The ads turned the city into a war zone.
Millie rubbed two fingers between her eyebrows. Today’s short run to the pharmacy would take hours to recover from. Even now, in the elevator, out of the onslaught, her head throbbed and her stomach heaved and beads of sweat hung heavy on her brow. She closed her eyes and shuddered.
When she opened them again, an alternate-reality version of herself stared back, dead-eyed. Elevator Millie had a waspy waist, a fashionably flat chest, and bowed, needle-thin legs at least two shades lighter than her real skin tone. A strapless tiered dress, chiffon and mint green, flickered into place, and slinky white heels replaced her sensible flats.
$339.97
ORDER NOW WITH ONE-TOUCH
Real Millie sighed and turned her gaze up to the ceiling. At least the elevator was consistently reading her as a woman these days. Unfazed by her dismissal, a deep blue dress appeared, this one all taut angles and asymmetric hems and a plunging neckline. A small cluster of gold fascinators levitated around her head like an abstract halo.
MILLICENT FORD IS A WOMAN OF MEANS AND TASTE
The white letters unfurled with a flourish, as they did every day.
$889.97
ORDER NOW WITH ONE-TOUCH
She maintained her gaze. She was a woman of means and taste, and the blue dress would have looked marvellous on her, had she only a function to wear it to. But she didn’t. Millie clicked on her face filter mask as the elevator slowed, groaning as the fans inside sputtered to a stop.
Mid-range body spray enveloped her like a neon shroud as the elevator doors opened. This one was different from this morning—the scent was changed daily—and smelled like a watermelon stand crashed into a jazz club. She pulled her sweater over her face and hurried to her apartment door.
“Would you like to hear—”
“No,” she snapped, palm against the squawking door reader. She didn’t care what today’s coupons were. She craved only darkness and silence and once the door was shut, she had it.
Millie sighed with palpable relief as she peeled away the mask, toed off her shoes, and padded across the thick, wine-red carpet. The apartment had every stimulation-reducing luxury that money could buy, from the dimmers on the lights to the acoustic insulation in the walls. The windows were fade-to-black solar paneled, and sound-proof, for good measure. In the living room, muted-gray furniture was dispersed through a calming minimalist space; sunset bulbs in every lamp provided a soothing, even ambiance.
She flung herself onto a couch, pulled a thick weighted blanket over her head, and promptly fell asleep.
* * *
Charlie and Louise were trying to be quiet, she knew, but the crinkle of paper bags and whisper of conversation from the kitchen roused her from her nap anyways.
“...but Will won’t tell me anything about the blend, so—”
“She’s awake, why don’t you just ask her?”
Millie sat up on her elbows and blinked the sleep from her eyes. “Ask me what?”
“Oh! Do you know what’s in that new strain Will is growing for you?” asked Louise, sliding a stack of frozen pizzas into the freezer.
“More importantly, is it working?” Charlie drummed his fingers intently on the countertop, having already forgotten the groceries.
“I… I think he’s been experimenting with adding klonopin to the mix… I don’t know explicitly what’s in it. But yes, Charlie, it is working.” She rubbed her eyes and sat upright. “It’s been putting me under the reg-levels for three, four hours at a time.”
“Klonopin too?” Louise shook her head as she hefted a bulk box of spaghetti to the top cabinet. “With the crap that’s already in it? One of these days you’re going to give yourself brain damage—all so you can get that stupid—shit!” she exclaimed. The box slipped from her fingers and landed corner-first, sending a thousand strands of spaghetti in a thousand directions. “...all so you can get that stupid chip!”
“All so I can break that stupid chip,” Millie retorted, as she stooped to gather dry noodles off the floor. “Charlie, stop laughing and help us.”
“Sorry—heh—I don’t like it either, Louise,” Charlie said. “But frankly, I’d try anything if it had a half-chance of shutting those damned ads off.”
The Maestro brain stem-to-machine chip wasn’t just an interface with the functionality of a supercomputer; it came with an ad-blocker. Not a good one, of course, because the ads mutated like viruses, but anything that could dim the cacophony had to be better than nothing.
Not that Millie, and the other occupants of apartment 37A had a say in the matter: they were what polite society referred to as neurodivergent and what pharmaceutical companies referred to as a problem.
The first, and as it turned out, only, test of the interface on a neurodivergent subject had gone… poorly. The atypical brain, the reasoning went, simply must not be sophisticated enough to operate a computer within itself. It was costly to redevelop the chip for accommodation—far cheaper to slap an FDA ban on the tail end of an unrelated congressional bill and call it felony possession of an unauthorized device. Besides, someone had to keep the dying cell phone industry afloat.
“Millie knows what she’s doing,” Charlie continued, “...right?”
“Will knows what he’s doing,” she said. “It’s his idea. I’m just the guinea pig that codes.”
“What, do you think that with the chip he’d be able to, you know, actually—”
“If he wants to, yes. That’s exactly what’s going on here, and why I’m willing to smoke up god knows what if it’ll make me seem ‘typical for a few hours.” Fists full of noodles, Millie stood and straightened them up a little more forcefully than necessary. Once she had a neat circle, she dropped it into the empty box with a satisfying thwack.
“Just let her do it, Louise. She’s going to with or without your blessing.”
Louise huffed. “Fine. Fine! I’m just worried is all.”
Millie didn’t need the reminder.
* * *
Later, in the privacy of her bedroom, she peeled two flesh-colored stickers from her temples and scanned them into her computer. 35 unread emails, it chided. Mostly contract requests, she was pleased to see on her first skim. Far more than enough to keep the aircon on and food on the table.
There weren’t many workplaces willing to hire the neurodivergent these days—not since the subsidized chip came along, anyways, and divided society cleanly into haves and have-nots. Overnight, a neurological bottom-caste was born and watched in horror as careers, contacts, and hard-won tricks of social camouflage dried up overnight.
Can’t make a phone call with your mind? Well, that’s all we do around here. Can’t add change in a millisecond? The other applicant for this job can. Can’t sign the rights to your ideas over to your employer? Then how do we know you can be trusted?
But Millie was lucky. Millie could code. And when you freelance online, and can play a terminal like a violin, no one is ever the wiser. And so it was that she financed not just the high-end tranquility of 37A but its occupants as well—Will: genetic botanist, non-verbal recluse, craft grower of hydroponic marijuana; Louise: knower of every aircraft that flew overhead and dishwasher at the Greek restaurant over on 3rd; Charlie: painter, sculptor, piano player and songwriter. The rich, comfortable silence of 37A contained them all: Millie’s stacks of trashed and salvaged hard drives, Will’s laboratory and grow room, and Charlie’s studios.
On the screen, she traced the peaks and plateaus of the data and furrowed her brow with academic pleasure. Will’s new Klonopin-Indica strain had sent her synaptic activity plummeting to neurotypical levels for three hours and fifty-two minutes today. She leaned back in her desk chair as a shrewd smile worked its way across her face.
She was ready.
* * *
Millie woke up late the next morning to sunlight streaming in through the window and a familiar tightness in her chest. She washed down the day’s pills: Abutrex for the anxiety-depression combo, Sedrin for the day’s upcoming headache, and Estradiol for that pesky testosterone. Then she put on a bubbly pink affair of a dress and her tallest heels, and strolled down the hall to Will’s lab.
The humid, fragrant air greeted her as she knocked softly, three times, on the doorframe. Rows of shining glass canisters filled the sterile white walls and wooden benches of the lab. From the ceilings, lush bunches of greens hung from brassy hooks, their roots exposed to the open air or soaking in water-filled spheres.
Will sat behind a shallow tub of murky water and tiny green sprouts and regarded her warmly through curls of red hair. He handed her a perfectly rolled blunt as she approached.
“Thanks, love—this one have a name?”
He set his jaw thoughtfully, then gestured with a finger to the floor.
“Down?”
He nodded.
“I like it. Straight to the point.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Try not to worry about me too much, okay? I’ll be back before you know it.”
He nodded and squeezed her hand, a worried, hopeful smile crossing his face.
* * *
“Millie, are you sure you’re ready for this?” Louise had foiled her plans of a quiet escape, and she stood, arms crossed, in the kitchen.
Millie laughed. “Louise, I’ve been faking it for thirty-eight years, I think I’ll do just fine. It’s just an EEG test, after all.”
“Ruth at work told me her husband just did it. She said it’s more than that, that there’s an interview, and a physical, and even a hand-writing—”
“Ruth is ‘typical, she’s probably just trying to scare you.” Truthfully, Millie hated Louise’s supervisor. It wouldn’t be the first time she had messed with Louise.
“No, I think she was trying to help me.”
Millie sighed. “Well, I’ll be careful. And look, I’m as prepared as I—as any one of us—could ever be.”
“But what if it’s not enough?”
“Then it isn’t enough, and I get arrested and sent to jail.”
“That’s not nothing, Millie! We need you here!” Louise snapped.
“Well you know what I need?” she snapped back as she spun to face her. “I need to be able to leave my goddamned house without having a meltdown. I need to stop hauling around a big sign—” she whipped out her cell phone and waved it flippantly— “that says ‘please treat me differently’ everywhere I go. I need to walk down the street without getting a migraine after half a minute. And do you know what you need?”
“What do I need?” Louise sneered.
“A good job!” Millie barked, sounding much harsher than she intended. “Someplace without any Ruths. If you had that chip, Louise, you’d be able to leave. You’re basically a prisoner at Kosta’s.”
Louise considered this, hurt plain on her face.
“And Charlie would be able to do exhibitions again. And talk to clients. God, maybe even paint a sunset or something nice instead of those horrid, strangled cityscapes.”
“And Will? Will can’t even leave the apartment. We can’t live like this anymore, Louise. Something has to change. I don’t care if it’s illegal, I’m going to get that damned chip, and then I’m going to make it work. For us.”
A tense silence passed.
Finally, Louise shook her head. “You’re out of your mind, Millie,” she muttered. “I hope you’re right.”
* * *
It would have been a pleasant Sunday morning, with the churches full and the streets empty, but the pleasantry ended where the screens began: screens flat on walls, screens on bus stops, screens on trams and trucks and trolleys, screens up in the air that leered down at the populace; the higher, the bigger: perspective-bending, nausea-inducing. The advertisements were an all-out assault on the senses. A monotonous array of thin, white bodies, ‘shopped into oblivion, writhed over a sickening miasma of reds and blues and neon-pinks and electric-yellows like a disco gone mad. And the noise! Speakers embedded in every screen screamed and wailed and sang over one another in every direction, all competing for the listener’s attention. The whole act was a sprawling, hellish, never-ending opera; molten lead to the ears, fists of lightning to the eyes.
Millie stretched a new filter mask over her nose and mouth, her admission ticket to the chaos. At least she was able to block the cacophonic odors of the motion-sensing perfume ads.
“FEELING FAT?” screamed an ad to her left. It was a man’s voice, not shouting, but nevertheless pitched at the volume of a jet takeoff, and Millie wanted to put her first not just into his bleached face but through the speaker itself. She ground her teeth instead.
More faces and colors shrieked as she hurried down the street, ads for soaps and sodas and menswear, cat food and solar panels and sports teams, diets and trips to space and ladies deodorant, dating apps and cheating apps and therapy apps, gaming consoles and sexbots and VR skins, cheap cheap cheap!
“The Maestro 2.0! Are you worthy?” intoned a booming, sensual woman’s voice from high above. On a theater-sized screen, two women played tennis on an immaculate court, a young woman in a suit placed a folder on an important man’s desk, a race car blew past on a track. “The new Maestro comes with more options, faster speeds, and a full ad-blocking experience. Ping your local Maestro center today!”
No ads, huh? So they already figured out how to do it. Jesus, this might actually be simple. She lit up Will’s beautifully crafted joint and let the sights and sounds blur together. Just walk right in, claim a prior religious exemption, and voila. Peace and quiet for the rest of her days.
Then for Will’s. And for Charlie’s, and Louise’s. And… then what? The chip was still illegal. The ads would still play. She sighed. What about others like her all over the city? They couldn’t escape.
* * *
Maestro Central occupied a building of the Classical Greek style that dominated the city’s Old Town. Inside, tall marble columns pressed in like they already knew her secret. Millie tightened her gait to a feminine sway, fooled with a strategically loose curl of hair, and approached the front desk.
A woman with green eyes and a lilac buzz cut looked up from a high desk at the click of her heels. “G’morning, ma’am, what can I help you with today?” she asked.
“I’d like to get myself one of them fancy chips I’ve been hearing so much about.” She leaned forward onto the desk, resting her chin on her left hand and presenting her best charming smile. Show your teeth, she focused. Tighten the corners of your eyes. Drop your eyelids just a hair. It had taken years—no, decades—for her to produce a natural-seeming smile on command, but it was her best weapon, her most effective disguise.
“Of course, ma’am, we’ll just need you to fill out some paperwork and take a physi-mental examination.”
A what? “Delightful.” Shit, Ruth was right for once.
The receptionist shuffled some papers together and handed them to her with a flower-tipped pen.
“Thank you.” She squeezed the corners of her eyes together once more, graciously, and wondered how ‘typical people didn’t exhaust their faces doing shit like this all the time.
Old-fashioned pen and paper, huh? Millie gripped the pen in her non-dominant hand and slowly filled in her information with sloppy print letters. She didn’t know what they were looking for, but they weren’t going to get her this easy. Millie flashed another smile for good measure as she slipped the papers back over the desk.
Well, here she was, on the verge of the unknown. It was suddenly very cold in the room. What if Maestro was right? What if the chip really was incompatible with the way her brain was wired? What if neurodivergence was so far removed from normalcy that—
“Millicent May Ford?”
“That’s me.” She deftly navigated a handshake. “Enchanted to meet you.”
* * *
Head spinning, Millie sat up from the chair and nearly threw up. High up on the back of her neck, a point the size of a pinhead stung and throbbed. But it was there! She had passed!
And someone else—no, something else—was there with her, embedded in her consciousness like a browser window she couldn’t close. She concentrated, focused her thoughts, and reached out to touch it. What was it connected to? What did it do?
Pure, unrefined digital logic swelled to meet her like a cresting ocean wave.
What could she do with it?
Even through the Klonopin-marijuana haze, the chip’s gates were clear. Sensory input. Analytics. Raw external interface. She pushed on the interface and networks materialized before her eyes like dust in a magnetic field. Medical equipment ran to outlets, outlets connected to circuits in the walls, everything was controlled by a router on the third floor, protected by a simple WEP-1024.
Pff. A 1024? And the password was probably “password”.
The system pinged back [0].
Millie recoiled, sat bolt upright like she had received an electric shock. Guess that’s a no. Then she tried again.
12345678? MAESTRO?
[0].[0].
Nothing.
She scratched her head. A birth date, perhaps. She set her origin to 01011950. [0]. Now the trick: she grasped the set of numbers, felt their calendrical weight, and riffled through them like a deck of cards. 12232006 pinged back [1]. Suddenly the whole building was hers to command. She grinned.
And then she jumped as the door swung open and the doctor walked through it. She dropped the connection and swore at herself for being so stupid.
“Ah, good, you’re awake,” he said. He carried a scanner in his left hand. “Have you had time to think about what OS you’d like?”
Linux, please. But should she know that? She decided she shouldn’t.
“What’s an OS?” she asked, innocently.
The doctor smiled sympathetically. “It’s just like your computer, sweetheart. Does your computer have a black apple or four squares on the cover?”
I run Gentoo, fool.
“Umm…” She searched the space above her theatrically. “You know, I think I have the apple.”
“Good, alright, we’ll try OSX.” He set a knob on the scanner and brought it to the back of her head. She experienced a sensation like chewing on radio static.
Oh. There was an interface, now, a slick and shiny one she could see inside her mind just like a thought. All the usual icons spread before her, music and photos, a camera… no terminal. She cautiously reached for the networks only to hit a wall; smooth as glass, impermeable as stone.
Shit.
“This, um, doesn’t look familiar… I think I might have the other one,” she mumbled.
“Not a problem.”
A new interface, this one sleek and black, shimmering 3D icons hovering over a dark pool. She flicked through them to nearly the same results. This wasn’t a wall so much as an infinite void, but it was just as impassable. She shuddered at the vast emptiness inside her.
“Ah… you know, this one doesn’t feel quite right, either. Are there any other settings?”
The doctor frowned. “Just these two for civilians. There’s another one, for scientists and such, but—hey!”
Millie didn’t need a chip to compute her odds of getting out of Maestro without an OS. She swiped the scanner and bolted out the door, making a wild, scrambling left and trying not to twist an ankle doing so.
She was in a maze of identical hallways, green with gaudy floral carpeting, fluorescent lights overhead illuminating one shut door after another. She made random lefts and rights, footsteps always a beat behind, until finally a stairwell appeared. Off came her heels, and she leapt up the stairs three at a time. The footsteps thumped down.
Hands shaking, Millie studied the scanner. It was fairly simple, with icons for OSX, Windows, Linux (tempting), and RESET. She set the knob to RESET, pressed it to the back of her head, and fumbled for the activating key.
After the awful tingling in her mouth and jaw subsided, she stuffed the scanner into a garbage can and made her way down the stairs. Donning her heels once more, she adjusted her posture into something resembling collected and stepped into the lobby with her head held high and her heart pounding like an entire drumline.
* * *
PIZZA! DISH DETERGENT!
ALTERED REALITY VACATIONS!
Millie stumbled and nearly fell at the new tsunami of-
TEETH WHITENING!
- overstimulation the chip brought. Walking down the street, the ad bombardment wasn’t just-
SUNSET CRUISES!
- in front of her but in her as well, popping up as-
GOURMET PASTRIES!
- dancing icons or flashing landscapes, several overlapping at a time before-
LUXURY SANDBAGS!
- distorting, one-by-one, out of thought-existence.
KITTENS THAT STAY KITTENS
FOREVER WITH THE MIRACLE OF—
The ads were connected to one another by neat strings that cut-
SILVER STRAIGHT FROM THE
NEW REPUBLIC OF TEXAS
- across the street like a spiderweb of ones and zeros—and they all ran on the same network.
FEELING FAT?!
The same man smirked at her from a different screen, and rail-thin, bikini-clad women paraded through her occipital lobe.
JOIN UNIVERSAL FITNESS TODAY!
Enough of this. In her mind, Millie pushed through the flashing gym scenes, through the women, through the lingering odors of pepperoni and dish soap and saltwater until she grasped the grainy threads of the advertisement network. Unsurprisingly, they were better secured than the Maestro. She gritted her teeth and flooded the modem with random character strings until one pinged back. Some background process informed her the process had taken 56.7 milliseconds. She sifted through connections until UNIVERSAL_FITNESS_AD_96.MP8 appeared. Now, to sever it…
BLAM! The screen’s explosion showered the sidewalk behind her with glass, and liquid rainbows sizzled as they met concrete. Passerbys stopped-
LOW-INTEREST STUDENT LOANS!
- to stare and Millie quickly hurried on. What the hell was that about? She hadn’t-
ESSENTIAL OILS HALF-OFF!
- blown up the Maestro WiFi. But she had left the house at 11:30, and now-
MATTRESS LIQUIDATION SALE!
EVERYTHING—MUST—GO!
- a large, floating clock face across the street indicated that it was 3:34 PM. The Down was wearing off, and-
NEWEST ARRIVALS AT
THE SUNGLASS SHACK
- she could feel it behind her eyes, a pressure fizzing at her sinuses like a fresh bottle of champagne, as the-
NEXUS INFINITY
58-SPEED FOOD PROCESSOR!
- ads became clearer, brighter; nauseatingly sharp and hyper-real. She staggered and nearly screamed as-
VISIT THE MOULIN PARK REGIONAL ZOO!
- one projected a pride of lions into her path, their soft fur brushing her legs as they weaved around her. Make it stop!
THE FINEST PINOT NOIRS
She scrambled through-
FIFTY PERCENT OFF HOUSEWARES
- the connections, found the-
MEET JEWISH SINGLES
- zoo, and yanked. The faint crack of-
FLOOD INSURANCE
- a high-up billboard barely registered as-
BATHROOM FIXTURES
- she snatched up a-
THE NEW MASERATI!
- hundred-foot radius of networks and-
—PING YOUR LOCAL—
- snapped every thread.
* * *
Shattering, screaming, shaking; the cumulative explosion of a hundred screens and billboards rocked the ground under her feet and bathed the sidewalks with steaming, hissing jets of opalescence. The street’s occupants ran into shops, dove under tables, shrieked to one another as they dodged the torrents of wet, broken glass.
But Millie didn’t notice the chaos around her. The inside of her head was finally, blissfully silent. And after the screaming died down… it was quiet.
No, it wasn’t quiet, not all the way. A new presence announced itself, a calming, ethereal mesh that moved and thought and felt. People! She studied this new web. Each shimmering point a chip, each gossamer a connection, all laid out plain like a topographical map of humanity. Dozens of uniform strands from each mind linked people to others, to home networks, to sights and sounds and smells.
Then she turned her gaze inwards and gasped at the map of herself. Thousands of strands, thick and thin, curling and twisting, some crossed, some knotted, some doubling back on themselves—all shimmered against the city of broken glass.
For a moment, she stood unperturbed in the nexus of the beautiful, lawless flow. Then wary eyes turned as the ads began to congeal around their broken threads like a grotesque, living entity. Like a heartbeat, she felt a pulse of alarms surge outwards to the police.
The delicate chip map disappeared as the ad network rebuilt itself.
Millie ducked her head and hurried down the road toward home, but the faraway trigger of a police drone fleet had already clicked in her mind. She let them get well airborne before she reached out, snapped their threads, and hastened her steps.
What power, she contemplated. Disabling the drone fleet had been easier than a thought. What else could she do? Could she liberate the whole city of ads all at once? No, the network would just re-establish itself. And how long before she was caught? In the absence of wifi, Millie shone like a lighthouse beacon. She was just going to have to lay low while she came up with a plan.
EXPERT LAWN CARE PERFORMED BY—
Not this shit again.
Millie felt the hum of police cars in the net.
GET YOUR MASTER’S DEGREE ONLINE!
She pulled gently on their threads until-
LISTEN ON SOUNDCLOUD AT—
- she felt the hum fade—hopefully, explosion-free. She shuddered and-
NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLER
- tried not to think about-
THE NEW BACON-OREO MCFLURRY
- the license to kill she’d just been issued.
NEW BROOKDALE’S GRAND OPENING
TOMORROW AT—
Visions swirled in her head again: the smell of new books and a freshly cut lawn, watermarked images of some elite-looking brick building, the cloying taste of chemicals and cold vanilla.
Her stomach began to twist and turn,
THAT’S BEEN CALLED THE WORLD’S
MOST EFFECTIVE WINDOW CLEANER
- a pounding began behind her eyes, and-
UP TO NINETY! FIVE! PERCENT!
OFF FURNITURE AT GALE’S
- she suddenly found herself grasping the strings of the local sphere again.
I’m not going to make it home like this, am I?
IONIZE YOUR HOME WITH
THE HEALING POWER OF
HIMALAYAN SALT LAMPS
She shielded her eyes, took a deep breath, and pulled without a blink, the glass falling and the people screaming all over again as she strode, heels clicking, down the boulevard.
Sweet silence fell once more.
A smile curved her lips. Was she beginning to enjoy this? Perhaps. Maybe she could just yank this city apart. Maybe she could blow out every screen and speaker and scent-sprayer so bad that the network wouldn’t know what to do with itself.
A future of silence; it sounded incredible, too good to be true. She pictured herself strolling through a quiet park, Will by her side, with only the whispering wind blowing; nothing in the sky but the clouds, nothing in the air but the scent of cattails and pond water.
Maybe—
“Ma’am?” A hand set firm on her shoulder. She turned around and forced a smile.
“Yes, officer?”
The man cautiously eyed the space around her and she realized that, in the quiet, he must be staring at her net aura. And not just him, either, two officers stood behind him ogling its density and span as it reached out over the city.
“Sorry to trouble you, miss,” he said genially. “But we can’t help but notice there’s something… wrong… with your implant.”
“We believe it may be interfering with the local nets,” added another.
“Well, I never!” she exclaimed. Was this acting? She hated it. “What on earth do you mean?”
“It appears to be… over-connected. If that aura is correct, you’re directly processing a thousand things at once.”
Gee, officer, that sounds terrible! She shrugged. “Feels normal to me.” Say something else. “I guess I’ll just have to have it looked at.” She turned to walk away.
“Now look here, ma’am.” The man grabbed her by the arm. “You and your malfunctioning chip show up and everything blows out all the sudden. We’re going to need you to come with us.”
Shit. Now she was in it. They would take her back to the station and realize she had no operating system. Then they would realize she wasn’t even supposed to have any sort of chip.
“Malfunctioning chip,” one of the officers muttered from the back. “More like ‘malfunctioning head.’”
“You know, there’s a whole bunch of people—ain’t even allowed to get the things,” returned his partner. “Busted up brains or something. Can’t handle it.”
“Bet that’s what we’re dealing with here.”
Yes, it is, how astute of you to notice.
She turned around and swatted the hand away. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” she threatened.
“Yeah? I think we do.” The officer smirked. “I think someone gave you a chip by mistake, and now your screwed up little mind is out to cause as much damage to normal society as you can before someone catches you.”
“Catches me? I believe I’ve already been caught…” she sneered. “Now try and stop me.” Empowered by the quiet, she laughed aloud, her aura growing stronger, brighter, as she summoned ever more connections. “I’m going to break this entire city. And then, you know what? We’ll all be free of these fucking ads. How does that sound?”
“Ma’am—”
The paltry threads of the officers’ chips shimmered in the late afternoon sun. There were so few of them, and they were all centered on her. It was easy, too easy, to simply reach in and—
In her mind’s fist, she released the city and instead gathered each thread she called her own into a small, neat circle, compressing, compacting, growing smaller and leaner until she had it—a fat, glowing cable of raw, white-hot sensation. With a mere flick she plugged it into the minds of the men before her.
Their eyes went wide and they doubled over howling, strangled screams dying in throats. Their heads met the ground with a series of thuds and they lay twitching; eyes flickering, seeing all and none.
She could do this to the world.
Millie chuckled as she imagined millions of maladapted minds scrambling to recalibrate to thousands of new inputs. The entire population could feel as she did, could know the soaring heights of her joys, the profound depths of her sorrows, and every shade in between.
But they didn’t deserve it.
She would only do them one favor.
* * *
The wind was soft, warm, and fragrant with spring flowers as she sat in the scrubby green grass by the bank of the river. She leaned into Will’s shoulder and snaked her arm around his waist as they watched people pass by on the opposite side.
What do people look like to you? she asked digitally.
Visions of elegant fountains shrouded in a golden mist filled her mind as his chip interpolated to her.
That’s beautiful, Will. She laughed aloud. They look like spaghetti noodles to me. Of course, she had been arrested after the destruction of every advertising surface in the city. But suddenly, mysteriously, no one wanted them fixed anymore. In fact, there was a rather lot of noisy, stressful business in this city, wasn’t there? And shouldn’t someone do something about it? If only there was someone to recode it all…
Millie twined her fingers into Will’s as they watched the sun set on another day in the quiet city.
C. M. Fields is a queer, non-binary astrophysicist and writer of horror and science fiction. They live in South Bend, Indiana, with their beloved cactus, Borne, spending eighty percent of their life shoveling snow and the other twenty writing a dissertation on the history of stars. They can be found on twitter as @C_M_Fields and @toomanyspectra.