Excerpt: Starsong of Enen (Working Title)

The first thing I remember about the hospital is telling the nurses and the doctors to just get it over with. I remember wondering why I wasn’t going under yet, and then realizing that the surgery was already done. It is a disorienting feeling when time disappears, almost like an offering to the pain-free gods. Here is a piece of my life for you to remember and me to forget. I wonder if it hurt like a mofo while it was happening and the real magic of it is that you don’t remember a moment of it when you wake up. My second memory of the hospital is of someone, I think it was James, telling the doctor how relieved he was that I was going to be okay, because “the last two didn’t make it.” I thought they probably should have told me about that, but then I wondered if I would have consented to the surgery if they had. I guessed it didn’t matter, because the whole thing was already over with, but I wish they’d told me. Some morbid part of me wanted to know their names. Maybe that was just the drugs talking.

I don’t remember thinking anything in particular about the chip itself, but I do remember this. When I reached my hands up to the bandage for the first time it was smaller than I expected. Maybe two square inches, nothing to really shake a stick at. Something in me had imagined being wrapped in bandages for days, walking around with a giant mummy head until the incisions healed. As it turned out, they didn’t have to do a lot of cutting for the installation. Secretly, that was a relief.

When the doctors decided I was stable enough to be released from the hospital, I found the rest of the team outside in the waiting room. At the time there were four of us, five if you counted the kid, but I didn’t. You could tell which people were team members by the bandages behind the right ear. We all had them, and I guess that’s part of why we got paid so much money. Couldn’t even start your first day of work without having brain surgery. You can imagine how much paperwork was involved in the employment process.

We were an interesting bunch, standing together in the waiting room. There was Kevin, who was a psychologist. I didn’t trust him just because of that, but he was a nice enough guy. Then there was James, who was into robots. In practice, he was an engineer of some kind, but what I remember best about him is his obsession with robots. Erica was a bio engineer who specialized in plants but had a knack for understanding the human body. I suspected she would have just as easy a time understanding animals, but we never had occasion to find out. The last was Katie, and all I remember thinking about her was that she was too young to be here. In truth, I think we were all too young that year.

When I was seventeen years old I graduated from high school in a small town north of Boston. I applied to several schools in New England to please my aunt and uncle, but I had a past to run from. It was no surprise to anyone when I moved to Los Angeles; I hated the cold, and I hated the memories, so I went and didn’t look back.

Originally my intention was to study music. When I was little I had a real talent for the piano. My mother used to shepherd me around to talent shows to perform. That was before my brother was born, though, and I mostly gave it up after that. The way I remember it, it was more like my mother forgot about me playing the piano, but the way my aunt and uncle told the story I started refusing to practice. I’m not sure that was likely to happen, but no one would have listened to me anyway, so I learned to keep my side of the story to myself.

In Los Angeles I discovered a hundred thousand other people following lost dreams. My college was full of students chasing after things that seemed to me as impossible as touching the sky. I was chasing the impossible too, but I guess your own fantasies will always seem more plausible than everyone else’s. Even so, I dropped out of music before my first year finished. I transferred my major to technology sciences, and fell in love with the world of programming. So much, in fact, that after I earned my bachelors degree, I came back for a masters. That’s when they found me.

The company, HorizonTech, offered me a job before I was even out of school. I wasn’t sure at first. High risk and high pay, living accommodations provided off site, which was good for me, since I wasn’t sure what to do with myself now that I was done with school. They wouldn’t tell my exactly what the job was, but it sounded exciting, so after I talked it over with my professor I decided to accept. They didn’t mention that part of the ‘high risk’ factor was brain surgery. I think I would have taken the job anyway.

The living accommodations turned out to be a fairly nice apartment a few blocks away from the office. Two bedrooms, one bath, and a very spacious kitchen. It was the kind of place that felt too big for me after six years of college dorms, so I was glad when I found out I would be sharing it with another team member. We drove there together, after the hospital. More correctly, Erica drove and I perched on the back of her motorcycle thinking that I probably should have invested in a car of some sort. I found myself grateful that I would be living a short walk away form work. Something told me that commuting on the back of a motorcycle wasn’t something I could get used to.

I was impressed with Erica from the start. She looked like a trouble maker, which was fascinating to me, since I was always a good girl or at least tried to be. When I met her she was leaning up against a wall, unlit cigarette in hand. The first thing she ever said to me was “Looks like the pidgin made it out alive.” She didn’t have a lot of words for me after that.

I found my belongings from school already sitting in my room when I arrived. There weren’t very many. I didn’t put a lot of stock in possessions since the house burned down when I was nine years old, so most of what I owned was books and clothing. The only exception to the rule was my computer and my grandmother’s quilt. Those were my treasures, the first being a laptop I engineered myself, the second being the only memento I had from the only woman in my family who didn’t hate me. Of course, she was also the only woman in my family who didn’t feel the need to stick her nose into my business. I guess what I mean is that she was generally absent, but I appreciated her anyway. That’s the way things go in my family.

Unpacking was a matter of minutes. I asked Erica to point me in the direction of a grocery store and wound up at a corner market buying poptarts and milk. I vowed that I would eat better in the near future, but I knew that neither one of us was going to have time to cook and the corner market didn’t have a great selection of frozen foods. I was going to have to find a real grocery store later that week. In the meantime it was poptarts and office food for me.

It made a bad dinner that first night. I realized that we didn’t have a toaster yet, so I had cold poptarts and a glass of milk. I wasn’t full when I was finished, but I felt slightly sick after too much processed sugar crap, so I tried for sleep anyway. It was a long night, wondering what sort of life I was going to wake up to in the morning. I kept waking up with headaches and sharp pains behind me ear. I wondered, idly, if something had gone wrong with the surgery. I was too tired and disassociated to really care at that point. When I finally fell asleep I forgot about it and didn’t bring it up again for a long time.