The Proxies - Beginning

A glance was all it took.

My curiosity had won over as soon as I'd spotted him in the corner of my field of vision. I was drawn to him, to the movement, even though I knew I should look elsewhere. When our eyes met, I was already in too deep.

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It was burning on the inside of his brain and his entire body, making him twitch, forcing him to shake both his legs just to tolerate the heat. It was eating him up from the inside out, turning his guts into a fiery stew and picking at his skin with millions of little needles.

He was trying not to look at the other passengers, he knew what they thought. Just a drug addict, a loser. Nobody knew that it wasn't his fault, and nobody would have cared.

The burn was talking to him now. It had stayed quiet for a long time, burning up little by little and gathering strength for hours. It had been just a tingle somewhere in his spine, hardly noticeable but still real. He had thought he'd had it suppressed already, but it had taken full control now. Why had it chosen him, out of all people? Why was he too weak to resist it?

Now the burn was more vicious than before. It was demanding him to act.

That metallic noise that had been ringing in his head was getting intolerable. Pain was shooting up and down his legs. Even moving them wasn't enough anymore, he would be forced to do what the burn wanted or it would take him down.

The young girl on the seat opposed to him was looking at the device on her hand, smiling every once in a while. Maybe speaking to someone she was in love with. Someone who was waiting for her at home. He could not. But he had to. To calm the burn, to get out that acid that was blasting his veins.

She was perfect, just what he had needed. Exactly what it was asking of him. He had no choice now.

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I was panting. The burn had been so real, the little pins and needles like they were actually picking at my skin. I wanted to vomit but managed to calm myself down.

It had been a rare thing, one of the more vivid ones. The ones that took over me and transmitted not only the clearer, rationally formed thoughts, but every sensation I imagined the person to have.

Imagined. That was the key. This was not real. I had to repeat the words a couple of times in my head to believe them. It was not real, it was not real, it was not real, I whispered, a mantra to wipe away the taste of blood in my mouth.

I opened my eyes and wrote down some words to remember how I had felt while I had been inside his head, just in case this turned into a story one day. But drug addicts weren't exactly my genre or anything I'd know about. They were certainly not common to see out in public. For my own writing, I normally focused on the broken-hearted, anyone too sad to focus their attention on their devices. Lonely people heading home to spend the night with a bottle of wine to numb their feelings of inadequacy. Frustrated housewives of lower income Thinker families. You didn't need to be a mind reader to see what the lines on their foreheads or their vacant eyes said about the stress of their everyday lives, the worry of making ends meet, the occasional bouts of jealousy with their working husbands. Young women who had just found out their boyfriends were cheating, their eyes filling up with tears at regular intervals, their thoughts traveling from rage to guilt to sadness and back again. Those were the people I wanted to write to. I drank in their thoughts and feelings to not deal with mine, transformed them into fiction to make my own life less real.

I lifted my eyes from my notebook and to the young woman who was sitting right next to me. Blonde, curly hair, a pointy nose and freckles. She looked a lot like me when I was her age, maybe some ten years ago. We had the exact same hair color and length, and similar features. We were both wearing light-colored sundresses. A split second of panic flashed through my mind but I brushed it away. The girl would be safe, I knew it. It was just my imagination, it wasn't real, no matter how much I had felt that thing piercing through my skin. I looked at the drug addict again, fast enough so I wouldn't get drawn back into his mind. He was still moving erratically, his eyes set on the screen in front of him. It was running a commercial about a real estate development in Villa Devoto, one of the up-and-coming Thinker neighborhoods and one of the few places in the city still above water. I was relieved he wasn't looking at the girl anymore. It had just been my imagination.

I nevertheless scribbled a couple of words about it into my notebook. It had been a while since I'd had one of these kinds of nightmarish visions, around the same time I had last seen my father. 

The memory made me shake my head. No need to entertain it any longer.

"What's that, Mom?" A little girl, no older than five, was pointing at me and my book from across the train. Their clothes were two steps above my grade, I noted, smiling at the mother and turning back to my writing, not really able to disguise my sadness about the girl not knowing what a book was.

It was getting harder and harder to buy them as paper was getting costlier, so I always used as few words as possible, wrote in the tiniest lettering. Environmentally, they were not great, and I knew I probably wouldn't be able to afford these little luxuries much longer, eventually having to resort to pouring my thoughts onto a microchip attached to my temple just like everybody else. And I did dictate to a computer sometimes when it came to work, but with my personal writing I preferred to keep my notes to myself.

I still loved the challenge of having to remember how to spell correctly without the help of a machine, turning a phrase on its head and spinning it around to get it right. I wanted to feel like I still had my wits, that I was able to do something by myself. Without the machine distorting the world, correcting my thoughts and making them more palatable to an audience. That was already what I had to do at the office, but it wasn't good enough for me. Even if it meant I would never get anything published. It wouldn't have been good for Mom, either, I thought, letting the sadness in again, if just for a second. I missed her, and even more on days like this. Mom was a part of why I did it, why for the past ten years I had always wanted to see what was going on in people's minds. To see if I could stop someone else.

Sometimes it was hard to distinguish which feelings were mine and which were somebody else's, but most of the time I wouldn't get inside another person's head for more than a second; it would be just a fleeting thought that would flash through my mind when I'd look at someone. Like a half an hour ago with my boss Jimmy, when he had given me my latest assignment. If you don't get it this time, I'll fire you, was what I'd read in his eyes. Why he didn't just do it already was beyond me. He'd thought of it enough by now.

Jimmy had, for a reason I couldn't fathom, been forced to give me one of the most important stories of the week, one that would require both extensive research and interviews with important politicians and scientists that were already set up, the questions mostly preordered. Well, an interview was what they still called them, even though us content collectors were about as far from real, old school journalists as a leopard from a rat. Sure, both were mammals, but you couldn't really say they looked alike. Only one of them had spots, only one ate from the garbage can. And only one had gone extinct not long after the dawn of the third millennium, a lot like journalists. It's always the good ones you lose. 

Jimmy's decision had shocked me a little. I had no explanation as to why he had given the story to me instead of one of his favorite collectors, who would get the job done just like Jimmy wanted it. It would be a shameless ad, of course, probably paid for by the companies, and it would be easy to handle. But Jimmy didn't want me to fuck up, that I had seen in his eyes. I didn't want to fuck up either, but lately it had been getting harder and harder to keep everything together. My imagination would get the best of me and I'd mess with the system, disable the automatic input and write with my gut and my own two hands instead of letting the algorithm do it. Nobody wanted that at Origin, especially with puff pieces like the one I'd been assigned.

I snapped out of my thoughts as the train came to a halt. It was my station. I got up, giving a quick glance at the young man who hadn't stopped twitching. "She'll be fine," I told myself. "It's just your imagination." But the burn was still going up and down my spine.

The crowd cleared as I watched the sleek black train disappear in the tunnel. The escalator was turned off, so people were packed up in the narrow staircase, slowly making their way upstairs and to the tunnels.

"D line is running with delay. Next train will arrive in 15 minutes," a calming woman's voice said in the loudspeaker, followed by a collective groan from the people standing on the other side of the tracks waiting for the train back to the center of Buenos Aires.

All the money in the world had flowed into this country in the past couple of decades, ever since Trade War I had ended. All the innovation and all the greatest minds working to produce enough food on the Argentinian soil to feed what was left of the world, and there was still no decent public transportation. Even though the tunnels that got you from A to B underground in an air-conditioned environment were extended, to travel longer distances than a couple of miles you had to rely on the city's old subway system. And it was far from perfect. The trains had less than a couple of years of use on them, but the infrastructure itself was incredibly outdated and on summer days like this there would often be electric shortages and other issues that made them run late. Just like everything here, decades of bad management had made sure public services remained subpar, and the new regime hadn't been able to wean out all the bad seeds just yet.

This city always had that strange air. That there could have been more, should have been more. That something great had been just around the corner, a bright future that would have been just impeccable, had something bad not happened and taken it away. But something did. It always did.

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This is the beginning chapter of my speculative suspense novel, The Proxies. It was originally published by me, on Medium. I'll be doing weekly updates, so stay tuned!