late on my rent. Could not find a job. A recruiter insisted without an A.I. implant I would not be able to compete. He doubted I’d even be able to obtain temp work.
Everyone was getting an implant. Painless, he insisted. It went right into the cerebral cortex. The recruitment agency would cover all associated fees for the lifetime of the implant.
This was a fantastic deal. I would be foolish to pass up on it. Early implantees paid top dollar for their upgrades so I should consider myself fortunate.
I asked him to find me a job that did not require an implant. He scoffed at the idea. It was a twenty minute procedure. Everyone was getting it. Every day that went by without an implant was a day in which I fell further behind.
I pleaded with him to find me something that did not require implantation, insisting any menial job would be fine. He shook his head, frustrated with my resistance.
Why would employers hire someone without memory of everything in human history? Without the capacity to execute lightning quick decisions with perfect reliability? Without an intelligence no mortal can match? Why accept that liability?
I sat there looking at my hands, feeling like an alien. There were so many ways I could hit back at him. He was a conformist dolt, a useless functionary; he had no creativity; no authentic spirit; above all, he was the one who should be interrogated at length since he parroted the warped logic of the technocracy with soulless grandeur.
But how to resist? If the bills could not be paid I’d starve. Eviction notice on my door. Hunger pains. Empty bank account. Battling the tyrannical agenda almost seemed futile.
At night I’d roll around in bed. The fan would hum. My clammy hands would pull the sheets up to my mouth and I’d bite down on them as if teething. There, in a kind of self-generated cocoon, I’d listen to the bluebird perched on a branch outside my window — that dainty bluebird —warbling — always warbling — from a spruce tree.
It seemed a relic from a bygone era. Once there lived a civilization that actually valued the notes brought forth from within. Once a bluebird had magic and everyone knew its melody counted since it was a song of the wild, a song that wrapped around us all and taught us again who we really were. Once your neighbors didn’t line up to become automatons. Once you could walk around and there was life in the streets — real life — and those faces — oh god those faces! — didn’t seem cartoon characters: empty shells, wisps, ghosts barely hanging on. Once I looked up and saw a meteor shower and believed — truly believed — actualizing my dreams was possible!
My girlfriend called.
“Did you get your implant?”
I hung up.
Roseanne called back. I did not pick up. Just watched her name flash on Caller ID. Finally, on the twelfth ring, I answered with a bitter “hello.”
“Just get it,” she said.
“No.”
“Oh come on James! I love mine. It really grows on you.”
“Like a metastasizing tumor.”
“You always have to be an outlier. Why can’t you just play along?”
“Am I speaking to you or the A.I.?”
“Very funny. But I’m the same.” She sighed. “I still order the veggie burger with the couscous at the Westway Diner, don’t I?”
“That vegan shit was a concern before you got the implant.”
“Ha,” she said, a fake laugh, a laugh to let you know she didn’t find your comment funny. “Face it James. I’m a better version of myself. You’ll be one too once you get your implant.”
“Great pep talk,” I said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”
I hung up. She called back. I didn’t answer. Nothing to say. I wasn’t getting the implant. No way. There was zero chance she’d win me over.
The A.I. had co-opted the mind of nearly all my contemporaries. Freedom had become an antediluvian concept. Art was little more than humdrum, mechanistic reproductions. Programmable mass compliance facilitated endless commercial exploitation of human gullibility.
Lockasta, the manufacturer, had achieved a jaw-dropping level of political domination. They ran the country through political subsidiaries granted such heavy campaign donations that they effectively became indentured servants, working night and day to pass The Lockasta Decrees, which altered The Constitution in frightening ways. The commercial applications of the implants were limitless…ads bombarding dreams, skulls buzzing joyously following government-sanctioned behaviors, implant trade shows with state-of-the-art cerebellum software upgrades.
I longed to pop Uzkapin or Myorka, but without an implant I no longer qualified for a pharmacological dulling of the senses. Every day I’d have a couple of panic attacks. The world seemed ready to implode.
In all of New York City there were but a few hundred like me who’d averted the procedure. The press deemed us Anti-Implanters, an ironic title since we were identified as A.I. yet strongly opposed it.
We met twice a week in the basement of St. Marks Church. These Cerebral Freedom Fighter meetings were long and featured strange, disfigured outcasts. The coffee was lousy. The lighting eerie. Yet the fellowship, the comradery, was terrific.
The odds were against us. The military-industrial-pharmacological cartels had banned us from entering concert halls and restaurants. They’d taken our jobs and refused us medical care. They’d rounded us up and interned us in camps. We’d been pushed to the fringe of society, abandoned by those closest to us, yet we somehow continued on.
My landlord evicted me. My remaining savings went quickly, particularly because my ex-wife bankrupted me with alimony payments.
By the time I knew what hit me I was living on the streets. It was shocking. I went from living in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side to becoming a New World Order Leper.
The first night I camped out in front of F.A.O. Schwartz. It didn’t take long for a couple of Wall Street Bankers to rob me for the cheap thrill. I sat there looking dour the next morning when a couple of bratty teens jeered at me. Over the next few days I moved to the Lower East Side where a sad clown honked his horn at me and a hippie beat me awkwardly with a walking stick.
Before long the hunger pains were so bad I started putting my hand in my craw and pretending it was food. Days passed in a drunken blur. I wanted to end it all. Hoped someone would slit my throat.
Just when I was ready to give up I was approached by a soft-spoken woman named Samantha who offered me half a moldy kaiser roll. We quickly took a liking to each other. Seemed kindred spirits.
Each night she let me use her big tits as a pillow. She was always on heroin which was good. It meant she didn’t talk much. Just nodded off for days. I liked the silence. I liked not having to pretend I gave a shit.
For a while we shacked up in an abandoned building that smelled like a geriatric home after it had been crapped on by a thousand pelicans. I liked the way the shadows danced across the dusty floor. I liked listening to Samantha sigh. I liked that the world around us became ever so small.
One morning I awoke to find Samantha’s body stiff. Her eyes were in the back of her head. All night I’d been resting my head against the hardened tits of a corpse.
It wasn’t long after that the building was bought by a developer and a construction crew came in to demolish it. I watched the building implode, the floors collapsing one by one. The dust kicked up. The road shook. It seemed anti-climactic. The real loss had already occurred. Samantha was gone.
I grew desperate. Mornings I begged. Afternoons I stole. Evenings I performed a weird dance by the fountain in Washington Square Park in an effort to accrue donations. It rarely worked. Tourists yelled “GET A JOB, LOSER!” and “YOU SMELL, DORK!”
I fell one evening, hit my head, and was overwhelmed by terrifying geometric patterns. It was almost as intense as LSD — yet it lasted days. I slept in the grass in Central Park, time evaporating, the sun and moon exchanging places in the firmament without it making any difference.
Police officers handed me tickets for public nuisance and disorderly conduct. I thanked them, went behind a tree, then used them as toilet paper.
Soon I developed a new routine. Nights I’d sleep under bridges, cardboard boxes wrapped around me as if shields defending me from a world gone astray. Mornings I’d secure breakfast out of garbage bins. I’d also take off my shoes before bed so by morning they’d be filled with rainwater — water I’d guzzle down thankfully.
I reached out to family and friends for help but they rejected me. Felt any contact put them in danger. I was being ridiculous, they insisted. All I needed was a harmless little implant.
I felt like a rat crawling from hole to hole, seeking refuge in dingy cellars and freaky alleys, when all around was a society full of contempt. The rat needed to dance. The rat needed to befriend every last shadow. The rat had to remind itself of its own value in a world indifferent to the prospect of its extermination.
I prayed constantly, on my knees in the muck, prayed for a sign that I was not just a relic of a bygone era, that I counted, that what I thought and felt in the recesses of my being had value.
I prayed that this whole charade, this great whirlwind of inanity would come crashing down. I prayed that a new sphere of justice would rise up, a resplendent garden filled with shamanic creativity and iridescent dreams.
Not that it mattered. Loneliness enveloped me. Darkness stretched toward oblivion. God was laughing. I wanted to laugh too. But the very thought seemed preposterous.
Unsure of where to turn, I snuck past the doorman at my former business partner’s apartment building. Richard Marx was in his pajamas, clutching a miniaturized copy of The Wall Street Journal. He didn’t let me in. Just gawked at me from the doorway.
Quickly I pitched him my business proposal. We’d sell pre-toasted marshmallows. Lightly-toasted, heavily-toasted, and blackened-as-hell. Who didn’t like goddamn toasted marshmallows?
“Sanderson,” Richard replied. “You really have gone off the rails.”
“Maybe,” I retorted. “But this can work.”
“I’m involved in billion dollar arbitrage deals now,” he said. “You honestly think I want to invest in a cockamamie toasted marshmallow scheme?”
I switched gears, explaining I also wanted to start a business employing leadership in the Cerebral Freedom Fighters. The one area C.F.F. members were uniquely adept at was creativity. This untapped labor pool could generate novel quantum computer software, imaginative architectural structures, groundbreaking drug therapies. Pairing C.F.F. creativity with the industrious of highly-efficient bureaucracies offered limitless possibilities.
“It’s better than the marshmallow idea,” Richard said. “But if I even consider investing with you C.F.F. bastards Lockasta will make me pay.”
“You can be a silent partner.”
“They’ll find out.”
“Please. All I need is ten-thousand dollars.”
Richard went into his wallet and handed me five bucks. “That’s the best I can do,” he said.
“You just said you’re doing billion dollar deals!”
“It’s not going to work out James. It’s really not. But I wish you all the success in the world.”
His doorman escorted me out the building. I sat in the gutter, bemoaning my fate. Even my former business partner wouldn’t help. The future looked grim.
The next day I spotted my childhood maid on the street and pleaded with her for a job. She laughed, pointing to a small incision on her head. Once you had an implant you could no longer hire someone without one. Your operating system prevented it.
I got down on my hands and knees and begged, hands folded before me in supplication. She ignored me, walking away, stunned I was making a scene. She was right. This was no way to behave.
I bit my lip, howling, the cry of the tormented, the bellow of the spiritually maligned. Next I smacked my head against a brick wall until it started to bleed. Ha. That was good. To feel something. To know I was alive!
Yes, I was a breathing, feeling organism, not yet a Nietzschean “overman” but on my way. If I could bash my brains against the wall there was no telling what I might accomplish. I might write Thus Spoke Zarathustra 2! Or grow a thick mustache and study antiquity to see how far man had fallen!
Then, at the height of my creative powers, I’d hug a horse in Turin and declare myself Dionysus!
Been done already? Too bad! I’d do it better. I’d prove once and for all this world was a will to power — and nothing besides!
Someone called an ambulance. Another noticed blood leaking from my forehead and insisted his uncle could adjust my implant for free. A third offered me a sip from a canteen filled with rum.
I walked away. I was among them but not like them. The canyon between us grew by the day.
I contacted Roseanne. She had a new apartment on the Upper West Side. A six-figure job. An active social life. She was dating a hedge fund manager now, a corporate shill with two implants.
“Big surprise,” I said when she mentioned the double-implant.
“He’s great,” she replied, missing my sarcasm. Roseanne explained he was into the new protocols to the point where he intended to get a third implant in his dick.
“My god!”
“It’s a state-of-the-art technology that grows your penis by four inches.”
“What’s wrong with a small, organic dick?”
“Not funny.”
“Sorry.”
“You should be. Seth is a great guy. I wish you’d acknowledge that.”
I promised her I’d try.
“Just curious,” I added. “What’s his last name?”
She hesitated. Eventually it came out: Ziegler. Seth Ziegler. She was dating the best friend of Richard Marx. No wonder Richard had been so cold. He knew his buddy was two-timing my former paramour.
“I know he ran in your circle,” she said. “But it wasn’t intentional. It just happened by chance.”
I fought the urge to gag. Of all the men in the world why did she have to shack up with that creep whom I’d despised for nearly two decades?
“If this is what you want I support it,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Do you think I could come over tonight though?”
“Sorry,” she said.
“I promise I won’t get in your way.”
“Really sorry.”
“I could use a shower and a warm bed.”
“To be honest, I’m taking Seth to the hospital at 9AM to get his penis implant.”
“I see.”
“Of course, once you get your implant you can come over anytime you want.”
I hung up the phone in a daze. The park bench seemed to spin. Locusts cried out to me from the leaves of spruce trees. Instinctively, I rushed to the nearest trash can and vomited.
Teens played basketball in the distance, one of them taunting his competitor before completing an easy layup. I wiped my face with the arm of my military jacket, my eyes tearing up, my heart stuck in my throat.
I felt trapped in a third-rate sci-fi film, an absurd dystopia. Those with implants flourished like kings. The rest of us were dying off. Yet I refused to participate. It just wasn’t right!
The walls were closing in, the sky tinted a cataclysmic orange. Every morning smog filtered in over the skyscrapers.
The papers insisted the last outliers were getting implants. Get your upgrade now, they explained, or risk getting thrown in the camps!
Join Up! the TV ads went. Allow yourself to experience the paradise of conformity! They never showed the drill going into your skull or the horrible look of emptiness that conquered your face. The focus instead was on children zip-gliding happily as their well-dressed parents hugged each other on white sandy beaches with operatic music blasting on the soundtrack.
Each state had a special offer for new implantees. A free year of transport on the hover train. Two for one chemical-war-survival-courses. Robo-powered steak knives.
The more they tried to get me to play along the more I withdrew into my own solipsistic realm. My contemporaries seemed sick. A virus was embedded in their Lockasta-operated heads, a virus that made them lose track of what counted.
I thought of buying a gun. A knife. A grenade. I thought of blowing myself up in Times Square. I thought of walking backwards on water while reciting a prayer in Swahili. This goddamn world. This paradise of fools. This staircase leading to an inferno of horribly pointless efficiency.
They thought I was crazy. They insisted I had zero common sense. But look at how they lived! Look at all they’d sacrificed to create a world so utterly deficient in soul!
The cops chased me. A nude sunbather grabbed my manmeat and slobbered filthy thoughts into my ear. I ate trash — actual trash — just to get some sort of tangible substance into my digestive tract.
Weeks passed. Months. More of my contemporaries were rounded up. Once they entered the camps they were never heard from again.
They wanted us dead. Forgotten. Silenced. It wouldn’t stop until every last one of us was gone.
One evening at an C.F.F. meeting I stood before the group and described my childhood. I’d been so close to my father. The old pervert. The whackjob salesman. As I described my first job working in his office I began to weep.
I didn’t know why. My father was in decent shape. Retired. Had a nice little apartment in Brooklyn Heights. There was nothing to be upset about. Still, I couldn’t stop. The tears were like rivers. Monsoon fucks.
Then it hit me that my adolescent memories made my current struggles so much worse because my past felt so distant now. It was an entirely alien world. All innocence was gone. Carefree grandeur had taken flight. Nor was there any solidarity with my family.
All that had been replaced by dismal skies and pounding rain from beneath a woebegone sun. Now the security of childhood, the alluring reassurance of paternal affection seemed laughable.
The C.F.F. Members seemed unimpressed.
“What!” I shouted. “This is the universal condition now. All connection to family is broken. Not only that the body is an illusion. A temple for the state. We’re dying, idiots! The last dregs of society are dying! And what are we doing about it? How are we fighting back?”
I shook my head in dismay. “You dolts! You ingrates! Once the last of us are in the camps it’s over! WE MUST REBEL!”
Some nodded, others felt I need psychiatric care. I didn’t though. I was just highly attuned to the cataclysmic vibes enveloping us all. I further knew what we were up against. Knew it with frightening intimacy.
I flipped over a garbage bin, hopped atop it, and started beating myself in the head. “This is what the deep state is doing to us,” I shouted while beating myself more forcefully. “This is what the A.I. is all about. LOCKASTA, YOU MORONS! LOCKASTA!”
They brought me down from the garbage bin. Insisted I chill out. Gonzi, they whispered, referring to the popular antipsychotic med. Please take Gonzi.
But they were wrong. I didn’t need to drug myself into a stupor. I wanted to confront what was wrong with the world. This seemed infinitely better than perpetually hiding from it.
My friend Mel wiggled his body by the fire while sipping a chocolate milkshake.
“Can I have a sip?” I asked.
“Shut up.”
“One sip.”
“I killed someone for this,” Mel said, throwing the milkshake at me. I lunged for it, sucking hard on the straw. I sucked and sucked.
Nothing left. I removed the lid and dug my nose in it, trying to get some sort of nutrition off the bottom. It was empty — hopelessly empty.
Another bum, Triton, cooked a rat on the fire.
“Eat rat,” Mel said.
“Jesus!”
“Grow up.”
I had not yet dined on sewer rat. All my friends had. But I felt a certain kinship with the rat, a spiritual connection, and there was something about eating a rat that made me want to puke.
My hunger was out of control though.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try it.”
I was handed a paw and a chunk of meat with a tail. I closed my eyes and tried to get down the meat around the tail. The meat around the paw was hardest to consume. You had to open your eyes and suck down the meat from around the bones.
I looked out at the Hudson, then the city skyline, then back at my friends huddled around the fire eating rats and drinking whatever they could scavenge out of the garbage — even if it was a used dip cup filled with brown saliva. How absurd! I’d graduated from Princeton Summa Cum Laude. How had I ended up like this?
Triton explained they were rounding up more of our type for the camps. They called it The New Lockasta Protocols For Improvement of Humanity. This was an even more bogus title than the obvious propaganda once generated by P.T. Barnum. Yet the populace accepted it.
We had to be more stealthy. Jaywalking. Loitering. Public Urination. An arrest for any of those and they’d throw us in the camps.
“Don’t let the blue sluts take you,” Triton said. “This time you won’t get out in a few days.”
Mel farted.
“Fight to the death if needed,” Triton went on. “They got Jacobson yesterday. Barker last week. Any of us could be next.”
I munched down on more rat. The meat crunched awkwardly in my mouth.
Jacobson was an outdoor adventure type who’d climbed Mt. McKinley. If they’d taken him down what hope was there for me? Mel farted again. Then I farted. Then Triton puked. Finally, we all went to sleep.
That evening I had a nightmare. The A.I. was ahead of me. Running, jumping, reaching out its ugly hands, hands that shoved my guts in the incinerator.
It laughed. Dangerous laughter. Laughter of wolves. Laughter of children after they’ve been castrated. Howling, cheeky, winsome laughter.
Oh, it was laughing! Laughing and laughing. Oh god, what heinous laughter!
I just wanted it to stop. I just wanted a way out of this jungle of hate and sorrow. To start over.
Remember? The good times. The simpleton times. The times on the farm in Oneonta when you looked up at the sun and thought it belonged to you and you alone. When the very idea of implantation seemed material from a hacky nightclub comedian.
The A.I. bot was destroying me. My face, my hands, mashed; my spirit, my hope, in the gutter; it kept bashing me and bashing me as it spit on me like a contemptuous imp. Oh god! Let me go A.I.. Let me be free! I can’t stand another moment of this hell!
I’m a Luddite! I just want a way out of this horrible, protean labyrinth of greed and efficiency, this artificial monstrosity generated en masse to ensure docile conformity. I’ll do anything…anything…to not end up like everyone else! HELP! Oh god…HELP!
I called my dad. Insisted we meet. If he didn’t give me money I’d starve. To my surprise his tone was conciliatory.
We met in Bryant Park. Nice, sunny day. Crowds eating lunch. His grey hair was thinning and there were lines under his eyes that made me think of a sailor who’d spent too long at sea. He hobbled forward slowly, his joints calcified.
“Thanks for being here Dad.”
He handed me a wad of cash.
“This didn’t happen.”
I nodded.
“I mean it,” he said. “They’ll crucify me if they find out.”
“Isn’t your implant recording all this?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “It malfunctioned. I had it removed. It’s being repaired in the Lockasta shops. Next week they put it back in.”
No wonder he’d met me! He was free of his implant — if only for a few days. I hugged him.
Every time I spoke to my family members it was like I was communicating with shadows of their former selves. Not now. In some way my father was the man I grew up with all over again. To be connected to that, to feel again that closeness of childhood, a sense I missed and needed so much when out in the streets was a kind of miracle.
My father was alive again! In the full sense of the word! And there for me. Showing me love — even if it was just by giving me money — crude money — evil money — it was an act — a radiant act — that would allow me to survive — at least for now. How fortunate I was! How blessed!
Then my father walked off in the direction of the hover train as police officers surrounded me. Guns drawn. Warnings shouted.
My father turned and shrugged. I gasped. For as he gave me that dour look I knew none of this was incidental. He’d sold me out. There was a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who turned in family members to the authorities. My father had succumbed to temptation.
I raised my hands above my head as the police instructed.
“How could you, Dad?”
“I’m sorry,” he replied, hobbling towards me. “But they were going to get you eventually. And your mother and I needed the funds.”
“Don’t you know what they’ll do to me?”
“It’s for the greater good son,” my father said, placing a consoling on my hand on my shoulder.
“You didn’t get your implant removed, did you?”
“No son. But once you get your upgrade I’ll split the reward with you.”
“It’ll be no good to me then. Nothing will. Without freedom nothing has value.”
“I know this is hard for you son. But have faith.”
The cops pushed my father away, reprimanding him for his garrulousness. They grabbed me, threw me on the ground, and handcuffed me.
There was no use resisting. They pinned me with superior force. I felt a great hollowness inside, a void that stretched on endlessly, a barren wasteland filled with sorrow and regret.
They were going to put me in a camp. No way out now. I was doomed.
Sordid faces clutched dingy barbed wire. Tubercular coughs. Emaciated frames writhing in desperation. A woman in rags shrieking over her dead child. Watching all this from a bus window, my heart seemed to shriek, the reverberations echoing all the way up to my throat.
I was given a tattered uniform, a serial number, and instructed to share a cell with a lanky man with emphysema. He stunk. Coughed frenetically. Not that it kept me up. I was generally too tired to care.
I spent twelve hours a day working in a munitions factory. The monotonous work was a useful distraction. I preferred keeping busy. Afternoons we were fed a slice of dark bread topped with discolored gruel. It grew on you. Best of all the staff had not yet insisted we get implants. Every day without one was a gift.
But there was a problem. Rebellion. Several camps. Many executed before the firing squad to restore docility. While we had a constitutional right to resist implantation the newest Lockasta Decree granted the government veto power over all civil liberties in matters of ‘dire national security.’ In short, it was decided that we needed to get our implants immediately to protect the welfare of the general populace.
My doctor explained all this to me at the nursing station. He was terribly sorry. But no new inmates could be spared. Better to get it over with. I wouldn’t be able to compete in the workforce without it.
“Rise to the challenge,” he said, “you’ll feel better after.”
“No. You’ll feel better,” I replied. “Because I’ll be completely under your spell.”
“Another wisecrack like that and I’ll put a black mark on your chart.”
“Go for it.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“And what is so terrible about a procedure that will improve your lot in this world?”
“Are you kidding me? Getting tortured in a Somalian Prison beats getting this stupid fucking implant!”
“Calm down.”
“To hell I will! I’ve got Constitutional rights. You’re lucky I don’t strangle your arrogant ass!”
He pressed a button on the wall and orderlies rushed in and held me down, big burly men with wicked, cavernous smiles. Guards followed, beating me soundly with nightsticks. Those in the waiting room heard my howls, shifting uncomfortably at the prospect of a similar punishment at the slightest hint of rebellion.
I kicked. I screamed. I bit the hands of my assailants, but it was like throwing dust into the wind. More orderlies entered, working on me with eternal patience.
They pinned me down. Drugged me. Stripped me. Put me in a hospital gown and placed me on a gurney.
Constrained there, I looked up at the ceiling and wanted to die. This would be merciful. It would beat the implant. For how could I accept being other than how I really am? How could that ever be okay?
They wheeled me into the O.R. It was cold in that barren room, but I felt even colder because of what they were about to do. The needle went into my I.V., and I started to fade, everything becoming blurry…
I woke up from the procedure with a sore head, my face swollen. This is normal, they insisted. Nothing to worry about.
I looked like a dying Frankenstein. My eyes were puffy and covered in weird rashes. My skin was jaundiced. I could barely see straight. The headaches were crushing.
The important point, they explained, was I had become far more intelligent and sophisticated. I understood the minute laws of Physics, could explain The Canterbury Tales with scholarly acumen, spoke a thousand languages with perfect fluency. Finally, I had a number of unique new skills such as staggeringly accurate eyesight, the implant allowing me to zoom in on any tiny detail of a room in a microsecond.
I was practically superhuman. It would take a little while to adjust. But once I got used to it I’d never want to go back to my old self.
They had a job waiting for me. A new apartment. I’d get a two-week vacation each year and help recruit the last remaining holdouts since I had first-hand knowledge of how they operated. My future looked bright.
Before long the swelling went down. Headaches stopped. My skin reaction cleared up. Perhaps this new life wouldn’t be so bad. I’d been wrong. I still felt like myself. Personal volition was overrated.
Roseanne showed up. Ziegler had dumped her for an IG model. She missed me. Wanted to try again.
Triton and Mel entered. They’d gotten implants too. Were thrilled about it. They had fantastic jobs lined up. Were thoroughly enjoying the hospital food, particularly the scrumptious fruit cup.
My former business partner, Richard, was next. He’d thought more about it and the pre-roasted marshmallow business plan now enticed him. He’d love an opportunity to help develop it for me since he thought my ingenuitive proposal would be of great benefit to his organization.
My father was last. He was proud of me. The implant was going to improve my life in countless ways. He couldn’t wait to have me over for Thanksgiving.
It was okay. Everything was going to be okay. I didn’t have to worry. Lockasta had my best intentions in mind. This had always been the case. There had never been any reason to doubt them.
Implantation was a gift. I was sorry it had taken me so long to realize it.
Pre-Order Matt Nagin’s The Book of Outcasts here!
Matt Nagin is a writer and comedian. He’s been writing fiction and poetry for almost thirty years. He is the author of five books. His most recent offering is The Book of Outcasts, which is now available for pre-order. For more info go to mattnagin.com.