The Journey

Below is the short story I wrote for the SCI-FI-LONDON Flash Fiction Challenge 2017. I was given the title THE JOURNEY, the dialogue "Most people don't remember quotes, I don't remember most people." and my theme was Augmented Reality. Just perfect! A hint of zeitgeist and I came up with this near future dystopia.
// contains a few stylistic changes to the original... I just couldn't help myself... ;)

A sharp pain in the stomach pulled him out of bed. Bending, groaning, he reached for the bathroom. Suddenly his body was soaked in cold sweat. He could feel every drop sprout from every pore of his skin, not a nice experience, but inescapable, due to his enhanced sense of tact. He tried to read the list of symptoms and diagnosis that had just been projected before his eyes, or in his mind, more properly, but he passed out on the bathroom floor.

When he woke up the pain was gone and the floor was covered with vomit. He crawled to the shower, “Water, warm!” and felt the tepid stream hit his body. He stayed there, sitting on the ground, letting the water wash away the puke and the tiredness. He remembered the pain, never felt a pain like that. “My senses might have overreacted to a food poisoning”. He couldn’t precise exactly how long it took to regain some strength, he could only think of going to work. “I will clean this mess when I come back”.

Not without some difficulty, he got dressed. Something was bothering him, a very subtle smell of blood, although there was no sign of blood in the abundant content of his stomach now spread on the floor. “There’s something wrong with my Overlay system… Enhanced senses should add information to reality, but never overwhelm or contradict it”. Fortunately, soon he could address any eventual problem, for he was a programmer at Overlay, the company responsible for the global augmented reality system that had been implanted in every human being, from birth, for many decades. Although still feeling somewhat weak, he left his tiny flat.

The tall glass building stood out against the greyish concrete around it. It stood out even more because each big square of glass was a window to surreal dreams, automatically customized to fit every eye, every desire of every person who looked at those magic squares. Many people would slow their frantic walk through life to stare at them. That’s why the Overlay building was also known as the daydream building. That had been always a crowded spot and, because of that, a most favorite place for protests. He worked on the fifth floor, up there he could see the march taking the street below. “The crooked women again”.

They were ugly, the crooked women. Their distorted figures caused aversion and mockery. Hate and aggression joined those feelings and extended to what they stood for, and to whoever dared to share the same values. They wanted to interact with the world without the mediation of the Overlay. Many people couldn’t bear to imagine that and most people had never experienced life directly, for they were born after the mass adoption of the Overlay. The crooked women themselves were born after the Overlay and had received the neuro-implant at birth. But they aimed to start a generation that would not have the Overlay implant. The press claimed that they endangered our way of life. They had systematically been denied authorization to the global human reproduction clinics services, and illegal backyard clinics were tracked down and destroyed by the global surveillance department. Now he could hear the crooked women shouts: “Free people’s minds!”, “Free people’s bodies!”, “Senses are not common sense!”. The shouts were thunder in his ears, he felt dizzy. “Violence is real!”, “Reality is racist!”, “Reality is sexist!”. A drop of sweat ran from his forehead, he couldn’t look down anymore, although he was drawn to those watchwords, to those crooked women. “Augmenting is denying!”, “Stop daydreaming, start living!”.

He rushed back to his station. He was feverish, the thunder in his ears now said “The road to freedom has always been stalked by death” but it didn’t sound as a watchword, it felt as a memory. The thunder ceased. He muttered “The road to freedom has always been stalked by death… Where does it come from?”. That random phrase felt like the deepest remembrance he ever had, although he didn’t know if it was even a memory at all. But it felt more solid than the fainted images of his childhood and the shallow sensation of being a programmer for all of his life. He took a deep breath… and felt that subtle smell of blood again. “There is, definitely, something wrong with my Overlay implant”. He couldn’t delay fixing it no longer, that flaw that was messing with his body and his mind, but he only programmed screens, as all his colleagues in the fifth floor. He needed the core masters, the developers of the system itself, and they were to be found in the underground floor.

As he walked the corridors towards the elevators, information about the creation of the Overlay system adorned the walls, but for his eyes only, as he retrieved the data only by willing to know it. A revolutionary augmented reality system developed by a group of visionaries, sponsored by the biggest tech companies in the first half of the twenty-first century, able to augment all five human senses. A layer of amazement over reality, an always available infinite memory, a global wireless network of shared thoughts and emotions that would never disturb anybody’s living with ups and downs, but instead be an eternal spring of the senses and the thinking. Then another random sentence met his eyes, taking the wall: “One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star”. A storm was hitting the eternal spring, he ran through the corridors.

The underground floor was very large and very bright and delimited by cold reflective walls of still. Empty. No people, no holograms, no furniture. He could hear the echoing sound of his steps, while looking at his own image reflected on the walls. At the end of the corridor a large white door, closed, and on the door a little frame, picturing an elderly man, his face very white with a grin for accessory. As he approached the door, the man in the frame sort of woke up, speaking to him with an inhuman voice:

- Hi, there! What a screen programmer is doing here in the underground floor?

- I’m looking for the core masters.

- And why do you need them?

- My Overlay system is malfunctioning.

- Oh, this is pretty impossible, young lad.

- My senses are impaired. And what the hell are you, some sort of AI?

- I am a fading man.

- What does it mean?

- It means you’re looking at the last core master.

- You are not even human!

- I was, once. Now I am… noise.

- So who is in charge of the system?

- Everybody. No shepherd, only one herd.

- I don’t understand.

- The Overlay system is self-regulated, it homogenizes the sensory and the thought experience of all human beings through the data it gathers… and the data is… all of you, your common sense, your averageness, your mediocrity, your conformity. Everyone wants the same, everyone sees the same, everyone is the same. Any anomaly that may burst is constrained by fear and hatred, humans against humans. No AI, that would be so burdensome… and so unnecessary. No, only the poison made of your own human matter is enough to disguise suffering as a pleasant daydreaming. You fight for your captivity as you would fight for your freedom. You fight for our profit as you would fight for your life. We have invented happiness!

He had listened to that with a bated breath. Now he was breathing heavily, it was like he woke up of a dream to dive into a nightmare, but the nightmare was better than any dream he might have been dreaming.

- Then I think I am some sort of anomaly. What you call happiness I call madness.

At this moment he saw another random sentence, right above the frame of his bizarre host, and he spoke out loud as he read the words:
— It’s at the edge of life that we meet our deepest strength.

- Oh, an anomaly quoting another. Most people don’t remember quotes, I don’t remember most people. But this one I can’t forget. That’s the scramble girl.

- Who’s the scramble girl?

- She was one of the crooked women, she tried to bypass the Overlay by developing a device that scrambled the signal emitted by the implant in the nervous system.

- What happened to her?

- She managed to hack the core, but the system took care of her, she eventually merged into the herd.

- Open the door.

- I have no reason to do that.

- You do. I am an anomaly as you now know, something in me is impairing the system and I’ve heard too much. Would you like me to go back now, being a liability to the Overlay? I am offering you a way out, through a way in. You let me in, and I face the risk of merging into the herd, for good, like the scramble girl.

The door opened and he ran, the sweat rolling through his face. He stumbled and fell. The thunder in his ears sounded like screams of terror. He squirmed in pain, the system was striking hard, trying to overlay his very life. In the middle of the noise, as a distant chant, he heard those words: “The road to freedom has always been stalked by death”. He crawled towards the words and they became louder. “One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star”.

He discovered a flaw on the floor; he removed a piece of it and found a little box; he opened the box and all the noise was gone; he had found the scramble girl’s device, it looked like a regular smart watch, and it set him free. He quickly put on the watch and then the sound of the street caught his attention. People running, shouts and bombs. He was right under the crooked women protest and they were under attack. Through a grid above his head he could see them with his own eyes. And they weren’t crooked, they weren’t deformed and scary, they were women, with women bodies. That’s how the crooked women really looked like.

He stood up to run away, but stopped, staring at the reflective still wall. A woman looked back at him. Her mouth was moving, “It’s at the edge of life that we meet our deepest strength”. His mouth was moving — and the louder he spoke the better he could hear her voice. Her voice was his voice. There was only her. There had always been her. She was the woman who had hacked the Overlay and developed the scramble device. She was the scramble girl and she set herself free. She was a woman and there was blood in her clothes. She understood everything now, she was free from the herd and she had to run, she had to move faster than she had ever moved in her life.

When she entered her tiny flat, free of any reality overlay, she felt not a subtle but a strong smell of blood. The bathroom floor was covered in blood — and there was the child. She fell on her knees, sobbing. Crawling, she drew near the child, that was so quiet. She finally took the baby in her trembling hands. Heavy drops of tear wet the baby’s face, heavy warm drops. Her face now touched the little face, all her body trembling, her weeping uncontained. And then she felt it, she felt the soft breath, the gentle breath of life that thrived. Her hands stopped shaking, she stopped weeping, she met her deepest strength. Both stood still, like one, breathing, at the edge of life.