Conscious Removal, a story, Part 1

It felt cold, like a metal fork cracking the shell of a fresh Olde American egg, physically painless while emotionally torturous- the fear was what got to me as I felt my skull split and release me. Where was I actually going? Which real was Real? And then I was there. Time moved differently there, if at all.

The place itself had evolved out of pure accident, or maybe pure determinism. A flux of both? A confluence of advances in quantum computing, computer-brain-interface tech, AI, and chemistry. Some fucked up kid with too much of mommy and daddy’s money discovered a very different experience when RTsyncing his implant on the new INET quantum lines and self-administering a nearly catatonic IV dose of methoxetamine- and the only reason I went in there was to find a fucking cat.

In the cat’s defense, it had extraordinarily rich owners that were offering a ridiculous amount of IcU Bits for its return or the of its captors’ capture. Very excessive for the situation so it had me interested. Like most- I was broke as hell constantly having to do interest removal jobs for my creditors to keep out of a debt colony. That barely left any time for work that put actual food in my stomach. IR jobs take 85% of the monthly 55% interest rate off your debt, your total debt goes over your assigned value for more than 90 days, you get flagged and hauled off for prison colony slave labor until your debt is cleared. Most people hit that limit at some point, bad luck or old age. This seemed a stupidly easy chance to not- so fuck it.

Northern Mexico formed as a result of UN peace keeping interventions during the Second American Civil War. The worlds’ former powerhouse economy began committing genocide on itself and, having international economic repercussions, the UN, backed by the full military might of the former EU assumed control of the US. That was the beginning of TIcU or The Intercontinental Union, basically everything except China, which is most of Asia, the New American Alliance of Latin, and Russia, which is, well, still pretty much Russia. Northern Mexico came into existence during the rebuilding and restructuring efforts, a combination of the former states of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, a new homeland for those pushed upward from then flooding. The sea levels had risen drastically by 2035. In a coastal perversion, the Pacific Ocean now lapped the feet of the Sierras lecherously and displaced hundreds of millions and separating the Northern and Southern continents of the Americas.

No longer under constant military coup by the now nonexistent USA and outside the purview of TIcU, the NAAL flourished as a neo-socialist network of independent countries while those pushed upward into North Mexico ended up in makeshift ghettoes and overcrowded cities. I was in flagstaff, a now strange, overbuilt and polluted inland tropical paradise due to climate change and the mass displacement. It was a beautiful, multicultural shithole.

This whole debacle had started about two weeks ago. I had had just completed a 3 week long IR gig and was walking the inner district and getting drunk, trying to pick up leads for a real job. I had credentials, most of them legitimate, but so did everyone within 300 miles of SLC. Oversaturation. Automation had eliminated the scarcity of just about everything but a paying job. Unless it was on the dark market.

Seb’s was a bar a few blocks southeast off the downtown district. Cheap drinks, bad food, terrible music, and even worse people. I loved it. You could always find something interesting there. Not good necessarily, but interesting. I had taken some Stim an hour or so before and I was sitting at a corner table, sifting through the bar chatter on my unit at hyper speed, putting down shots of Colaquiers Tabasco Vodka to keep from vibrating my brain trying to scoop up something profitable using my wetware to run searches and correlation algorithms through all of my many flops of previously collected data- every thought I’d registered consciously or not since I’d gotten my base implant over 20 years ago- a part of standardized schooling. I’d long since had the government malware and nasty spying bits removed, upgrading my complete system numerous times over the years. I was running up there in terms of raw processing power and capacity. I tended to overload my nerves though, the vodka counteracted that.

The overlays of conversation in the bar ran below my conscious thoughts, processing, pulling anything useful, nothing yet. Anything related to my chosen parameters- money, drugs, work, violence- would register as a conscious thought I could immediately investigate on deeper levels or would be put in the search results log. When you run the deeper algorithms on localized conversation, depending on your wetware and dataset, you can run their pulse, pupil dilation, breathing rate, sweat level- hell some systems can identify what drugs you’re on from scanning a locations net-connection.

With that information you can learn a lot more about what they just said. For example, most people lie to those they are comfortable with far more often than those they do not, and with those they do not, more often than not it is a withholding of information than an outright lie. When you catch someone in a lie with someone they do not know well and are not comfortable with, it is often profitable. Like the white woman talking to the Asiatic masculine person, though I was not really sure what was between their legs. Neither could my drive. From posture readings she was familiar with him, but not friendly- he held power over her, and she knew it. A few beads of sweat on the back of her neck, 2 more breaths than she had been averaging the rest of the conversation when she said it, “I don’t know, I came in to work this morning and the cat was gone. That’s when I called you. I was hoping you knew where it was.” That was a lie and both of them were out of place, even in an out of place place like this. I logged their wet IPs and set a geo log. Tomorrow I would see where they’d been and see if anything turned up. Why would she lie about a cat? Why would she be scared to lie about a cat? And what were a high standard pair like that doing here if it wasn’t illegal?

I stood up to leave, making sure to drunkenly fall into the duos table to get close enough to get a full bio electrical read out of who they were, infuriating the now intoxicated Asian. The woman grew visibly tense and shut down. I apologized and made my way out the door.

I was renting a room from a familial friend in the mio alto district, one of the cheaper slums of the slums. The room was the smallest in a 3 bedroom shared apartment on the top floor. Being on the top floor, 68 stories up was a blessing for me as it gave me great connectivity to the sattelites constantly spitting their signals against the pocked face of the planet. Being this high up, even on tempestuous summer nights I was speeding on their waves of data. A ten by ten, infinite cup noodles hung over the edge of the too-tiny garbage can in the corner, twin mattress stained with detoxification sweats lie naked, uncared for- not a bedroom, not my home, this was nothing more than a charging station and locker. Bare walls. The only sign this room was more than a squat was the tentacled, writhing mass of electronics in the far corner. THAT was my home.