Love Removal Machine

Love Removal Machine

By Theo Ellis

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

MEDITATION XVII

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

David held the locket in his hand as he and Argus, his Siberian Husky, walked swiftly down the road towards the lighthouse. The sweat from his palm was making it more and more difficult to hold the piece of jewelry, but he found he couldn’t let go of it and put it in his pocket, because he felt as if it was the only thing keeping him alive.

And, he supposed, it was.

Not physically alive. Its very existence had the opposite effect - it placed him in opposition to physical life. It was emotional life to which the locket was allowing him to cling, although he knew that clinging to emotional life was one of the surest ways to wind up physically dead. But even after all he’d been through, he wasn’t willing to give up his emotions, no matter what the physical consequences would be.

As he walked down the road with Argus leading the way, he looked back over his shoulder for any sign of the Islanders. Nothing yet. But they would be coming. They had hunted down almost every one of David’s kind, and they wouldn’t stop, because the emotions that would have made them stop simply didn’t exist in them anymore. They had been replaced by emotions like vengeance.

And even if the Islanders hadn’t managed to track him here, there was always the threat of invading forces from other nations, whose ability to love had been robbed from them, just as the Islanders’ had been robbed from them. Just as Kara and Aimee had been robbed from him.

DARPA had been researching brain-computer interfaces since the 1970s, but it wasn’t until the twenty-first century that this research really took off. Military transhumanism, they called it. Transforming soldiers for war. And not just soldiers’ bodies – their brains, as well. The American military began using Augmented Cognition – AugCog – to increase the performance of its warfighters’ brains.

Not just the brains of brain-wounded soldiers, though - the brains of perfectly healthy warriors, too. DARPA developed its robo-rat and Manduca sexta moth programs, in which its scientists created animal-machine biohybrids that could be steered by remote control. Then it moved on to creating human-machine biohybrids, and the evolution towards the Islanders had truly begun.

As he and Argus continued down the road towards the lighthouse, David felt the bitterly cold wind blowing in off the water, and pulled up his collar. Must be sometime around mid-November, he thought, and he was right. It was November 11, to be exact. Veterans Day. He picked up his pace, anticipating the relative warmth of the lighthouse. He just needed to get inside.

It was in the early 2020s that the billionaire tech entrepreneur Ian Nurse unveiled his Neurochain chip, which was designed to be inserted into a person’s skull to assist with any brain-signaling problem a person might have. The chip was easily mounted in the skull, with its electrodes intruding to various depths in the brain, and eventually it became affordable for most people who wanted one. Its first application was to allow the paralyzed to walk again by creating a neural shunt that bypassed the damaged portion of the person’s spinal cord. But it was obvious that many more applications would follow, including those involving people’s mental and emotional states.

By this time, scientists had already succeeded in erasing fear from people’s minds using memory reconsolidation and drugs. It wasn’t that great a leap, then, to start erasing other emotions from people’s minds, too. Love was the most positive of emotions when it went right, but often the most negative when it went wrong. Accordingly, it became the most common emotion for people to have erased.

Those who refused to have love erased from their brains had a term for those who underwent the procedure: they called them Islanders, because, in their eyes, people who didn’t have the capacity to love were cut off from the other members of their species, like emotional islands. For their part, the Islanders called those who continued to love “Lovers,” saying they were masochists, because, as the old song said,

A rock feels no pain.

And an island never cries.

David and Kara had made the decision early on that they wouldn’t become Islanders, and that they wouldn’t turn their daughter into one, either. They wouldn’t sacrifice the feeling of love they had for each other - and Aimee - no matter how much pain it might eventually expose them to. They saw love as essential to their lives; they didn’t want to live without it. But they were in the minority.

When the world’s militaries saw how successful Neurochain was at making people unable to love, they quickly developed military-grade versions of the chip, so they could make their soldiers hate their enemies as much as possible. Before very long, the entire world was at war, each nation fighting against every other nation, which meant that the weakest nations were quickly conquered by the strongest, as the world became a social Darwinist battle, a Hobbesian struggle of all against all.

And within each nation, those who refused to renounce love were identified as threats to national security, and hunted down and killed. Militias formed to carry out this duty, and as David approached the lighthouse, the most traumatic experience he’d ever had came back to him in horrific detail.

He and Kara and Aimee had been out one night walking Argus, when a group of militiamen approached them.

“Turn around,” David said to his family, and they started walking in the other direction. But the militiamen picked up their pace.

“Hey!” one of them yelled. “Stop!”

“Keep walking,” David said, and Kara and Aimee did so.

Then a gunshot pierced the silence of the night, and David said, “Freeze!”

The militiamen – there were three of them – caught up to them and surrounded them.

“I hear you’re a bunch of Lovers,” one of them said.

David and his family said nothing in return.

“You know who we are?” said the man.

“You’re Islanders,” said David.

“That’s right. We protect this little island called America against foreign aggressors, and you do everything you can to make us fail.”

“Just because someone’s foreign doesn’t make them an aggressor.”

“But that’s where you’re wrong. It’s ideas like that that’ll destroy this country. So we have to destroy the ideas, and the only way to do that is to destroy you.”

The militiaman drew a pistol and fired it at Kara, hitting her square in the chest and knocking her backwards.

“No!” David yelled, and lunged towards the gunman, who pointed the gun from Kara to David. David grabbed his arm and pushed it to the side, and the gun went off, missing David. While the man’s arm was extended over his head, David kneed him in the groin, and the man doubled over, vomiting all over David as he did so. David brought his hands down on the man’s back, and the man fell belly-first to the ground.

David grabbed the man’s gun and turned around to see one of the other militiamen pointing his gun at Aimee. David raised his gun to fire at the man, but before he could, the man fired at Aimee, and she was hit square in the chest and thrown backwards, just like her mother.

“No!” David screamed, and fired his gun at the militiaman, hitting him square in the head, turning him off like a light. Once the man was on the ground, David turned back to the other two militiamen and emptied his clip into them.

He ran over to see if Aimee was breathing, but she wasn’t. It was no use calling for the police, as most of them were Islanders, too. He started giving Aimee CPR, but after a few minutes, he realized it was no use. A few minutes later, he realized the same thing about Kara.

The memory of that night sent a chill through David as he stopped beside the grey slab of rock outside the lighthouse. It read:

EASTERNMOST POINT IN THE USA

WEST QUODDY HEAD

LUBEC, MAINE

In the US, the wave of hate had started in Silicon Valley and moved its way eastward, as if it were a reversal of the great westward expansion of the American frontier. Now David was as far east as he could go. Retreat was no longer an option, and surrender would mean certain death. He had only once choice left: to fight.

When he got to the deserted lighthouse, he stopped and looked at the locket in his hand. Kara had given it to him for their first anniversary. It was heart-shaped, and at the time, it was meant to symbolize their love for each other. As he looked at it now, it symbolized something much larger: the emotion that had once held humanity together. He put it around his neck, and broke open the door to the small building at the base of the lighthouse tower.

There was a table in the middle of the building, and he threw his backpack down on it. He rummaged through the pack until he found his pistol, and laid it on the table, along with all the ammunition he had, which wasn’t much.

He knew the Islanders would have far more firepower than he did, that he would be vastly outnumbered, and outgunned. But he wasn’t going to sit still and be killed by the same people who’d killed his wife and daughter. He was going to take as many of them with him as he could. He loaded the pistol and put the rest of the ammunition in his pockets, then grabbed the backpack.

“Come on, Argus,” he said, as he entered the base of the tower. He started to climb the stairs, going over his plan in his head, with Argus trailing him. Once the Islanders were within range, he’d pick off as many as he could from his lofty perch. Then, assuming he had any ammo left, he’d run down and try to dispatch the rest. It was a flawed plan, to say the least, but it was all he had.

He reached the main gallery of the tower, and stepped back out into the cold. There was a ladder leading up to the lantern room gallery, which Argus couldn’t climb. “Stay, Argus,” he said, and the dog stayed, obedient as ever.

David climbed the ladder to the lantern room gallery, and when he reached it, he paused, and took the locket from his neck. He opened it, and saw the picture of Kara and Aimee inside it, from before the darkness descended, when love still existed, and even thrived. Their faces were beaming, and he felt a familiar pang of guilt at not having been able to save them. But most of all, he felt love, and he took some consolation from the fact that they had died still being able to feel love, too.

He stared at the locket for a few more seconds, then closed it, and put it back around his neck. Then he turned and looked out towards the road, and waited for the hate to come.