The Individuals

When I woke up, it was purple, the day. A pale lavender dream. It reached out and touched me. I said yes. Then I said no. I got up, and went to the desk. No, my mind did. My body was still in bed. The spark of a golden piece of dust passing through a sunbeam. You stay hard with the present. ‘There is a day here’, my hands say, questioning my grip on things, palms upturned on the rose petal slip of my nightdress as I lay on top of the bedspread. 'Today,' they say, 'You're going to pinch something squirt dead.' The coffee was bubbling on the stove filling the small apartment with familiarity. The smell of toast and a sound from the street, metal falling in an empty lot somewhere below. A drifter? Antack Avenue below was now running on empty, having once been a tree-lined street of Harbor, a thriving scientific community. We were sealed in nine floors up in a building at the edge of the Toca Valley, one of a dozen on off-grid compound owned by Hull. Luke and I were the only tenants and employees left that we knew of for a two hundred mile radius. The shower was running on Luke in the next room. Potted artificial plants from the high shelf watched our artificial cat named Cat stretched in a vertical line across a cool part of the tiled floor, limbs splayed fecklessly in the heat. After the bomb went off and the remaining kings and queens of the food chain were settled in now fully functional city substructures, Petrin-22 hit, the viral scourge that was taking out thousands. Hull was one of the few remaining private corporations making life bearable for survivors, for a price, of course. Namely, employment. But no who knows what they're really up to with a vast conglomerate of tech companies working almost free rein on solving the April 3rd, 2042.

apocalypse. The remaining governments formed into one, Medloc, and was pumping money into solutions. On paper, I was part of one of Hull's hubs of selected scientists charged with coming up with cures, recovery systems, etc. However, a recent wave of surface drifters, half mangled and deranged from the fallout, had wiped everyone else on the compound out over a week ago. Instead of a rescue team, Hull had instructed us to stay put and await instructions. Luke was suddenly in the kitchen, towel wrapped around the waist. Taking a seat at the table, I could tell that he was again wondering how to get rid of me. But he didn't really need much help. The bob-key around my neck, a small chip inside a heart-shaped locket he gave me once, made sure of it. I couldn't disturb his pristine halo of self because he had set the bob in his watch to perfect indifference. He set mine, or thought he'd set it, to compliant. If I moved from my inert position, he could influence me to do something I didn't want to. That little key was what I had come up with for the military. The bob could control human emotions. Luke had a job too. Laying low. One of Luke's other problems was that he couldn't make love to me anymore, and it was eroding his romantic notion of life. On May 3rd, 2042, getting nowhere slowly, I almost destroyed the bob prototype because it had been giving me so much trouble. That was the same day Luke moved in upstairs. We met because my failed attempts to get bob working kept shorting the power, and he discovered me half-inserted in the generator in the basement. A peculiar, electrical, fizzing feeling at my elbow had made me turn around, and I jumped when I saw him leaning back agains the wall, watching me. "Bad day?" he said, comically pursing his lips in mock flirtation. It wasn't possible to hide the blush as I lost any remaining dignity I'd had backing out of the generator tail first. But he was polite and, after finishing off fixing the generator for me, we went upstairs for a coffee.

It was hard to keep my mind in one place. Here was Luke Wright, the award-winning neuroscientist, the creator of the mero, chatting to me about his childhood. The mero was the reason he was laying low; a device he created a few years back that could locate an individual's electromagnetic frequency anywhere on the planet. After the bomb, the mero had had the bewildering benefit of putting an end to all war and it looked like peace would be restored, famines eradicated and disease eliminated. Any individual could be located, harnessed and incarcerated from any location. But trouble came when a copy of the mero was licensed and commercialized for the upper classes above Luke's head by some unknown party higher up in Hull. Unhappily, that version was unstable and resulted in some alarming side effects which emerged only much later, one of which was an aberrant form of psychosis. High-flying players at the top levels were converted into deranged lunatics. The economy faltered, and the chaos resumed, as though nature had just blinked an eye and restored the status quo. Luke, the fall guy, was sent out here where they could keep an eye on him. "You don't say very much," he said, eyeing me over a glass of brandy he'd brought with him that first evening after we spent together. Insecure and mousey, I couldn't help taking it as an insult, even though his eyes were glued to me. In the following days, his unexpected incandescent glances weren't lost on me. He found excuses to visit me. Once we were alone, he would work his tall, lithe frame into a lose, languorous, feline expression of intention and weave it around me. I liked the way he squinted at me when he spoke, giving me his full attention. Now I'm only still around because there's something wrong. He has all my designs and my notes to do whatever he likes with. But there's something else. I had a feeling that if I could just see the desk,Tthe answer would be there. It was Luke who had helped me get the bob working in the end. It was a painfully minor detail, a tiny adjustment to the carrier signal. Once we had them up and running, it was like someone

had turned the lights on inside us again. We were almost like kids. Luke couldn't get enough of me. He swept me up in an endless wave of love. After a few short weeks, I couldn't tell which way was up, where he began or when I ended. The comedown eventually came, or, I should say, the unexpected side effects. They were extreme. One day, in a fit of rage, Luke almost smashed a window, which would have let the virus in. Another day, I accidentally cut star shapes out of all our clothes. It was only when I'd finished that I understood what I'd done. Luke had moved. He was standing facing the breeze of the air filter, inhaling the dulcet scent of sedge from the tangled, unruly garden below. There was the faint sound of murmuring coming from him. When he turned around, he was holding Cat. Back to the kitchen, he set the cat down and picked up a tray with toast on it. He brought it to the night stand, lifted me up to a sitting position, and sat down next to me on the bed. "Anne," he said, placing a finger on my bottom lip. I hadn't eaten in six days. "This is all very unpleasant," he said, raising a piece of toast to my mouth. It remained closed. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and gently pinched a stray eyelash away. "Why are you being this way? It's so childish." His watch. It was no longer on his wrist. That's what he kept his bob in. Like the locket, the watch was the control, it contained the console for setting the frequencies. It had finally become clear to me on the day bob started working that I'd gone too far. I shouldn't have designed the thing to connect to the individual. It was easy to isolate a person's unique electromagnetic signature. The consequences had eluded me, I was so ensconced in getting the thing to work in the first place. Even if I could snap off my locket and cast it out the window, it wouldn't matter. It was calibrated to my individual frequency. That had been the promethean step that may have angered the gods. Perhaps they'd sent me Luke to restore order.

Now his back was turned, head inclined toward his chest. I waited. There was a slight tremble of his shoulders and I realized he was crying. This could easily be done with a bob. If the watch was elsewhere, maybe he'd found a way to surgically insert the chip somewhere. He'd spoken of doing this. A kiss on my forehead almost made me jump. It was hard to keep track of things lately. "Why won't you come back to me?" he said. "Please, Anne." It was risky, it was potentially fatal, but I stole a quick glance at his face. But what a payoff! A glint. A little sparkle inside his mouth. The bob was lodged in one of his teeth. "Anne, please," he said, as he moved back. My eyes shot back to their original position. He didn't know, I kept reminding myself. He didn't know about the individual frequency calibration. I never recorded it in my notes. "It's broken," he said, suddenly gripping me by the arms. "My remote, the watch," he said. "It's broken. I've lost control!" He kissed me and kissed me. An image of our first night together. Wine, a movie. What was it? The Princess Bride, yes, his favorite. In another few moments, I'd be lost. I slapped his face. Wide-eyed and frozen, his daze gave me a window to scramble off the bed and leap for the desk where I finally saw the solution, a set of pliers. I can tell you that I was successful somehow in wrestling him to the floor and yanking the bob tooth out of his head. It is also true that in the handful of moments that followed, a team of armed Hull enforcers burst through the door due to something entirely unrelated. There had been someone in the building opposite ours. Dr. Ethan Platt, a biochemist working on a vaccine for the virus - a third survivor who hadn't known about us either - had managed to

get Hull out by sabotaging his project. That same hour, he'd reported a security breach in the system which he'd faked to get off the compound. "I never liked him," said Ethan, as he handed me a little brown paper box wrapped in twine through the prison bars back at Hull headquarters in Berkin. "Can we watch the tv?" I said to him, my finger working on the box. "It might upset you," he said, tilting his head to one side with compassion, a little crucifix earring dangled from his lower ear. I made an expression that communicated indifferent insistence. The light was nice today in the cell. You could even hear the simulated birds outside, tweeting sweetly away from their holographic orange trees in the courtyard. A tv hung in the far corner of the cell and I used a remote to switch it on. The news. Today it showed Luke's smiling talking head bobbing away above scrolling headlines below. "The creator of Goodbeam, a device that can control human emotions has -" the broadcaster narrated over Luke's muted speech, was interrupted by a snort. "What a terrifically stupid name," I said, gnawing a little on the remote. "I told you," Ethan said, reaching through the bars and taking it from me. "You're upset now." "He had no right!" he said, rising from his chair in hot righteousness to smack his fist against his palm. One of the delicious praline chocolates was taken by two of my fingers from the box and placed slowly into my mouth. I couldn't remember the last time I'd tasted real chocolate. Ethan may have been sweet on me considering the lavish gifts. The books were great, but I'd rounded out a bit in the last few weeks from the candy. It wasn't so bad, though. The extra cush served to soften the hard bed and chair of my cell. "I'm sorry," he said, sitting down. "It really burns me that he just stole your idea and practically became Jesus Christ again." A little smile almost crept over my face.

"What?" Ethan said wryly. The smile spread, and I warmed it a little when I glanced at him. It might have been the chocolate working on me, or it might have been that I'd just remembered the two little bob chips nestled happily together inside the heart-shaped locket around my neck.