Brain Dust
A cyberpunk story.
It was the seventh day of the Art Riots and we were dreadfully bored. Usually we tried to survive the summer heat by being distracted with the TV, but our shows were constantly being interrupted by level red city lockdown warnings. Option two was to be occupied by the feeds on my phone but those were already repetitive.
I was somewhere between Zen meditation and braindead unconsciousness when Chloe loudly whined to the room, “I’m bored.”
I opened my eyes and was greeted by the same grey ceiling. I looked over and found Chloe leaning against the wall upside down doing a handstand. I closed my eyes as I lay on the couch. I tried to imagine nothingness again. I was being transported back to the void when Chloe interrupted again in her bored whine, “Max, what are you doing?”
“Trying to die,” I said keeping my eyes shut.
“Want any help?” Chloe asked.
“Not from you,” I replied.
I couldn’t get half a minute of silence without Chloe again interrupting my Zen with more talking.
“I told ya. You should have gotten an implant. It makes dying so easy.”
To clarify, the dying I was talking about was sleep, so this moment in time could pass immediately. The dying Chloe was referring to was putting her brain into rest mode. And the implant she was talking about was the CX360 brain augmentation.
Chloe got the augmentation about a decade ago. Flew all the way to Berlin to get it done. It was revolutionary at the time, and still is. It wasn’t her first mod, she’s had all the miscellaneous little ones and a metal left arm for who knows how long.
I, on the other hand, never jumped on the robotics trend. The idea of getting an arm sawed off for a mechanical one was far from appealing. Hell, having someone open my head and replacing parts of my brain with the new XCrikk was nightmare material for me. I was still 100% human, a small and shrinking population of the world. Even my grandmother got robo-ears last Christmas.
Chloe was talking. Even without my grandma’s mute option, I had the perfectly capable human trait of tuning Chloe out. I wished I was thinking about nothing and its appealing void, instead my thoughts were occupied with Chloe’s past. Ugh she’s so annoying sometimes.
I opened my mouth, “Why don’t you just go into sleep mode and we could both relax in peace?”
Chloe gracefully left her handstand and was standing right side up, “Nah I don’t sleep anymore, boot process is too much of a pain in the ass?”
“Oh the aug lifestyle isn’t all peaches eh?”
Chloe was quick to defend, “It’s only cause I need to upgrade my neuron.”
“Well I never need to upgrade anything,” I replied.
“I don’t need to sleep, forget things, or feel pain. I could go on all day about everything you’re missing.”
There was a pause.
“I like to sleep,” I said more to myself.
Chloe slouched into the chair next to me. After a too short amount of silence Chloe started to talk to me/herself.
“I probably don’t need to upgrade. The new updates are kinda useless. Besides the newer models are all wireless and I’m not too big of a fan. I probably just need to delete a bunch of funkfile.”
Chloe stopped talking and then sat completely still. I watched her curiously as she went through her internal files. I wondered what she was deleting. She never appeared to be any different after these processes, but there has to be something that’s changed.
Chloe’s shoulder twitched and then she was back to moving like a normal human being. I returned my gaze towards the ceiling.
“I don’t know,” Chloe said, “My head still feels a little cloggy.”
“Maybe you have a virus,” I said as a joke.
“No, I did a virus scan just now too. Perhaps I have too much dust in my head.”
“Dust in your head?” I repeated.
“Yeah dust accumulates, clogs the fans, and acts as a heat sink. Can result in overheating. Especially in this damn hot weather.” Chloe kept talking but more to herself at this point. “When was the last time I dusted out? I don’t think I ever have. Ugh eight years of dust accumulation.”
I tried to ignore her and not hear about how messed up the whole thing was. Take me back to the blank void.
Chloe shook my arm asking, “Hey can you help clean my head?”
“No way.”
Chloe was still shaking my arm. “Please. I don’t want to go out into those riots or pay a fortune for some stranger to vacuum my brain.”
“You didn’t mind a stranger taking your brain out in the first place”.
“Yeah but dusting out is simple. The money they charge for it is a scam.”
“Can’t you just wait until the riots are over?”
“C’mon it’ll be easy. Then I can sleep in peace and so could you.”
The blank void I was seeking was far away and nowhere to be found. I opened my eyes and turned to see Chloe intently staring at me.
“Fine.”
–
The sun had set by the time we were ready. We were supposed to start earlier but our takeout delivery was late due to the riots.
Chloe was sitting on the floor with a pillow. “Okay it’s quite simple. You unscrew the port here,” she undid her wig revealing a panel that was seamless with her skin just at the top of her neck. “After that you’ll just need to latch off the case. Then just poke around and brush all the dust out. Easy.”
I was definitely more nervous than Chloe.
Chloe concluded, “When in doubt just look up a video on your barbaric phone. And don’t unscrew anything.”
Chloe placed her head into the pillow and finally asked, “Ready?”
“Wait,” I quietly replied. “How do I wake you back up?”
“Oh yeah.” Chloe got a syringe from her desk and pointed to a spot on her neck. “Just inject me here when you’re done.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You can open my head after I fall unconscious.”
And with that, Chloe’s face fell heavily into the pillow and her whole body relaxed. I waited for a minute doing nothing. I sat still watching her lie motionless. I poked her arm a bit and there was no response. Okay time to do this. I grabbed the screwdriver and removed the four screws that were discreetly imbedded in her still warm skin.
There was a time when Chloe was true blood. No augmentations or gadgets. The arm was a big deal when it happened. The warm flesh and skin replaced by cold metal. She could now punch like a jackhammer and also have the precision of a surgeon. The arm was not a subtle change. But when Chloe got the augmented brain, physically she appeared the same.
The head-plate was now resting beside Chloe’s open head. It was a similar experience to carving a pumpkin. Except instead of spooning out pumpkin guts I was going to be brushing out dust while not damaging any important components. I took out a little flashlight and shone it inside. The pumpkin analogy disappeared from my mind. Inside was completely inorganic. In fact it was mechanical and machine like. It reminded me of when I had a job fixing cars. Black boxes with wires tangled around fans and a metal casing. I was looking inside a computer.
And it was a mess. Components and wires were everywhere. There was no order, everything looked ready to burst out from the lack of space. And everything was covered with dust. Large solid dust clumps in every corner and no surface without a thin layer of particles.
I sat there gazing inside doing nothing for some time.
Eventually I became less intimidated. We didn’t have a fancy little duster or mini vacuum. Instead we had thin paintbrushes. I grabbed one and started to sweep the big clumps of dust out of Chloe’s head.
It was surprisingly easy. The giant dust bunnies willingly left the head for the great landscapes of our apartment floor. Quite quickly a pile of dust accumulated, expanding out to become about half the size of Chloe’s head.
As I peered closer I could now see the detailing on the individual components inside Chloe’s head.
The power supply was taking up a large amount of space. The thin green motherboard was tightly fitted next to a fan unit. There were tiny German words etched into the units that I couldn’t understand. I wondered if I was getting the chance to peak at boring technical notes or maybe personal messages hidden away.
Quite some time had passed. It was late enough that the riots outside were now quiet. Chloe’s internal head now appeared to be clean enough and the job was complete by my standards. Time to close her up.
Just as I was picking up her separated scalp, I noticed something move at the edge of my vision. I quickly turned my attention to it. Was it just my imagination? No wait. Something black moved right there inside her head. I grabbed the flashlight and shone it in.
I saw it. A tiny black ant on the battery unit inside of Chloe’s head. And then the ant crawled deeper out of sight. I was shocked. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what to do. I let out a moderately loud, “Aaa”.
“Okay focus” I told myself. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
I checked every angle of Chloe’s brain with my smallest brush, but I couldn’t find any trace of the ant. I wondered if I had imagined it. I waited for a long time. How long? I have no clue. I just stared into the complex brain, seeing no movement.
I must have imagined it. I must have imagined it. I must have imagined it.
I closed Chloe’s head. Screwed the casing together. Injected the syringe contents into her neck.
Chloe’s whole body twitched for a second and then was still. She took a deep breath of air and rose from the floor.
“Ay I feel great,” Chloe said with excitement and then let out a howl of celebration.
I watched in silence as she did a somersault.
Finally Chloe turned to me and asked how it went.
“Good,” was all I said.
Chloe was too excited to question further as she pranced around the room. I wished I could have shared her excitement but my heart was beating with worry. She seemed fine. Maybe there was no ant after all.
Days passed
I kept a close watch on Chloe, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. In fact, things were actually pretty nice with Chloe going into sleep mode fairly often, leaving me to enjoy the silence and peace. But every time I tried to find my place in the endless void of nothingness all I could think about was that ant in Chloe’s head. That little bug crawling around nibbling from the brain. I never felt the relief of silence in the apartment anymore. I would only feel concern when Chloe was in sleep mode. At least when she was awake and talking I knew nothing was wrong.
Maybe I had imagined the ant, and there was nothing wrong inside Chloe’s head. But I could never stop thinking about it. I couldn’t reach the thoughtless void again. The ant was inside my head
Chloe appeared fine. She was actively doing her usual handstands and flips. And constantly talking.
“You seem quieter these days,” Chloe said during a pause from her run on story.
“It’s just the heat,” I lied.
The days were getting hotter. And then, one day it cooled down. The Art Riots were over. The TV stopped having lockdown notifications and the streets were now occupied by normal people doing everyday things.
We decided to celebrate the end of the riots by going to the art gallery along with two friends.
The tickets were expensive and the lineup was long. The rooms were all packed making me feel like a sardine. I split off from the group looking for somewhere quieter. Eventually I found it on the top floor near a broken elevator. I found an unoccupied bench. In front of me was an enormous canvas of a horse in a field. I found it boring and closed my eyes. I used to relax in the galleries but nowadays they were as gross as shopping malls.
Enough time passed that I figured I should find the others. I wandered down to the lower levels looking at the people in the rooms instead of the art.
Eventually I found Chloe by herself looking at one of the pieces. I approached and then noticed that the art on the wall was a painting of an ant. Just a lone ant on a white background. An ant in the void of whiteness. Chloe appeared to be deeply focused on the work.
I interrupted, “Hey Chloe.”
She snapped out of her concentration but didn’t turn to look at me.
“Hey,” she said.
“You like the ant?” I commented.
“I don’t know why,” She began, “but out of all the art in this building, this one makes me feel… I don’t know. Makes me feel something. Ants don’t belong on a white artificial background. They’re creatures of nature and belong in the grass and dirt. Well, used to. Y’know ants became extinct two years ago.”
I said I’d never heard of ants becoming extinct.
“Yeah a chemical was released into the soil that was supposed to get rid of termites but instead it only got rid of ants. Pretty sad. What did ants ever do to us?”
I could not answer her.
Chloe finally turned to me, “Anyways, Randy and Paul ditched with some excuse. Wanna head home or get drinks at Tunnels?”
“Let’s go to Tunnels,” I said.
“Great!” Chloe happily replied. “I love it there.”
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