Hardwired
by Talia
I.
no one understood
the way she had understood
so you were startled,
but not surprised,
when her grafted spine
started appearing on
every major feed.
The fine silver vein
sliced symmetry down her spine.
Shoulder blades threw deep shadows
across airbrush-smooth skin,
their edges gleaming cold and sharp
beneath the hard spotlight
lurking just out frame.
Yours will never look like that.
You can tell that the scarring
is what it is,
and you will never have the money they used
to hardwire her model
directly into her nervous system.
It could unzip with a thought
or a word
brilliant metal teeth unfurling
to bare the pinpoint interface
that you imagined running your fingers across,
sliding delicate contacts into place.
You’d talked about how to do it together.
How to make it feel real.
It was the Last Nice Thing.
But eventually, there was just you,
turning over your restless ideas
until she surfaced on the feeds.
Head shaved.
Dull-eyed.
Like she’d always dreamed.
They called her Sponsored Content
and she responded however They wanted her to.
The house was Theirs.
The camera and the lights were Theirs.
The copy on her posts was Theirs.
The tech she let Them fuse to her spine
was Theirs, and,
contractually,
that made her Theirs too.
II.
It was your first time out of the City
and all you could do
was play her clips over
(and over)
as the train crawled forward,
her too-bright voice
enthusiastically detailing
functionality
specifications
and exorbitant price point.
She showed off the ways she could
be modified and used,
programs and personalities
unfolding behind her eyes,
a thick data spike
jammed into the port
at the base of her skull
by a rough-handed tech
who scrupulously kept their face
just out of frame.
You did not recognize
the way she spoke
or moved her face
until you noticed that
small
involuntary
hitch in her voice.
The one that told you she was close,
your cue to back off
before you made her cum too soon.
You played those two seconds of footage
on a loop
in your cousin’s guest room.
That hitch,
and the matching tremor in her lower lip.
Her body rattled off
risks and side effects
and you stayed glued to her account
as the engagement declined
and the videos became more extreme to compensate,
and you returned again
(and again)
to watch her body
fuck and be fucked
as her sensations streamed live
to a shrinking, frenzied audience,
the tech’s rough fingers shoving deep
into her glistening neural mesh
as her body seized and
her eyes rolled back into her skull
to demonstrate the product’s durability
and comprehensive safety features.
You teased out guilty orgasms
one after another
in someone else’s home.
You would try your hardest
to imagine her happy,
willing,
rich.
But as you came
you’d give yourself permission
to see her erased
once and for all
by a rush of all-consuming pleasure.
You’d curl up sick
with shame and envy
and then you’d start again.
III.
It took some time
to save the money you needed
for the reverse-engineered knockoff
the chop shop shoved into your head
during the two weeks of
PTO you’d managed to scrape
together. You told yourself
that you just wanted to understand.
Going back to work was impossible,
pain screaming with every
turn of your head
or word out of your mouth.
You didn’t have a plan
when you booked the surgery,
passed it off as some self-improvement thing
when people bothered to ask.
One of your coworkers
coded on their meal breaks.
They wrote you the painkiller app
that got you through those first few weeks
in exchange for letting their
furtive fingers tease open
your spring-loaded access hatch
and slide the drive in themselves.
You would have let them do
much
much
more,
but they were too scared of breaking you,
and you couldn’t let yourself tell them
that being broken didn’t
scare you at all.
The incisions faded into scars
the pain faded into less pain
You were fired, eventually.
Too many complaints
about glitches and crashes,
and when you cracked the records server
to track down the client
who found out how to
trigger your maintenance mode,
who pawed at your chest
as you stared frozen straight ahead,
they were happy to wash their hands of you
even though you never even called him.
The work you found afterwards
paid well enough at first.
Sometimes you even enjoyed it.
A friend of a friend
set you up with some basic tools
A front-end interface
for adjusting sensory responsiveness
and decreasing wear and tear
so the people who paid you
to climb around in your head
and make use of your body
couldn’t make any lasting changes
and so you wouldn’t be tempted
to let them.
You booked more surgeries.
Your arms amputated,
refitted,
and replaced
with topline prosthetics.
Detachable
Cheaper than your spinal graft,
but still expensive,
with countless work hours lost to the recovery.
The other pros you knew were skeptical
that the appeal was worth the cost.
You laughed them off
and pretended to disagree.
If you told them
the lie you told yourself,
one of them might have asked
a bottomless pit of a question
like how much of yourself
you needed to replace
before it would be
enough?
They couldn’t understand
the way she had understood
right away
breath quickening as she read the short story
you wrote as a teenager.
You had told yourself it was a cautionary tale
to scare yourself straight
and extinguish the simmering need
that, despite yourself, seethed
behind every word.
At first you thought you’d scared her off
with the heat of your want, but then you noticed
the flush in her cheeks
and her feverish eyes
as she put down the tablet
and leaned in close
and her breath was warm and heavy on your neck
and she asked you to use her
the way she and so many others had used you
in the fitful, secret dreams
you pretended not to remember.
IV.
You replaced one leg
but had to cancel your appointment for the other.
The money began drying up
when They released
Their consumer model
sleek and perfect like hers
at half the price you paid
for your crude knockoff.
You were no longer a novelty,
the new laws made advertising a nightmare,
and too many clients
were drawn to your older tech
because of its how easy it was to hack.
Every day, you white-knuckled through
your various inboxes,
reminding yourself that these men
and their see-through bullshit
lacked the skill and imagination
to give you the thing you could finally admit
you were chasing
once it slipped out of reach.
One of your listings
caught the eye of some random shithead
who sent it to some other noxious asshole
who told his twenty-eight
million followers
that you represented
whatever shadowy, sinister enemy
he said could bring down western society
this week.
You got doxxed
moved across the city
and dropped the work cold.
You resigned yourself to shit jobs
and long-sleeved turtlenecks
for the rest of your lonely life.
But as you closed inbox after inbox
overflowing with death threats
there was her name
so you clicked
V.
and there she was
smiling
voice bright
eyes plastic
inviting you to her owner’s home
a few hours outside the city
and when she said
“I can’t wait to see you”
and her voice caught
that same little hitch.
You played the moment
again
and again
(and again)
trying to tell whether it had been her
really her
or just the gesture
of a precise instrument
programmed to carry out a task.
You rushed out to the train
and arrived just before dawn
no bag, no plan
you walked to the address
some stately two-story colonial
the door opened
and there she was
cheerful
perfect
and empty
And when she finally
leaned in
and held you tight as
she slid a drive into the hungry metal
at the base of your neck,
you could feel her breath,
air-conditioner cool,
and you felt a rush of shameful relief
as something unfolded inside you
a roiling, bubbling pressure
that exploded outwards,
leaving you moaning and shaking
as the orgasm filled up
every little empty place inside you,
expanding on and on,
squeezing and pushing,
until you broke wide open
and hung limp across the shoulders
of the impassive object who
wore the face of someone you’d loved,
a face that gazed at you,
flat and expressionless,
as wave after wave
smashed you against the limits of yourself
and you cried and laughed and
shook yourself ragged,
until some little piece of you realized
that the pleasure
was ebbing away
receding slowly
and
then
ripping out of you all at once,
leaving a terrible, cold vacuum as
your shattered mind followed
the last dying embers of pleasure into
the deepest, smallest part of yourself
like a collapsing star,
until the crushing pressure of
the great and empty
void you left being finally
(finally)
snuffed you out.
VI.
the thing
that had once
been you
and the thing
that had once
been her
went into the house.
the door closed behind them.