False Feedback - part 2 (Patreon)

The machine takes a long time to come up.

I stand in the doorway of a room I've been inside maybe four times. It's hers. The door that stays shut.

There's a workbench down one wall. A pegboard hung with tools I can't name, pliers and a coil of solder and a clamp with rubber jaws, some kind of crimping thing. Plastic bins sorted by a logic only she has. Shelves of technical manuals gone pale along the spines from handling, and behind those, actual books, the colored kind. And the terminal. Matte, purpose-built, the kind of thing that comes in a case rather than a box. A flat screen above a low console with more switches than keys, and set into the console face a row of flat sensor circles spaced at even intervals. No ethernet jack, no router light, no visible line to anywhere outside this room. It reads wirelessly and it sends nowhere.

"Sit all the way back. Arms on the arms."

I took the shirt off in the hall because she told me to. Now she looks at me standing there in my jeans and says it without inflection, already half into the work. "All of it, Russ. Clothes throw the read off."

So I undress in my wife's locked room under a fluorescent tube while she keys something in, and the shame in it has nothing to do with her seeing me. She's seen me a thousand times. It's that the body stepping out of the jeans isn't the body doing the stepping. I bend and my weight goes somewhere it has never gone. I lower myself onto the chair and the cold metal of the arm meets my forearm and the cold vinyl meets me underneath, the seat's edge pressing up into the soft folds between my thighs in a way I can't redistribute, and the cold reaches the tissue and reports back in detail I didn't ask for. The weight settling forward into the thighs. A damp warmth building where the vinyl presses. My hands close on the chair arms without me telling them to.

She comes around and tips my chin up with two fingers, angling my head toward the sensor array. That's all. Brief and professional and my skin lights up under it anyway, the heat of her standing close, the lavender of the hand stuff she keeps by every sink in the house, and the body wants to turn its face toward her like a plant at a window, and I grip the chair and look at the floor.

A tone from the console. It's reading.

"Don't move once it's mapping. Takes a minute."

She goes back around to the keyboard. Striped sleeve pushed up one forearm. Hair down, catching the tube light along the top, brown going to copper. She types, and the screen does nothing for a while, a flat field of pale grain. Then it starts to build something out of the grain, line by line, top down, the way a picture used to load on a slow connection when we were young. Hair first. Short and dark and cropped close. My own dark, like whatever was drawing this couldn't be bothered to change my coloring, and saved its effort for the rest. A face under the hair. Narrow shoulders. The build coming down from there and assembling itself, on the screen, in a chair matching mine.

A naked woman. Cropped dark hair. Frightened eyes. Both hands gripping the arms of her seat.

She moves when I move. That's what gets all the way in. I shift my weight without meaning to and she shifts hers. I tighten my grip and her knuckles go white when mine do.

"You see it," I say. Light and thin, the borrowed voice. "Jeanne. That's it. You see it now."

"I'm seeing the somatic map." She doesn't look away from the screen. "What the layer's outputting for your body. Where it thinks your edges are. The mass and the surfaces." Her hands go still on the keys. "It built a woman, Russ."

On the glass the woman watches us both with my fear in her face.

I shut my eyes.

I learned what's behind them in the hour between the living room and this chair. Eyes closed, there's no fat glass screen, no naked stranger doing my terror back at me, no Jeanne's back refusing to turn around. Just the body, reporting itself, whole and unargued. The cold seat. The settled weight. The new map of myself, consistent and total and quiet. Behind my eyes I'm simply a woman sitting bare and scared in a cold room at night, and for one breath the inside of me and the picture on the screen are the same picture and no one is fighting about it.

"Take it off me," I say. "Roll it back. You bring this stuff home, you've got the equipment, Jeanne. Push the firmware down a version. Do what you'd do at work."

It takes her a while to answer. The machine ticks somewhere inside itself. One of the parts bins has a label I read three times without it going in. When she speaks she's not typing anymore.

"It's not sitting on top of the layer," she says. "That's what I was hoping for the whole time it loaded. On top, I scrape it, push you back a version, you wake up fine. It's not on top." She presses two fingers flat to her own forehead, the thing she does over the bills, over the car. "It went down. Into the motor cortex. The part of you that was there before we ever touched it. And it grew in fast." A pause. "The code the terminal is flagging isn't anything I recognize. It's not in our firmware library, it's not in any build I've worked on. I don't know what it is or where it came from. It's just there, inside your XSync implant, and it's bonded."

I understand without asking. "And you can't scrape what you can't identify."

"I can't scrape what's inside the cortex wall. Doesn't matter what it is."

The screen's woman turns slowly in her chair, keeping up with me, patient.

"So scrape it anyway," I say. "Whatever it takes."

"That's the problem." She turns to face me, and this is the thing I'll come back to: she makes herself do it. She doesn't say this to the keyboard. "Getting under it now means going through the tissue it bonded to. It grew into the cortex and it's holding on. Do a hard sever, tear the XSync connection out root and all, and the payload doesn't come out clean. The motor tissue comes with it." A pause. "We're talking about your hands, Russ. Your coordination. The thing that controls how you walk. A hard sever right now is permanent motor damage and we don't know how much."

The air in the room is very still. The machine ticks.

"But the payload stays and I keep feeling like this," I say.

She doesn't answer right away. That is the answer.

"Could it get worse," I say.

"I don't know enough to say."

The woman on the screen has gone still because I have. The two of us sitting in the same fear in the same chair, and I understand that I'm looking at the only honest picture of myself in the house, and that getting rid of it means losing the use of my hands.

I could keep this. The weight and the cold and the absence, the body no one will ever see except a machine wired to nothing, the voice that comes out a stranger, Jeanne's hand landing on a nervous system that turns toward her like a plant toward a window. A whole life as the only witness to myself, held together by hands that still work.

Or we do the sever, and the woman in the glass goes dark, and so does whatever the motor cortex holds, and no one can tell me how much goes with it.