Version Control - part 1 (Patreon)

Three hundred perforations, or close to it — lost count somewhere in the two hundreds. Same foam ceiling squares as the dentist's office. Brin is moving near my left ear and I don't turn to look.

"You'll feel the sedation in about thirty seconds," Brin says. "Some people describe it as warm. Some people describe it as the lights dimming."

I'm a writer. I want to tell her the words are wrong and I'll find better ones. I don't say anything. I look at the ceiling and wait. Brin is moving near my left ear, some instrument I can't see, and there's a sound like a heat gun warming up, low and intermittent. Then it stops.

The mirror on the wall I haven't looked at. Brin has the manner of someone who does this forty times a week, presumably accurate — she made small talk about the HVAC system while she prepped the site behind my ear, the antiseptic swab cold for a second and then nothing, her gloved fingers finding the spot without looking. The node goes in while the sedation is taking hold, same register as a dentist's needle — you feel it more than feel it. The table still there, the ceiling still there, and then a faint pressure and a dull click I feel more than hear, and that's the thing I've been not doing for two years.

It's like the feeling when you know you've forgotten something but haven't landed on what yet, that half-second of vertigo, and the ceiling is still there but I'm not quite — the room goes soft, and I'm not behind my own eyes anymore. And then this.

Sera got her XSync in October. I remember because we'd had plans — a drive out to the coast, two nights somewhere we'd been talking about since July — and she called to say she'd moved the appointment up, could we do the coast another time. I said of course. She said she wanted it done before the semester really got going. Completely reasonable. I cooked dinner and she came home with a small bandage behind her left ear and was quiet that evening, the processing quiet she gets, and by morning she was herself again. Herself plus something. The plus part impossible to name then.

First week I didn't notice much. Maybe sharper in the mornings, but Sera is already sharp in the mornings, it's one of the things about her I find faintly irritating at seven a.m. By the third week I understood that something had changed. She was faster. Like a machine after you've cleared the cache. No waiting between wanting and doing. She'd read something and it stayed, cross-referenced against everything else she'd read, her recall so immediate it stopped feeling like recall and started feeling like she just knew things already. Stayed up later, slept less. Woke up without that first-hour drag.

I told myself this didn't bother me.

What I was telling myself didn't bother me: Sera had a tool I didn't have. The tool made her better at her work. Her work and my work were different things — she's doing a PhD in comparative literature, I'm in the MFA program, we're not competing in any direct sense — but both our work ran on the same inputs, which were reading and thinking and writing, and she was doing all three faster and better, and the gap was widening in a way I could feel even if I couldn't have measured it. I told myself this was fine. I had principles about it. I had a thing about friction. Resistance between the mind and the material. I'd gotten some mileage out of it.

This was a real principle. I believed it before the implant question was even relevant to me, before Sera got hers, before my cohort started getting theirs one by one. The belief was there first. The convenience came after.

The belief came from an argument I'd made in the second week of my first semester, in a seminar on documentary poetics. The professor had asked whether recorded material — interview transcripts, found documents, archival photographs — could constitute primary creative acts or whether they were always secondary, always arrangement rather than generation. I'd said something about friction being the engine of meaning. That the resistance you feel when you try to say a true thing in language that was built for other purposes — that resistance is not an obstacle, it's the mechanism. The professor had written two words in the margin of my response paper. I'd been chasing those two words for two years, built most of my sense of myself around them, and now I was lying on a table waiting for someone to put a node behind my ear — the thing I'd spent two years saying was wrong.

Wren got hers in November — Opal, the competitor brand. Then Will. Then both of the Brennan twins got an XSync the same week, which might have been coincidence or might not have been, they tend to move together. By January it was me and Tadashi, and Tadashi is Tadashi, he'll do things in his own time or not at all, and his resistance was genuine and impermeable in a way mine wasn't and I envied that even as I watched my own start to hollow out.

The workshop was where I felt it most. Twelve people around a table with someone's draft, the room finding the piece, the thing wrong with it, the thing right with it, and I used to be ahead of that room. Not performing. Just fast at that kind of reading. First year, I was usually the one who found the thing first.

By February the conversation moved differently. Not faster, exactly — workshop is still workshop, it's still twelve people in a room — but the arguments were tighter, the references came from further back, the connections people drew between a draft and something we'd read in September were more precise and came without searching. I wasn't ahead anymore. I was in the room, same as everyone else. And there were moments — a Tuesday, Wren making a point about the second section of Will's essay, something I'd seen but hadn't gotten to yet — when I was behind.

Sera never pushed. She mentioned the implant like you'd mention a dentist who was good, or a coffee place worth the detour — occasionally, in context, never pressingly, but always with a small pause first, as if she were deciding how much of her own thought to let me hear. She said her friend Luc had a good experience, that the adjustment was easier than expected. She said once — we were in the kitchen, she was washing dishes, I was at the table with a book I'd been sort of reading for forty minutes — that I'd probably adapt faster than most people, given what I study. She said it and then looked at me in a way that meant she'd already thought about how I'd take it. Given what I study. Like the nonfiction program was preparation for having your cognitive architecture upgraded. She wasn't wrong. That was the thing. She was making a reasonable point with a reasonable tone and I put the book down and said I was going to take a walk.

An hour. I came back and she was reading and she looked up and said nothing about the conversation, just: "how was the walk." Fine. It was fine.

The essay is what broke me. Or clarified things.

I've been working on this piece since September. Personal essay, the form I came here to learn, the thing I think I can do — or thought. It's about my father and a summer when I was twelve and he took the whole summer to build a shed in the backyard. One afternoon he measured the same board three times, all three times wrong, and then stood there with the tape dangling from one hand as if the mistake had happened to someone else. The material is there. My advisor says so, in the way he says things when he means something else. The essay won't open. I've written several thousand words on it and scrapped most of them. What survives is a first paragraph that I'm fairly sure is wrong, and a handful of sentences scattered through the middle, all of them circling the same core thing from different angles and never quite landing on it.

In March I sat in Wren's kitchen — she'd had a few of us over — and she talked about her thesis draft, which she’d mostly finished in her head and was now putting to paper. Forty pages since October. She talked about the AI like it was a colleague, a good reader who happened to be available at two in the morning. I drank my wine and did the math. Forty pages. I had something like a twentieth of that and a shed.

But it wasn't really about pages. It was about what forty pages meant for how the program was working, and what happened after the program — which was the rest of my writing life, which was everything. I was here on a two-year fellowship. At the end of the two years there would be a thesis, and the thesis would be the thing I sent out, and the thing I sent out was the argument I was making to the world about whether I had a right to be doing this. I'd come in with a chapter of a book, personal essays about growing up in the house my father built and couldn't quite finish and eventually sold. My advisor had taken me on the strength of that chapter. Two years later I had a principle about friction that was starting to feel, in the context of Wren's forty pages, less like a philosophical position and more like an excuse.

I made the appointment the next morning. While Sera was in the shower, fast, before I could think about it too much — and then I sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and looked out the window at the street.

Didn't tell her. Not that morning and not for two days after, until it was close enough that not mentioning it felt stranger than mentioning it. She said that's great, kissed me on the cheek, went back to what she was reading. She did not look up again for a while. I don't know what I expected. Something. But she was warm about it — she's always warm — and that was it, and I went back to the shed essay and wrote two more sentences and deleted one.

The sedation is thinning. I can tell because I'm aware of the table again, the slight give of the padding under my shoulder blades. The room reassembling itself at the edges.

There's a mirror on the wall across from the table. I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror this morning — six forty-five, the light still gray, the usual face — and tried to find in it some evidence of what I was about to do, some change in the eyes or the jaw that would mark this as a threshold. There was nothing. Which is either reassuring or not, depending on how you look at it. I've decided not to look at the one across the room.

Brin asks how I feel. I go looking for the word — the actual search, casting around, testing options against the thing I mean — and the word is already there. Right at the surface, before the search begins. I didn't put it there. Something put it there without me.

I take the word. I say: "Clear."

She writes something down. The word was right — it was what I meant, accurate — and there's something uncomfortable about that. I run my tongue over my teeth. I think about the shed. About twelve and the way my father held a level like he understood what it was telling him, and the small involuntary wince I'd suppress each time he reached for a nail. I think about the essay, the sentences that have been sitting in it for months, the ones I wrote when I didn't know what I was writing. Whether the AI would surface something like them — whether it could, or whether they're the kind of thing that only comes from the slow, inefficient, friction-laden process I've been defending for two years.

I wonder whether what I'm actually here to lose is the ability to tell the difference.

I'm not supposed to drive myself home. Brin mentions this twice, cheerfully, as if I might forget. Sera took the morning off.

I sit up slowly. The room holds.

The clinic's glass door swings shut behind me and the cold comes in off the street and Sera is across the parking lot in the car, head down over her phone. She looks up. Gets out.

"How do you feel?"

"Strange. Good, I think."

She opens the passenger door and I fold myself in and reach for the seatbelt and miss. Not by much — the buckle is exactly where it always is and my hand lands a half-inch to the left of it, closing on air. Second try. Sera, already around to the driver's side, doesn't see.

I hold the belt across my chest and look at my hand for a moment.

Fatigue. The sedation wearing off. I put my hand in my lap.

There's a small silver disc behind my left ear now, just like Sera's. Same model. I touch it briefly, like touching a new filling with your tongue — making sure you know where it is. Sera starts the car and I watch the clinic recede in the side mirror, the pavement wet from a recent rain. She’s overly cautious driving in the rain, as if she fears an accident. But she doesn’t need to be. She can drive better than me.

The Premium version of this post includes images of Declan receiving the implant and on the way home with Sera.