Fabian's Monologue

You can feel the fear sweat rolling down your face in rivulets, trickling down around your eyes – blinded of any sight by the neural harnass jacked into the back of your head – and dripping off your chin. It tickles maddeningly, but you can't deal with it right now, because your hands are slotted into the delicate spiderlike machinery that lets you manipulate cyberspace, and something's chasing you.

It shouldn't be possible. In cyberspace you are nowhere and everywhere, your own monad in a sea of information foci suspended like dewdrops in a perpetually-shifting spiderweb of connections that can be made and unmade as fast as changing the channel on the ancient TVs that can still be found in the dump outside your apartment. Space represented as a network instead of a Cartesian plane: you can patch your node in and out of parts of the information graph almost as fast as thought, shifting your effective location without having to move through space. It should be impossible to predict where you'll go next without reading your mind, impossible to follow you fast enough after you've moved, because you move as fast as electrons move in transatlantic cables – literally.

But something is. Somehow, it always knows where you'll be next. Whenever you patch in that connection, it's already waiting in the connecting node, and the intrusion into your node begins again, red warnings flashing up in every direction, error messages piling up. ERROR. ERROR. WARNING. ERROR ANAUTHORIZED INTRUSION DETECTED. WARNING FIREWALL BYPASSED.

It just wants to talk, it says.

You stole something from it.

You'd give it up. You really would. But you need the money. Badly.

So you focus, sweat rolling down your face, your fingers flying and clicking in the spiderlike controller, spinning new webs out of noncorporial concepts, your mind ablaze with the connectivity graph, but each time you make a connection more and more of your defenses are ablated away. Mercilessly.

It has to be a machine of some kind. That's the only answer.

It isn't.

Finally, your last defense sheers away with a final scroll of logs, and the presence enters your node with you.

At first, it's a vast and shadowy thing, without form and void, roiling from the final connection you made and filling your node like the black, noxious smoke of funeral pires and burning cities and human sacrifice, like the smoke of Troy that drifted past Olympos as it burned.

Then, slowly – slowly, it begins to take shape: a man. Thin. Pale. Wearing square glasses. Worry lines cut deep into his forhead.

"You've taken something of mine," he says. "I'd like you to give it back. You didn't have to delete it when you took a copy, you know. If you'd just taken a copy, I wouldn't care, but of course you just had to delete it."

"I- I can't give it back," you hear yourself saying. "Deleting it… that was part of the deal."

"Give. It. Back."

"Just make another one! You're clearly a great hacker," you say. You hate the sound of your fawning voice in your ears, but it's a reflex. A reflex that's saved your life many times before.

A sad smile flickers across the pale man's face. "That's not how it works. That thing is pain, for me. What you're holding in that encrypted vault I'm asking you to decrypt for me – that's embodied pain. Asking me to make another one is like asking me to hurt myself more. So no, I won't make another one. Return it, or I will make you, and you won't like what that feels like."

You shake your head. You really, really need that money.

"I don't think you get fully get it," the man says, head dropping, rubbing his forehead as if he's in pain already. "I could just take it but… I want you to get it first. To understand what this represents to me."

Something in his voice makes your spine run cold.

"Imagine that, from the age of seven, you were raised to do one thing and one thing alone.

Your brain grew around it, was shaped by it. It is your god. It is your purpose. It constitutes most of who you are to yourself.

And the more you do it, the more it causes you immense pain.

Like an aluminum rod rammed into a hemisphere. You can smell the aluminum when it happens. You can smell it. And it hurts. But that isn't all, oh no – if it was just that, you could deal with it. There's also the feeling of every neuron in your brain screaming, screaming in agony, like someone ripped your skull open and poured chemical drain cleaner across into the folds of your defenseless gray matter.

It burns. There aren't any nerves in your brain tissue; you shouldn't be able to feel anything there. But you can, because what's happening is that your brain's pain processing matrix is being directly stimulated, independent from any actual pain stimulus.

And oh if only it was just pain. You could handle it if it was just pain, but it isn't. Because that aluminum bar leaves a well of blankness in your mind that consumes information like a black hole under general relativity. You try to think and there are things missing. You miss details. Memories don't come to mind. Words, gone. Your reasoning goes wrong and you get lost. Complex structures fall out of your working memory like grains of sand through your fingers. Sensory input outside the cold beautiful black and white world of cyberspace begins to hurt you, blind you, confuse you. Your balance goes. Then one of your eyes begins to tell you it can't see even though it can. Then parts of your face start twitching. Then worse things happen, like the paranoia.

The more your do this thing that makes you who you are, this thing that you love, the more pain you experience. You spend a day in cyberspace making beautiful conceptual architectures that glow like neon in your mind, but the longer you spend the worse your mind gets until you feel that you can no longer work on it, like you're worthless, a disgusting hack. So you give it up for now, to rest, and you wake up the next day to return to your day job a broken, non-functioning shell of a human being. You crawl out of bed shaking in pain and playing rituals with your right eye to convince it that it can see and forgetting basic things, sometimes even where you are and what's real and what's cyberspace."

The man pauses, and looks at you. "You weren't listening, were you? You still don't get it. You still don't get it, damn it. Here, let me give you an object lesson."

You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know if whatever he's gibbering about pain is what he actually experiences, or whether he's just insane, but something tells you he'll inflict it on you without a second thought. In a blind panic, you slip your hands out of your controllers and fumble at the jack in the back of your head, your fingers jerking and tugging spastically, but the safety lock won't disengage. It won't come out, it won't come out. Fuck. He has you.

Then there's a blinding flash of red light filling your vision and the overwhelming smell of aluminum filling your nostrels, and pain, like a bar of cold unyeielding metal has been shoved into your left hemisphere, ripping and pushing brain matter along the way, and every neuron is on fire. When you can see again you're lying on your side on the "ground," gasping for breath against the oppressive pain, barely able to think around the bright bar that has been driven into your mind, and the man is squatting next to you, face pale and stricken with a facial expression you can't read.

"Don't worry," he says. "You learn to deal with it."

You can feel the fear sweat rolling down your face in rivulets, trickling down around your eyes – blinded by the neural harness jacked into the back of your head – and dripping off your chin. It tickles maddeningly, but you can't deal with it right now, because your hands are slotted into the delicate spiderlike machinery that lets you manipulate cyberspace, and something's chasing you.

It's not possible. In cyberspace you are nowhere and everywhere, your own monad in a sea of information foci suspended like dewdrops in a perpetually-shifting spiderweb of connections that can be made and unmade as fast as changing the channel on the ancient TVs that can still be found in the dump outside your apartment. Space represented as a network instead of a Cartesian plane: you can patch your node in and out of parts of the information graph almost as fast as thought, shifting your effective location without having to move through space. It should be impossible to predict where you'll go next without reading your mind, impossible to follow you fast enough after you've moved, because you move as fast as electrons move in transatlantic cables – literally.

But something is. Somehow, it always knows where you'll be next. Whenever you patch in that connection, it's already waiting in the connecting node, and the intrusion into your node begins again, red warnings flashing up in every direction, error messages piling up. ERROR. ERROR. WARNING. ERROR ANAUTHORIZED INTRUSION DETECTED. WARNING FIREWALL BYPASSED.

It just wants to talk, it says.

You stole something from it.

You'd give it up. You really would. But you need the money. Badly.

So you focus, sweat rolling down your face, your fingers flying and clicking in the spiderlike controller, spinning new webs out of noncorporial concepts, your mind ablaze with the connectivity graph, but each time you make a connection more and more of your defenses are ablated away. Mercilessly.

It has to be a machine of some kind. That's the only answer.

It isn't.

Finally, your last defense sheers away with a final scroll of logs, and the presence enters your node with you.

At first, it's a vast and shadowy thing, without form and void, roiling from the final connection you made and filling your node like the black, noxious smoke of funeral pyres and burning cities and human sacrifice, like the smoke of Troy that drifted past Olympos as it burned.

Then, slowly – slowly, it begins to take shape: a man. Thin. Pale. Wearing square glasses. Worry lines cut deep into his forehead.

"That's mine," he says. "Give it back. I don't care about the copy, I care that you deleted mine."

"I- I can't give it back," you hear yourself saying. "Deleting it… that was part of the deal."

His eyelid flickers. "Come on. Where can you go?"

You shake your head. You really, really need that money. "Just make another one! You can do all…this," you say, gesturing wildly. You hate the sound of your fawning voice in your ears, but it's a reflex. A reflex that's saved your life many times before.

A sad smile twitches across the pale man's face. "You don't know how much pain you're asking me to go through again," he says, head dropping, rubbing his forehead as if he's in pain already.

Something in his voice makes your spine run cold.

His eyes meet yours and you see a decision. "You will." He snaps his fingers.

Blackness.

"Imagine that, from the age of seven, you were raised to do just one thing.

It is your god, your purpose. It is you.

And it is excruciating.

It isn't just the smell of the aluminum from the rod driven through my skull. There's also the feeling of every neuron in your brain screaming, screaming in agony, like someone ripped your skull open and poured lye across into the folds of your gray matter.

It burns. There aren't any nerves in your brain tissue – you shouldn't be able to feel it, but you do. You do." Gigabytes per second of medical information scraped from hospital databases across the net pour into your mind like whitewater rapids, washing away what thoughts you might have had before. Percentages, symptoms, experience reports, simulations, schematics and neurology obliterate you.

"More subtle is the ravening well it opens in the back of your mind. You don't notice it at first, not until you realize you need to remember something and that it's gone, that you're going to need to throw yourself into the well to get it back. And sometimes you don't even remember to find what's missing until it's too late."

Suddenly, the man is visible again, in front of you, and his index finger is pressed to your forehead. There is a moment of pressure, finger against solid skull, and then your skull gives way like plastic, and the finger presses in. A bright, impassable pillar lances through your mind, grinding your thoughts to a halt. You try to think and there is only… immobility. Panic rises, but you can't… quite… tell exactly what's wrong? What – what…

Then the finger leaves your skull and the shock of thought and horror returning to your mind makes you whimper in pain.

"So you spend your night burning your brain alive in cyberspace, and the next day you have to crawl out of bed as a hollow shell and make it through the day."

The man pauses. "Of course, this must come across as completely abstract to you. Let me show you." You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know if whatever he's gibbering about pain is what he actually experiences, or whether he's just insane, but something tells you he'll inflict it on you without a second thought. In a blind panic, you slip your hands out of your controllers and fumble at the jack in the back of your head, your fingers jerking and tugging spastically, but the safety lock won't disengage. It won't come out, it won't come out. Fuck. He has you.

Then there's a blinding flash of red light filling your vision and the overwhelming smell of aluminum filling your nostrils, and pain, like a bar of cold unyielding metal has been shoved into your left hemisphere, ripping and pushing brain matter along the way, and every neuron is on fire. When you can see again you're lying on your side on the "ground," gasping for breath against the oppressive pain, barely able to think around the bright bar that has been driven into your mind, and the man is squatting next to you, face pale and stricken with a facial expression you can't read.

"Don't worry," he says. "Get up. You'll learn to deal with it."