《Dreamshards》INTERLUDE IV: Gilded Cage

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I woke, faint streamers of light sneaking past the heavy curtains blacking out the large picture windows on the west side of my room. I sat up, throwing off my lace-edged blankets, too heavy for this time of year.

Small falling flakes of dark red caught my eye. A nose bleed sometime over the night, long enough ago now to have dried. Yes. YES! Will was right! Oh, thank you, you beautiful, wonderful, weird, prudish man.

I stood, reveling in the fact that I nearly fell from the twitches and twinges in my legs. Much worse than yesterday. To not address this, to not remove my implants, would be to risk my death. They would never risk it, even given the stakes. Even with my particular… affliction.

I cast off my foul, flimsy, frilly nightshirt. I was unconcerned if it ended up damaged. They would replace it if I damaged this one. Maybe one day they would give up and give me something reasonable to wear instead.

I paced my room, feeling out the specific pains. I would report them shortly. My mother would expect me to take a late lunch with her, to update her on my progress for the night. ‘To secure foreign allies’ I had lied, when questioned on my choice to wait out the night and sleep only at daybreak. ‘To escape from you sad, hateful excuses for people’ would not have been a wise answer, however true it may have been. How fortunate that my lie had become the truth. And who would have thought that it would be so easy to get along with common men? Though on the other hand, having borne witness to the pinnacle of vice and entitlement, perhaps the failings of common men hardly seem to be failings at all.

I moved to stand before my wardrobe, looking over the numerous slithery, slinky things they had provided for me to wear. All this pomp and ceremony, even just to meet with my mother. I reached out and took one off its hanger. My eyes strayed onto the mirror for a brief moment. Curves. Flawless skin. I squatted down and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the shaking to stop.

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Tier zero genetics. The peak of human potential, body and mind. At least according to ‘the science’. Also a fluke. My parents were tier one, but by a narrow margin. The projected likelihood of producing tier zero offspring with their pairing was around one percent. They hadn’t been climbers, at least not before. My aunts and uncles all lamented how they had changed, after getting a taste of ‘the good life’. After I was born.

There were not all that many offers. After all, there were not that many tier zero families. It was more the magnitude of the benefits attached to them that made them significant. A directorship for the UN’s Pan-African Outreach Program. A seat at the EU’s Committee for Preservation of Women’s Rights. My parents had already been elevated from their prior status as mere ‘working rich’ by the aid the state provides for tier zero births, to ensure that I and those like me would have the resources to reach our potential, and now they had their sights set even higher.

It wasn’t even that the prospective partners were bad. They were tier zero men, after all. Brilliant. Beautiful. They had the best educations, the most interesting jobs and hobbies. A more charming and engaging conversation partner you could never hope to find. True, some of them were older than my father, but I cannot honestly say I cared much about that. No. Once I turned sixteen, and began to meet them in person, I discovered that they all shared the same flaw. They were all men.

Their demeanors, most of them, turned sour when they realized that their charms did not work on me. At eighteen, I was taken for in-depth neuroimaging. ‘Attraction Deviation’ was the formal diagnosis. They watched the live images of my brain as they showed me unclothed images of men, first, and then of women. Before that moment, before being given direct instructions to imagine myself with the subjects of those pictures, I had never truly understood what others had meant, when they talked about attraction.

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But after seeing a few of those pictures, being told to think deeply about what it might be like to be with those women, something inside me woke up. I finally got it. Wow, did I get it.

I came to crouched on the ground, naked but for an overcoat draped over me. I looked up to see August, crouched near me, missing his overcoat. Concern was clear on his face. I narrowed my eyes. It wasn’t that I disliked him, but he was a reminder. After my diagnosis, my parents had dismissed my personal attendants and replaced them all with young men.

The indignity of it! Did they not trust me around women? Did they fear that I would have my way with each and every maid if given the chance? Or were they trying to entice me? I bet they would secretly celebrate if I dragged this poor boy over to my bed. I didn’t know which possibility was more insulting.

This, of course, reminded me of how I managed to end up like this. Thinking too deeply about women, in that particular way, would inevitably cause a chain of certain neurological reactions. The implant, resting securely in my frontal lobe, with filaments connecting it to my hypothalamus, insula, and striatum, would detect these reactions and issue a ‘correction’. Electroconvulsive therapy, neatly packaged into a purely internal device. A wonder of modern medicine.

“Your mother is asking after you.” August said, when it was clear I wasn’t going to say anything. He was always patient, to the best of his ability. He knew that I lived mostly in my own head, and gave me space. In return, I tried my best not to take my frustrations out on him. He looked closer, just below my eyes.

“Are you alright, miss?” He knew the usual effects of the ‘corrections’, and a nosebleed was not one of them. Good. Let’s begin.

“No,” I said, “Please inform my mother that I will need to make an unscheduled visit to our family physician.”

He nodded and vacated my room. I stood, letting the coat fall to the floor. Someone would retrieve it sooner or later. It had been a nice gesture. I hoped that he was paid well to put up with me.

I looked at the dress still clutched in my hand. I held it up and found that I had ripped it at some point during either my fit or my medically induced blackout afterward. The tear, though, was suspiciously straight. It was as if I had taken a razor to the fragile fabric.

Was I losing my grip on reality due to the hopefully mounting neurological damage? Was it alien nanotechnology? I found that I did not care. That dress joined the growing pile of garments on the floor, and I pulled out another at random. I dressed mechanically, avoiding looking at my reflection again.

It didn’t ultimately matter what was happening here. I didn’t care anymore that I was stuck here, confined to the house and approved social events. It did not matter if I was hidden away from polite society entirely, locked in an attic and fed through a hole in the wall. Soon I would have my implants removed, and my mind would be my own again. It didn’t matter that all my other implants would go with it. That one. Would. Be. Gone. That was all that really mattered.

After all, they couldn’t take my key from me. It couldn’t be removed at all. I could always live out my real life on the other side instead of here.

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