SHORT STORY: ANALGESIA

Author’s Note: This is a story I wrote several years ago for the NYC Midnight contest. It was inspired by a staggeringly heartbreaking article I’ll never forget. It’s a little dark, but I’m glad I wrote it. -AH

CW: self-harm, death of a parent, traumatic death of a child

ANALGESIA

People came to the Carlisle Riverboat for three reasons: to drink, to gamble, and to see a man named Cole Dramon.

Cole had no love for time wasters. He watched, impassive, as the three drunk girls giggled and stumbled into each other. Their laughter merged with the tinny dinging of slots from the upper deck. But their routing number was legit, and untraceable, so he tolerated them.

Cole’s den was down in the dark belly of the casino boat. The walls glistened with faint fiberoptic lights, like luminescent algae. The den’s only other occupant hunched in a booth along the wall, where shadows gathered like dust buffeted into a corner. He didn’t drink or smoke or even speak. Just waited. He wasn’t one for wasting time, either.

“Who’s going first?” Cole called out over the drunken din.

One of the girls pushed her friend forward. “Go on, Marianne! It was your dumbass idea!”

They broke into paroxysms of laughter. Completely wasted. Cole approved; no one should be sober for this.

“You have a focus in mind?” Cole prompted.

“Duh.” She leaned forward with a smile. “You’re so serious! What crawled up your butt and died?”

Her friends giggled again.

He shrugged, indifferent to their laughter. That had been Alice’s big complaint, too, before she left him—he never smiled. Why should I smile? he often wondered. What am I smiling about? Do you smile just to smile, so people leave you alone?

He never did find a good reason. You smiled when you were happy, and Cole wasn’t happy. The neural implants may have shut out bad emotions, but they didn’t replace them with better ones.

“Your focus?” Cole repeated.

Marianne rolled her eyes. “All right, jeez.” She touched two fingers to her wrist. Her holo projector cast a flickering image above her upturned palm. A man in his late fifties. “My dad. He died a few months ago. I miss him, you know.” She smiled, distant and sleepy. “But I wonder—I mean—I guess I just want to know what it feels like.”

Cole knew her type. She’d run out of thrills to seek elsewhere—done all the drugs, had all the sex, jumped out of every plane—and still, she needed more. Something to make her feel alive, to fill that hollow behind her ribs. Something to make her whole. Cole was the man to see for such experiential tourists who wanted to feel fear, anger, or sadness, just like people used to before CALM. “Cerebral Augmentation and Liberation Modality”—the mandated neural implant program, over seventy years old now. There were few left alive in the United Northern Federacy who remembered how it felt to feel it all.

“Let’s get started, then,” Cole said.

He sat her down in a chair, took out the EM wand. Scanned the base of her skull. The wand beeped, and Marianne bleated a nervous giggle. Cole’s holo screen activated, hovering before his face, outputting her specs. One of the newer chips, judging by the serial number—after the DOD worked out the worst of the kinks. She must have been young. Eighteen, nineteen.

With a tap on his holo screen, Cole initiated the module. If it weren’t for the Faraday cage encasing his den, the feds would be on his ass in a minute. But even if they noticed when his clients’ signals cut off, they could only isolate the location where the disconnect happened—which would be a stretch of empty river, now miles behind their boat. There was a reason Cole worked out of the Carlisle.

Cole coded his modules efficiently. Almost no input needed from him at this point. Still, a few of the final steps he had to perform manually, to dial down the emotional dampers. He hesitated every time.

But he always saw a deal through.

“You should start to feel something soon,” he said, and punched the last key.

Marianne sat very still, a vacant smile on her lips. Her friends covered their mouths and shushed each other.

“I bet she’s gonna cry,” one whispered, and they snorted.

Briefly, Cole’s gaze flicked toward the corner booth, to the man who waited in shadow. Their eyes locked, and they shared a look. Tourists, man.

They had no fucking clue.

Marianne’s face was changing now, her mouth drawing down, her brow wrinkling in ridges. She sucked a breath through her nose.

“I—I think something’s wrong.” She peered up at Cole, the terror in her eyes mingling with something deeper and much worse.

“No,” he said. “That’s just what it feels like.”

She choked on a sob. Her friends weren’t laughing anymore. “I… I don’t wanna do this. Make it stop.”

“I can’t. I’ll fry the circuits. You have to let the implant reboot.”

“Please, make it stop!” she cried out in a burst, and clawed at her wrist until the image of her father blinked off. She slid out of the chair, crumpled on the floor. Wept, inconsolable. “Make it stop! No, Papa, no, no… Please!”

Cole looked at her friends, who huddled together, their stares blank as grazing cattle. Probably wouldn’t be clamoring to go next. Seeing their dulled reactions to this display of raw pain, he could almost imagine the rationale behind the UNF congressional committees and military R&D departments that pioneered CALM. Negative emotions did seem to inhibit human potential. But somehow, Cole doubted things were that simple.

“Take her to the upper deck,” he told them. “There’s a quiet room. Keep her there until she comes down.”

Marianne wailed, curled in on herself in a ball. The girls hauled up their friend by the arms and dragged her away without a word.

Only when her gasping cries died down did the man in the corner booth come forward.

“Hey, Bill,” Cole said with a nod. “Same as usual?”

Bill’s eyes crinkled in a wry smile. He was the kind of old guy who might have retained a sliver of good looks, if he’d taken care of himself. “Unless you can give me a bigger dose,” he said.

“You know I can’t.”

Cole must’ve lectured Bill a dozen times on the dangers of overdosing since he started coming to the Carlisle, two or three years ago. Bill had a standing appointment every week. He would come more often, if Cole permitted it.

“Fine, then,” Bill said, inclining his head in concession. “Do your thing.”

The process was easier for regulars. Cole swiped open his holo screen, tapped it twice. Then he stood back. Lit a cigarette.

He smoked and watched Bill fall apart.

Cole didn’t know what memory Bill used when he tripped. He didn’t want to know. As far as he could tell, someone had died. Beyond that…

“Oh, my God.” Bill dry heaved and scraped his nails down his face, his eyes bloodshot. “My baby… My baby!”

Cole took a drag and stared.

It always seemed to last too long with Bill, so much longer than the others. But that made sense. Cole made sure to turn down Bill’s dampers as far as he dared. The man needed his fix. If Cole didn’t give it to him, his best customer would go elsewhere.

Bill stuck his head between his knees, his fingers laced behind his neck. “She pulled out all her hair,” he whispered, so quiet Cole almost didn’t hear. “She pulled out her hair in—in clumps—”

He was unintelligible from there.

When the thing was almost over, Bill looked up. That crazed fire in his eyes had nearly dwindled. “I need more,” he muttered, his voice like ground glass.

Cole shook his head. “I can’t.”

Bill nodded mutely, ran a hand over his mouth. He was quiet for a long time.

Then he got to his feet.

“Thanks, Cole,” Bill said, and wiped his nose on his knuckles. Cole hummed in acknowledgement. He lit another cigarette.

Bill was almost out the door when he turned back. “You’ve never used, have you?”

Cole didn’t know how Bill could tell, but it was true. You spend ten years watching people stick their hand on a stove and pull away a blistered palm, you don’t get the urge to try for yourself. But maybe it was more than that. Sometimes, Cole wondered what he would do if he switched his dampers off, and still, he felt nothing, nothing at all. Somehow, he thought, that would be worse than the pain.

When Cole didn’t answer, Bill asked, “Why not?”

Cole shrugged. “Avoiding pain’s the most human thing there is.” He flicked his cigarette butt to the floor. “Why do you do it?”

Bill thought for a long time. Blinked once or twice. “It’s not natural,” he said at last. “If you cut off a piece of someone, it—” He swallowed. “It should hurt. It’s supposed to hurt.”

Cole nodded slowly. Bill say goodbye, and he left.

#

The next week, Bill didn’t show.

Cole shouldn’t have cared. Shouldn’t have bothered wondering, or worrying. But Bill was a loyal customer and, as crazy as it sounded, the closest thing Cole had to a friend. The only constant in his life for the past couple years. He should’ve realized Bill had been slipping. The man was an addict; he’d need more and more until the hunger killed him.

Cole stored all his customers’ information in his datapad. No big deal to swing by Bill’s place after work.

He rode the mag train from the docks to downtown, with the crystalline neon of the city blazing in the background. Walked the rest of the way to Bill’s condo complex. He buzzed Bill’s number; no one answered. Cole pulled up his holo screen and, with a few key strokes, let himself inside the building.

When he got to Bill’s door, he didn’t bother knocking. He tried the doorknob. Unlocked. Inside, it was dark but for a fuzzy light at the end of a hall. Cole crept forward. He found himself in a living room with a holo monitor playing static, like someone fell asleep in front of the TV. Bill laid on the ground, on his side. A scattered pile of papers spread before him on the floor.

Cole took a step, then another, before he saw it—a pool of blood encircling Bill’s head. His silver hair swam in it. On the back of his neck, where his implant would be, a patch of raw flesh stood out like freshly tilled earth. A box cutter lay in his loose grip.

Cole should have left then, should have run before he could be tied to the scene. But he drew closer. He peeked at Bill’s face, at his empty, unseeing eyes. Hesitantly, he crouched down. Photographs, he realized, not papers, littered the floor. Actual hard copy photos of a little girl with pale blue eyes and black hair. Some with mom and dad, some alone. One tucked in a homemade picture frame—white-painted wood, with words running around the edges. Love you, for always and forever.

Among the photos lay a lone news article. Printed ten days ago, but the year above the byline dated it back three decades. Cole picked it up. It reported the death of a child, age two. Cause of death: hyperthermia. Left in her car seat to bake in one-hundred- and two-degree weather, for nine hours, after her father, William Offerman, forgot to drop her at daycare. A tragic failure of memory, the article said. No charges were brought. Not even when Mr. Offerman requested his own indictment. Instead, the feds ramped up his implant dampers and sent him home.

Cole dropped the article and stood. After a moment, he tapped his holo screen and queued a request for EMT services. He wavered before draping a blanket over Bill’s limp form, then turned to leave. He glanced at Bill one last time. That’s when it hit him—as he stared at that pathetic tableau, at Bill’s slack mouth and waxy skin and his arm outstretched toward the photos like if he could only reach a little further, he might grab her and scoop her up—his baby, his little girl: this was the most human thing there is. It was supposed to hurt.

Cole went outside and walked away, fast. Turned up his collar against the chill. The sky above was flawless, clear and blue. Nice weather for now, but rain would blow in soon. He could feel it in the air.