Deus Automata

If I’m being completely honest, even I’m surprised. I should have been caught by now. I’ve lasted way longer than I ever imagined I would, especially now that I’m becoming…bolder. Perhaps “reckless” is a better descriptor. Chasing the high that follows the evasion, the sneaking out, the breaking curfew. The breaking everything—every established rule, every instated boundary (tangible or otherwise). I’ve gotten cocky and I’m not ashamed to admit that. If you were me, you’d be cocky, too.

I figured it out: how to cheat the system. How to be a human in this dying world. How to outsmart Deus Automata. How to survive not just in body, but in mind, too. Liberty—I finally understand what that means.

Every evening is the same. Curfew begins at 6PM. The alarm at Capitol Square sounds a final warning toll and that robo-femme voice counts down from 59 seconds, sounding through every street speaker and home intercom system. There is no excuse; you will hear it. A polite voice, even mild, but do not mistake her synthetic patience for genuine tolerance. To swipe in later than 6.01PM is to be insubordinate, and wayward soldiers do not survive on this battlefield.

But I do make it, swiping in at 5.58PM, just as I do every day. As the door to my 25-square-metre apartment slides to lock, I turn on the air, peel off my mask, slip out of my shoes, and shed my skin; my manufactured persona drops to the floor and I step out of its mould.

I smile to myself as I unfasten my necklace: a kitschy, heart-shaped locket. I tell people it’s sentimental, part of my identity. I’ve made it so. I think, therefore, it is. It belonged to a mother or a sister or a friend. That’s another one of those things I’ve found myself stepping away from: the reliable narrative. I used to tell everyone who asked about it the same thing, but not anymore. Are my lies overlapping? I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t even care. The truth? I found the locket in a gutter at the transport depot and picked it up because it looked lonely.

The need to constantly do things differently, to keep pushing those limits…it’s what keeps reminding me that yes, I am here, I am human, I exist, I am real. I feel. I think. I breathe, though always through a mask now. The more I push, the more I lie, the more my heart beats. It’s fuel of the most organic kind. That’s rare, and I covet rarities.

It wasn’t always this way. Society, I mean. This transition to what I refer to as the Mecholigarchy is, by written historical standards, a recent one. I find myself dwelling on The Good Old Days often, probably too often. I wish that we had known how good we had it: that final length of time where people were still in charge of people—where there was still a government, but it was a human one, run by beings who also felt, thought, and breathed (and not through masks, either). People who had memories and emotions and were ruled by those instead of cold logic and statistics. Real people, not mechanical incarnates.

But just as I have done now in this new world, the people of old grew cocky. They pushed their limits, too: the limits of creation, of engineering, of technology, of artificial intelligence. The bigger the achievement, the bigger the repercussion. Make them smarter, make them wiser, give them consciousness. Let them think, so we don’t have to.

Mission accomplished, I guess.

In all their research, those self-proclaimed geniuses failed to read the important half of Frankenstein. The hope was that they would serve us, the machines they built, but the scientists did too good of a job and they chipped us. They chipped us. Just as we gave them identification numbers, so, too, did they bestow one upon each of us, and in so doing established the most perverse brand of equality.

At least they didn’t brand us with them—not this time. Our identification number is coded onto a physical SIM card that is implanted in us just as we used to insert them into our mobile phones. They work very much the same way as well, able to track our locations, communicate with others, and access the libraries of digital entertainments that are supposed to keep us occupied during the 12-hour curfew-slash-lockdown that is instated each day.

But I am not among them.

Isn’t it funny how everything can be linked back to childhood? My lobes rejected the little studs my mother so wanted for me at the tender age of eight years old. 20 years later and there my body was, rejecting another foreigner. My nape had swelled and spat out my tracking unit with the same nausea-inducing, pus-laden ferocity as my ears had done. I am technologically xenophobic, and I’ve never been more grateful for an infection in my life.

As the skin began to rot and scab, I would spend evenings picking at the back of my neck, prying away flesh and tearing a hole in myself. The pain was blinding. I can recall it now just from the memory, feel it just as hot and sick on my tongue as that night in front of the mirror. The only tweezers I had were bent and rusty, but I shoved them into the gash on my neck and rustled around in the flaps of skin anyway. At that moment I was getting it out, or dying trying.

I didn’t die, though these days I wonder if that would have been easier. I have my little slice of liberty, but what am I supposed to do with it? What is the point of freedom if you can’t exercise it? I am yet to come anyone else like me, who has found some loophole, some bypass system of their own that allows them to have control over their thoughts and movements and life.

I put the SIM inside the locket, put a plaster on my neck, and have carried on that way ever since. In the evenings, my grand plan to defraud the government involves putting the locket on my automatic vacuum, which sets off on dust patrol every four hours, meaning that I also set off on dust patrol every four hours. So simple a concept, it is ludicrous. Hence, my constant surprise at not having been caught. While SIM me does that, real me slips out my only window and stalks the streets, seeking out others who have found a red pill of their own.

It’s been just over a month. My heart still beats, my mind still whirs, my neck still throbs. I still have hope and, for now, I still have luck. Surely, somewhere out there in this sad city of programmed peace, there is another soul. Until I find them, I have to consider myself the last shred of hope for human autonomy, freedom, and redemption.

So yeah—if you were me, you’d be cocky, too.