—————
The notification sound was specifically designed by some Silicon Valley sociopath to trigger the exact neurological response that made you want to check your phone while simultaneously hating yourself for checking your phone. Brian knew this. He'd read the articles. He'd watched the documentaries. He'd even shared the infographics about dopamine hijacking on social media, which was, he understood on some level, exactly what they wanted him to do.
None of that knowledge prevented him from reaching for the cracked Samsung on his nightstand before his eyes had fully opened.
11:07 AM.
The light seeping through the gap where his blackout curtains failed to meet—because of course they failed to meet, because he'd bought them from Amazon at 2 AM six months ago and hadn't bothered to measure the window first—was the particular shade of aggressive gray that New York specialized in during late October. Not quite overcast, not quite sunny. A meteorological shrug. The kind of light that couldn't commit to a mood, much like his mother when asked about her wedding anniversary plans. Though that particular analogy had become somewhat obsolete in recent months.
Brian's thumb moved across the screen with the muscle memory of ten thousand mornings. His eyes, still gummed with the residue of what might generously be called five hours of sleep, struggled to focus on the parade of notifications.
CoinBase Alert: Bitcoin drops 3.2% overnight. Thanks, Brian thought. Very helpful. Should've mentioned that before I put seventeen thousand borrowed dollars into a shit—
He swiped it away.
DoorDash: Missing your late-night favorites? Here's 15% off your next order! Only if you can find a promo code for dignity.
Swipe.
Instagram: jake_the_snake_83 started following you. Who the fuck is jake_the_snake_83?
Swipe.
Mom: Call me when you can. Important.
He stared at that one for a moment. The last time she'd texted something similar, it had been to inform him that his father had moved into a Holiday Inn Express and that she was, quote, "finally free." Brian wasn't sure if he was supposed to congratulate her or offer condolences. He'd settled for sending a thumbs-up emoji and then spent forty minutes in the shower, which in his current apartment meant approximately eleven minutes of hot water followed by twenty-nine minutes of standing in an increasingly cold stream because getting out seemed like too much of a commitment.
He didn't swipe his mother's message away, but he didn't open it either. Schrödinger's parental crisis: as long as he didn't read it, it could be anything. Maybe she'd won the lottery. Maybe his father had discovered he was actually gay and was moving to Vermont with his Peloton instructor. Maybe the divorce was off and they'd realized that twenty-seven years of mild contempt was actually the foundation of a beautiful love story.
Brian rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling stared back.
It was not a beautiful ceiling. It had been painted approximately forty times over the past century, each layer applied with varying degrees of competence and absolutely zero attention to the popcorn texture that someone in the 1970s had decided was the pinnacle of interior design. There was a water stain in the corner that looked vaguely like Abraham Lincoln if Abraham Lincoln had been melting. There was also a crack that Brian had been watching since he moved in eight months ago, convinced it was growing, mapping its progress like a man documenting his own slow-motion disaster.
The crack had grown by approximately half an inch.
This seemed meaningful in ways he preferred not to examine.
You played games until 4 AM again, the crack seemed to say. That's seven hours where you could have been sleeping, or networking, or applying for jobs, or doing literally anything that might rescue you from the gravitational pull of your own mediocrity.
"Shut up, crack," Brian muttered.
The crack said nothing. It was a crack.
Brian wondered, not for the first time, if talking to inanimate objects was a sign of impending mental collapse or simply what happened when you spent too much time alone. He suspected it was both. He suspected a lot of things were both these days.
—————
The apartment—and he used that term loosely, the way one might use the term "meal" to describe a gas station hot dog or "relationship" to describe what he'd had with Maya before she'd texted him a fourteen-paragraph breakup essay from a meditation retreat in Costa Rica—was what New York real estate agents liked to call "cozy." Four hundred square feet of charm, they'd said. Hardwood floors, they'd said. Natural light.
The hardwood floors were original, which was another way of saying they were warped, creaky, and contained gaps large enough to lose coins and small hopes. The natural light came from two windows, one of which faced a brick wall approximately three feet away, the other of which offered a stunning view of the fire escape where his upstairs neighbor, a seventy-year-old Romanian woman named Magda, liked to smoke and discuss her conspiracy theories with the pigeons.
Brian could hear her now, through the paper-thin walls that separated his "cozy" prison from the hallway.
"The government," Magda was saying, presumably to a bird, "they put the chemicals in the clouds. You know this. You have seen this. You have flown through this."
The pigeon cooed, either in agreement or because it was a pigeon.
Brian's bedroom—a generous term for the alcove where he'd shoved a queen mattress that was definitely not up to code for the space—was separated from the "living area" by a tension rod and a shower curtain he'd bought at Target during what he now thought of as his "optimistic period." The shower curtain featured a cheerful pattern of tropical fish. Blue tangs. Clownfish. A sea turtle that seemed to be smiling.
The sea turtle's smile had long since started to feel mocking.
He pushed himself upright, his spine issuing the particular series of complaints that came from sleeping on a mattress he'd bought on Craigslist from a man who had insisted on being called "Bones." The mattress had been a hundred and fifty dollars. Brian had not asked why a man named Bones was selling a mattress. He had not wanted to know. There were many things Brian didn't want to know these days, and the provenance of his sleeping surface was relatively low on the list.
His feet hit the floor—the warped, gapped, probably historically significant floor—and he shuffled toward the bathroom with the enthusiasm of a man approaching his own execution.
The bathroom was where the apartment's "charm" truly revealed itself. The sink was approximately the size of a salad bowl and permanently featured a rust stain in the shape of what Brian had decided was either Africa or a middle finger, depending on his mood. The shower was a standing-only affair with a curtain that clung to your body no matter how you adjusted the water pressure, because the landlord, a man named Eugene who looked exactly like you'd expect a man named Eugene who owned eleven properties in Brooklyn to look, had installed the cheapest possible hardware for maximum water conservation. Or maximum suffering. Same thing, really.
The mirror above the sink was merciful in its smallness. It showed Brian's face, and only his face, which was plenty.
Twenty-three years old. Brown eyes that might have been described as "soulful" by the kind of person who used words like "soulful" unironically, but which Brian thought of as "tired." Dark hair that existed in a state of perpetual disagreement with itself, some sections pushing upward in defiance of gravity while others lay flat in apparent defeat. A jaw that could charitably be called "angular" and uncharitably called "skinny."
He looked, he thought, like someone who had spent the last three years making exclusively incorrect decisions. Which tracked.
He brushed his teeth with the electric toothbrush his mother had sent him for his birthday—a passive-aggressive gift that said "I don't know who you are anymore but I do know you probably aren't taking care of yourself"—and contemplated the day ahead.
Today was going to be different.
Today, he was going to voluntarily let a startup drill into his eyeballs.
—————
The kitchen, such as it was, occupied approximately twelve square feet of the apartment's total footprint. It featured a two-burner stove that had never been cleaned by anyone who had ever lived in the building's 112-year history, a mini-fridge that hummed at a frequency Brian was convinced was slowly damaging his hearing, and a counter space that could accommodate exactly one cutting board if you were willing to let it hang over the edge by about thirty percent.
There was also, incongruously, a Nespresso machine.
And an air fryer.
And a sous vide immersion circulator.
And a smart toaster that could, according to its marketing materials, "learn your bread preferences and adjust browning levels via AI-assisted algorithms."
These items sat on a rolling cart Brian had assembled during a bout of insomnia three weeks prior, arranged like artifacts in a museum of failed adulthood. They gleamed with the particular sheen of objects that had never been used for their intended purpose. The Nespresso machine had been a gift from his father, one of several "investment items" that had arrived in the mail during the separation, each one accompanied by a note that said something like "Thought of you!" or "Every young man needs a good espresso!" in the handwriting of a man who was clearly trying to purchase forgiveness through kitchen appliances.
Brian had never used the Nespresso machine.
He was, frankly, terrified of it.
The machine sat on its cart, its chrome exterior reflecting the gray October light with an intensity that felt almost aggressive. It had buttons. Multiple buttons. It had a water reservoir that needed to be filled to a specific line, and a capsule holder that needed to be emptied after every use, and a drip tray that collected God-knows-what and apparently needed to be "descaled" periodically, which was a word Brian had never encountered before reading the machine's 47-page instruction manual.
He had read the instruction manual. Twice. He had watched YouTube tutorials. He had bookmarked a Reddit thread titled "Nespresso for Beginners: Don't Let the Machine Intimidate You."
The machine intimidated him.
It wasn't that he was incapable of operating a coffee machine. He understood, intellectually, that the process involved inserting a pod, pressing a button, and waiting for liquid to emerge. But there was something about the machine's slick perfection, its obvious expense, that made him feel like any interaction with it would somehow reveal his fundamental unworthiness. As if he would press the wrong button and the machine would make a sound—a judgmental sound, a sound that said "really?"—and then refuse to produce coffee for someone so clearly not ready for the responsibility.
This was, he knew, completely insane.
He made instant coffee instead.
The kettle—an old-fashioned, non-smart, deeply stupid kettle that couldn't learn anything and didn't want to—sat on one of the two burners, its whistle a reliable and judgment-free announcement that water had achieved its boiling point. Brian spooned Folgers crystals into a mug that said "World's Okayest Human" (a gift from Maya, back when they were still at the stage of the relationship where mild insults felt like affection) and waited for the water to boil.
The refrigerator hummed.
Magda's voice drifted through the walls: "—and the vaccines, you understand, the vaccines contain the microchips, but not in the arm, no, they travel through the blood to the—"
A car alarm went off somewhere outside.
Brian's phone buzzed.
Dad: Thinking about coming to the city next week. Coffee?
He stared at the message for a long moment. His father, David Holden, had never, in the twenty-three years of Brian's existence, suggested they get coffee. His father had suggested they go to Mets games (twice, both times awkward). His father had suggested they play golf (once, a disaster that ended with Brian in a water hazard and his father not speaking to him for the entire drive home). His father had suggested, when Brian was sixteen, that they have "a man-to-man talk about women," which had resulted in a fifteen-minute monologue about respect and communication that had felt like it was being delivered by an alien who had recently learned about human relationships from a WikiHow article.
But coffee? Never.
This was, Brian understood, what divorce did. It turned fathers into strangers who suddenly wanted to "catch up" and "stay connected" and "be there for you, son, in ways I maybe wasn't before."
He would have preferred the silence.
He left the message on read and focused on the kettle, which was making the pre-whistle sounds that indicated water was approaching its existential crisis.
Breakfast was, technically, the most important meal of the day. Brian knew this. Everyone knew this. There were studies. There were articles. There were influencers on TikTok who woke up at 5 AM to show you their "morning routines" that involved green smoothies and meditation and gratitude journals and absolutely no mention of the likely eating disorder powering the whole enterprise.
Brian's breakfast routine was somewhat simpler.
He opened the refrigerator.
The refrigerator contained: half a bottle of sriracha, a carton of eggs of uncertain age, something in a Tupperware container that might have once been fried rice, and a Brita pitcher that was three weeks overdue for a filter change.
He closed the refrigerator.
He opened the freezer.
The freezer contained: three frozen burritos from Trader Joe's, a bag of ice that had fused into a solid block, and what appeared to be a very old container of ice cream that his ex-girlfriend Hannah (not Maya; the one before Maya; the one who had described breaking up with him as "like leaving a really comfortable but kind of depressing blanket") had left behind when she'd moved out.
Hannah had been gone for two years. The ice cream remained. Brian wasn't sure what this said about him and preferred not to investigate.
He selected a frozen burrito.
The smart toaster sat on its cart, its LED display glowing with the cheerful blue light of a device that was always on, always ready, always watching. Brian had received the toaster as part of a promotional package from a tech blog he'd written for briefly, during the period when he'd convinced himself that "content creation" was a viable career path. The blog had folded six months later. The toaster remained.
He had never used the toaster.
It had settings. Too many settings. It could connect to WiFi. It had an app.
A toaster with an app.
Brian put the frozen burrito in the microwave, which was old, dumb, and required only that you press buttons and wait. It was the only appliance in the kitchen he trusted completely.
Three minutes later, he was sitting on his couch—a loveseat, technically, purchased from IKEA during the same optimistic period that had produced the tropical fish shower curtain—eating a burrito that was still frozen in the exact center and scalding hot around the edges.
This seemed metaphorically significant.
He didn't care.
—————
The notification from NeuralBlink had arrived three weeks ago, tucked between a spam email promising to enlarge something he wasn't interested in enlarging and a newsletter from a meditation app he'd downloaded once, used twice, and been receiving daily "gentle reminders" from ever since.
SUBJECT: You've Been Selected for the NeuralBlink Pioneer Program!
His first thought had been: scam.
His second thought had been: elaborate scam.
His third thought, after reading the email three times and Googling the company and finding actual news articles from actual publications and a Wikipedia page that hadn't been created yesterday, had been: wait, really?
NeuralBlink was, as far as he could tell, legitimate. Founded in 2019 by a pair of Stanford dropouts who had done the whole "got funding before they could legally drink" thing. Series B funding from Andreessen Horowitz. A office in Manhattan, which Brian had verified by walking past it twice during a rare outdoor excursion, peering through the glass doors at a lobby that featured the mandatory startup aesthetic: exposed brick, mid-century modern furniture, a receptionist who looked like they could also be a model for a sustainable clothing company.
They were developing, according to their website, "the next evolution in human-computer interaction." An implant. For your eyes. That would let you see virtual reality overlays without glasses, without headsets, without any external hardware at all.
And they needed test subjects.
Guinea pigs, Brian had thought when he'd first read it. Lab rats with opposable thumbs.
The compensation was fifteen thousand dollars.
Fifteen thousand dollars.
That was rent for almost a year. That was enough to pay off the most aggressive of his credit card debts. That was enough to tell his mother, the next time she called with carefully phrased concerns about his "situation," that actually, things were fine, he'd figured something out, he was an adult who was adulting successfully.
(The irony of achieving financial stability by letting a startup experiment on his eyeballs was not lost on him. Nothing was lost on him. He was a generation raised on irony. Irony was the water they swam in, the air they breathed, the only way to process a world that seemed increasingly designed to make processing impossible.)
He'd applied.
He'd been accepted.
And now, today—October 27th, a date he'd circled on the calendar app he never used and also written on a Post-it note stuck to his laptop because he didn't trust the calendar app—he was going to show up at NeuralBlink's Manhattan office and let them put things in his eyes.
Cool.
Totally cool.
He was definitely not nervous.
—————
The subway, Brian had long since concluded, was a metaphor for the human condition. You waited on a platform, surrounded by strangers, for a train that might or might not come at the time it was supposed to. When it arrived, you crammed yourself into a metal tube with people you would never speak to, avoiding eye contact according to an unwritten social contract that everyone understood and no one had ever explicitly agreed to. You stood too close to other bodies, smelling their smells, hearing their music leaking from their headphones, watching them scroll through their phones with the glazed expressions of people who had given up trying to be present in the present.
And then you emerged, blinking, into a different part of the city, and you did it all again the next day.
The F train was running on the G line today due to "ongoing track maintenance." This meant, in practice, that Brian's thirty-minute commute would take approximately an hour and would involve three transfers and at least one moment where he questioned every decision that had led him to this point.
He stood on the platform at his usual spot—third car from the front, near the doors, because that position gave him the optimal chance of finding a seat while also allowing for a quick exit—and watched the rats on the tracks below.
The rats were thriving. The rats were always thriving. No matter how many times the MTA claimed to be addressing "rodent management," the rats continued their subway empire, scurrying between rails with the confidence of creatures who knew they would outlast every human in this station.
Brian respected the rats.
The rats had figured it out. They lived underground. They ate garbage. They answered to no one. They had no student loans, no parental expectations, no ex-girlfriends sending them passive-aggressive Instagram story views at 2 AM.
A train arrived. Not his train. The 2, running express for reasons that were explained only in the conductor's garbled announcement, which sounded approximately like "mmmrphhh Brooklyn mmmrphhh service mmmrphhh."
People got on. People got off. The dance continued.
Brian's phone buzzed.
Spotify: Discover Weekly is ready! Based on your listening habits, we think you'll love—
He didn't check what Spotify thought he'd love. Spotify's algorithm had long since concluded that he was a person who enjoyed "sad indie rock" and "lo-fi beats to study/cry to," and it was not wrong, but being seen so clearly by a machine felt somehow more invasive than being seen by a person.
The F/G abomination train arrived seven minutes later. Brian found a seat next to a woman who was reading an actual paper book, which felt almost transgressive in its analog-ness. The book was called "How to Keep House While Drowning," which seemed either very specific or very metaphorical. Possibly both.
The train lurched into motion.
Brian stared at his reflection in the dark window across from him. The tunnel lights strobed past, creating a flickering effect that made his face appear and disappear, appear and disappear, like a ghost that couldn't decide if it wanted to haunt this particular train.
He thought about Maya.
He tried not to think about Maya.
He thought about Maya anyway.
The meditation retreat had been in Costa Rica because of course it had been. She'd gone for "two weeks of digital detox and self-discovery," which was a thing people apparently did when they had the money and the vacation time and the particular kind of anxiety that could only be solved by flying to another country and paying someone to teach them how to breathe.
Brian could breathe just fine. He did it all the time, automatically, without paying anyone.
The fourteen-paragraph breakup text had arrived on day three.
He hadn't read all fourteen paragraphs. He'd made it through about seven before his vision had started doing that thing where everything goes slightly liquid at the edges, and then he'd put the phone down and stared at the tropical fish shower curtain for what might have been twenty minutes or might have been two hours.
The gist, as far as he could summarize it, was: - Maya loved him (paragraph one). - Maya was not in love with him (paragraph three). - Maya needed "space to grow" (paragraph five). - Maya had met a yoga instructor named Diego (paragraph seven). - The last six paragraphs were presumably about Maya's spiritual journey or Diego's abs or the fundamental incompatibility of two people who had once spent an entire weekend in bed watching documentaries about cults. Brian would never know.
That had been five months ago.
He was fine.
He was totally fine.
The woman with the paper book turned a page. The train screeched around a corner. Somewhere in the car, someone's phone played a TikTok at full volume, because some people had apparently decided that social contracts were simply suggestions.
Brian closed his eyes and practiced not thinking about anything at all.
—————
NeuralBlink's office was located on the fourteenth floor of a building in Tribeca that had probably once been a factory of some kind and was now, like everything else in the neighborhood, a temple to the particular aesthetic of people who had more money than personality. The lobby featured marble floors, a living wall of succulents, and a security desk staffed by a man who looked at Brian's worn sneakers and slightly wrinkled jacket with the particular contempt of someone paid minimum wage to protect spaces for people paid maximum wage.
"NeuralBlink?"
"Fourteenth floor. They're expecting you?"
"Yeah. Appointment at two."
The security guard handed him a visitor badge. It said GUEST in large letters and featured a picture of Brian that the lobby camera had taken at the exact moment he'd been blinking, making him look either exhausted or recently deceased.
Appropriate.
The elevator was silent. Not quiet—silent. The kind of silence that cost money. Brian stood in the brushed-steel cube as numbers ticked past and wondered, not for the first time, if he was making a terrible mistake.
The thing was: he didn't really believe in the product.
Oh, he believed it existed. He'd read the white papers (well, skimmed them). He'd watched the demo videos (well, the first few minutes). He understood, in broad strokes, that NeuralBlink had developed some kind of retinal implant that could project images directly onto the eye, allowing users to see digital overlays without any external display.
But he also knew that technology companies lied. They lied about their timelines, their capabilities, their intentions. They used words like "revolutionary" and "paradigm-shifting" when what they meant was "slightly improved version of thing that already exists." They showed polished demos that bore approximately no relationship to the actual user experience.
And NeuralBlink was asking to put something in his eye.
This seemed, on balance, like something a person should think more carefully about than Brian had thought about it.
But the alternative was calling his mother and asking for money.
The elevator doors opened.
The NeuralBlink office was exactly what he'd expected. Open floor plan. Standing desks. A kitchen area with a coffee bar, a cold-brew tap, and a sign that said "Fuel Your Vision!" in the same font used by every startup since 2015. Employees in casual clothes—jeans, hoodies, t-shirts with the logos of other tech companies—moved between workstations with the focused energy of people who believed they were changing the world.
Maybe they were.
Brian wasn't sure he believed the world could be changed anymore, or that it should be, or that any of the people who claimed to be changing it were doing anything other than shuffling deck chairs on an increasingly warm and flooded ship.
But he was here, wasn't he? He'd shown up. He'd put on his best jacket (his only jacket) and his least-stained jeans. He'd even downloaded the NeuralBlink app, which had required him to create an account and agree to seventeen different privacy policies and submit to what the onboarding process called "baseline biometric assessment," which had involved staring at his phone's camera while dots flashed on the screen for ten minutes.
He was, against his better judgment, interested.
"Brian Holden?"
A woman in her late twenties approached, tablet in hand. She had the particular type of attractiveness that startup recruiters probably trained for: approachable but not intimidating, professional but not cold, wearing enough minimal jewelry to seem like a person while not enough to suggest she had interests outside of work.
"That's me."
"Great! I'm Priya. I'll be your intake coordinator today. Ready to see the future?"
She said it without irony, which was somehow worse than if she'd said it with irony.
"Sure," Brian said. "Let's see it."
—————
The next three hours passed in a blur of forms, assessments, and increasingly invasive questions about his medical history.
"Any history of epilepsy?"
"No."
"Seizures of any kind?"
"No."
"Migraines with visual aura?"
"What's visual aura?"
"You'd know if you had it. I'll put no."
He signed consent forms. He signed liability waivers. He signed a document that, as far as he could tell, gave NeuralBlink the right to use his anonymized data "for research purposes in perpetuity," which was a phrase that somehow sounded both boring and terrifying.
He had his eyes examined by three different machines, one of which required him to rest his chin on a plastic guard while infrared light scanned his retinas. He stared at blinking dots, tracking them left and right, up and down, while technicians murmured to each other and took notes.
"You've got great ocular structure," one of them said, as if this was a compliment he should be proud of.
"Thanks. I grew them myself."
The technician did not laugh. Tough room.
Finally, after what felt like approximately a thousand years but was probably closer to three hours, he was led to a room that looked disturbingly like an operating theater.
"This is where the magic happens," Priya said.
Brian looked at the reclining chair, the articulated arm with its array of instruments, the monitors displaying what he assumed were representations of his own eyeballs.
"Magic's not the word I'd use."
"We'll start with a local anesthetic. You won't feel anything. The whole procedure takes about forty minutes. Most patients describe it as 'surprisingly uneventful.'"
"What do the other patients describe it as?"
Priya's smile flickered for just a moment. "Dr. Chen will be with you shortly. Do you have any last questions?"
Brian had many questions. He had questions about the long-term effects, about what happened if the implant failed, about whether he was making a catastrophically stupid decision for a sum of money that would probably be gone within six months anyway.
"Nope," he said. "Let's do it."
He settled into the chair. The lights were adjusted. Someone placed drops in his eyes that made the world go slightly liquid.
He thought about the crypto project. Seventeen thousand dollars, gone. Invested in something a guy from Discord had assured him was "the next Ethereum." The guy's username had been "definitely_not_a_scam," which should have been a warning sign but hadn't been, because Brian had wanted to believe that he could turn nothing into something without actually having to do anything.
He thought about his apartment, with its water-stained ceiling and its aggressive Nespresso machine.
He thought about his parents, currently locked in a slow-motion demolition derby of a divorce, each trying to prove they were the reasonable one, the wronged one, the one who deserved Brian's sympathy and support.
He thought about Maya, probably somewhere in Costa Rica still, probably doing yoga with Diego, probably not thinking about him at all.
The anesthesia began to work. The room softened. The lights became halos, beautiful and strange.
"Count backward from ten," someone said.
"Ten," Brian said. "Nine. Eight. Se—"
—————
He came back to consciousness in stages, like climbing a ladder through fog.
First, there was sound. Beeping. Soft voices. The hum of machinery.
Then there was sensation. A slight pressure around his eyes, not painful, just present. His body, horizontal on something soft. His hands, resting on what felt like a thin blanket.
Then there was light. Dim at first, a general glow behind his eyelids. He blinked—or tried to, though it felt strange, like his eyelids were moving through honey—and the light resolved into shapes.
Ceiling. Fluorescent panels. A water stain in the corner.
Wait, no. That was his apartment. This ceiling was pristine. Unmarked. Institutionally perfect.
"Hey there, sleepyhead."
The voice came from his left. He turned his head, which took more effort than it should have, and found himself looking at a young woman in scrubs. Dark hair pulled back. A smile that was either professionally warm or genuinely warm; he couldn't tell.
"Where…" His voice came out as a croak.
"You're in recovery. NeuralBlink. The procedure went perfectly. You were out for about four hours."
Four hours. The room was darker now. Through a window he hadn't noticed before, he could see that the Manhattan skyline was lit up against a black sky.
"What time is it?"
"Almost midnight." She was doing something with a tablet, checking readings, making notes. "How do you feel?"
Brian considered the question. His mouth was dry. His head felt stuffed with cotton. There was an odd awareness of his eyes—not pain, exactly, but a consciousness of them that he'd never had before. Like wearing contacts for the first time, except the contacts were inside him.
"Weird," he said.
"That's normal." She moved closer, shining a small light into each of his eyes, watching something he couldn't see. "The implants are in place and functioning. We'll keep you here for another couple hours for observation, and then you're free to go."
"When do they… work? When do I see the… whatever?"
"The interface activates in three days." She smiled again, and this time he noticed the small gap between her front teeth, which made the smile seem more real, more individual. "Your neural pathways need time to adjust. If we activated them now, it would be like turning on a firehose before the plumbing's connected. Very messy."
"Great analogy."
"I've given this talk before." She set down her tablet and actually looked at him—at him, not at his charts or his vitals. "Nervous?"
Brian tried to shrug, but the movement came out as more of a twitch. "A little."
"That's normal too. We've done about sixty of these now. No significant adverse events. Most participants describe the experience as…" She paused, seeming to search for the right word.
"Life-changing?"
"I was going to say 'interesting.' But sure, some of them say life-changing." She picked up the tablet again. "I'm Riley, by the way. I'll be one of your contacts during the trial period. Any issues, any questions, any weird visual artifacts—you call me. Day or night."
She handed him a card. Simple, white, just her name and a phone number.
"Day or night?"
"The human visual system is more active than you'd think. Especially at night. Especially during REM sleep." She said this cheerfully, as if it were a fun fact and not something mildly terrifying. "But seriously—most people's adjustment period is totally smooth. You'll probably just wake up in three days, blink a few times, and suddenly you're living in the future."
Brian looked at the card in his hand. Riley Chen, it said. Clinical Support Specialist.
"The future," he repeated.
"The future."
Outside the window, Manhattan sparkled. A hundred thousand windows, a hundred thousand lives, everyone doing whatever it was they did at midnight on a Wednesday. Working. Sleeping. Scrolling through their phones. Waiting for something to change.
Brian closed his eyes.
In three days, something was going to change for him. Whether it would be better or worse, he had absolutely no idea.
But at least, for now, he was fifteen thousand dollars richer.
At least there was that.
—————
END OF CHAPTER ONE