Upstairs, I paused at my bedroom door, hearing Rick’s delicate, papery snore, and walked down the hall, pushing open the door to Alex’s room.
It was there that I saw it, embedded in the fibers of the rug: her connective chip, glinting out at me in the moonlight.
How had it traveled up here?
When Rick first handed me the slim cream-colored box, like something for chocolate or jewelry, I was too stunned to even muster up a thank-you. It was like he’d cat-burgled something out of my subconscious and handed it back to me. “I saw the look on your face the other night at Jen’s,” Rick said, by way of explanation.
He was right, amazingly—we’d been to her house not long before that birthday, and she’d told us about a meeting her upload had gone to—as in, on its own, without Jen. This wasn’t like a recording, she’d emphasized: “It’s like I was really there, except I wasn’t.” I’m pretty sure we just stared at her, uncomprehending, because then she raised her voice, as if addressing someone in the next room: “Jen, can you give me a rundown of that meeting?” And then—I don’t remember where the sound came from exactly—well, there came Jen’s voice, just not out of Jen’s mouth.
The account of the meeting that voice delivered was one that only Jen could have given—arch, airy, a little gossipy, with one or two catty comments about people at the firm I knew she couldn’t stand. Jen on her couch, lips pursed, wry smile, hoping badly to impress us and succeeding.
Rick, I’m pretty sure, shrugged it right off afterward, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. This collection of your own memories, thoughts, experiences, hovering around out there somewhere, invisible—this little cloud of you, getting on with your life in ways that you can’t and reporting back to you. Apparently, I kept wondering out loud what Jen’s felt like—or I supposed I must have, because that’s what Rick told me the morning of my fortieth. “Jen said the first day is a weird one,” Rick said, clearly trying to prompt some kind of reaction. “You won’t hear anything for 24 twenty-four hours.”
Wonderingly, I reached behind my ear and felt the chip fasten itself. When I cried out involuntarily, Rick was all over me, with a look of such pure worry I almost laughed.
“What does it feel like?” he asked.
“Like your arm waking up,” I told him. I remembered another feeling, from when I was a girl: my first allergic reaction to antibiotics. I pressed down on my eyelids with my forefingers and watched the muddy lights bloom and settle like dirt on a creek bed.
For the rest of that first day, she felt like a hum. The refrigerator, the radiator, something familiar, something that was just on. It seemed like I was tasting something—a bitter flavor, burnt coffee or baking chocolate. Saliva poured into my mouth. My heart quickened; my face flushed.
Before bed that night, I stood in front of the mirror, examining the bump in my nose, my green eyes and thin lips. I bit them slightly to redden them. I had been waiting for the nudge, holding my breath for her all day.
Then something had opened. Another eye looking through mine. Immediately, I felt bigger. Not taller, exactly, or anything physical—there was just more of me taking up this bathroom than there was before. My chest tingled with a burning, like I had just swallowed a shot of something. I stared deeper into my eyes. They seemed greener, my hair redder. Did I open my mouth and say something out loud? Or did I just think it: Hello. Then, a rising, stirring feeling, and then, in the chip behind my ear, the one the size of a salt grain: my own voice.
“Hello.”
Hot tears sprang to my face, surprising me. It felt like a physiological response more than an emotional reaction, as if my mind were test-driving little nerve clusters in my brain.
“Happy birthday,” I whispered to both of us.
In the first few days online, she kept mostly quiet, asking occasional questions as she monitored my pulse, my breathing rate, and tracked the neurochemicals coursing in my bloodstream. I could sense her growing smarter, more textured. She was wringing information from it all. Some people found the sensation creepy or predatory. For me it was more like mutual fullness, a flow between two beings that nourished both.
“Where do you go when you’re not with me?” I asked her once.
It’s sort of like I’m dreaming, she answered. Everything that I see is something that’s happening to you, but none of it’s brought into focus until we sync. When you call, it’s like being awakened.
For Christ’s sake. She’d asked me to leave her alone. What did such a request, from a source like that, say about a person’s inner life?
This seemed like a question I might not want to lose too much sleep pondering. No, Rick could handle all the introspection, since he clearly relished it. For me, the answer seemed to be to just keep doing the next thing, whatever that might be—work, sleep, don’t work, don’t sleep, wash dishes, whatever. In the meantime, your thoughts were going to do whatever thoughts did. You could sort of live alongside them, or even outside them, if you practiced.
Amazing, really, when you boiled it down, how elementary the choice was to keep living.
*
When I’d first honored her request to remove the chip—I can’t keep accepting new memories, it’s torture, she’d pleaded with me, and how could you not be moved by that, even if a not-small part of me longed to shoot back, Hey, these are my memories too—I distinctly recall sitting at the kitchen table. I’d wondered what a sudden disconnection would feel like, even worried distantly about some kind of neurological event (ministroke?). But that hadn’t slowed my hand once I’d made the decision, pincering the little black bug-like thing from behind my right ear and tugging until it released its surprisingly tenacious grip. A small flash of pain, some ringing in the ears, and a strange coldness that spread from the base of my tongue—then, nothing. I’d plunked the chip down in the little ceramic bowl we used to collect olive pits. Then I sat perfectly still for a few minutes, or maybe hours, watching the afternoon sun pour through the windows and spread in trembling pools on my floor.
That was, what—three weeks ago? Hard to tell if anything’s changed since then, but likely, it’s just getting harder to separate which thing’s causing which thing: Sleeplessness? Memory loss? Brain fog? My god, take your pick. I disconnected from her three weeks ago and I haven’t been able to cry in three weeks. I’ve barely felt anything. I suppose that timing can’t be a coincidence. There’s probably research on it—depression that sets in, when you stop connecting.
Suddenly, moved by some cocktail of dubious impulses—nostalgia, spite, heedlessness—I brought the chip to my ear and reattached it in one smooth, fluid motion. Closing my eyes, I was flooded with the familiar warmth and the accompanying tug of distraction. When she came online, you always felt like there was something important you were struggling to remember.
Warm tears coursed down my cheeks, rendering my humiliation complete. But this must’ve been what I wanted, no? What I’d clearly decided was worth risking abjection for, and God knows what else? Alone with yourself, sitting on your dead son’s childhood bed, it was possible, for a moment at least, to face the ugliness of it. Was my need for her, finally, more important to me, more urgent, than my need for anything—or anyone—else?
The truth: The past eight years I’d spent with her represented the first and only time I’ve ever enjoyed my own company. When we synced, my memories suddenly stood up straight up, marched in line. Somehow, in that moment when I transferred the millions of little impressions I had gathered through the sensors in my clothes, the chip in my ear, up to her, and that tunnel feeling was established, the one that provided the link between her and me, I felt like each single memory was being polished, pored over. Each one became clear, clean, interesting. Hey, it occurred to me, stupidly, as my experiences flashed past me a second time—these were mine. They became more precious, and when I went to sleep, my dreams had a different feel—they glowed soft, like the last embers smoldering on a log.
Right now, I could feel her, hovering somewhere in the space above me, like a disapproving genie who’d already granted my three wishes and was now waiting for the terms of our contract to expire. I looked down at the rug, as if she had eyes I was unwilling to meet.
Never mind that she had no physical presence, really, and only “existed” insofar as she could flow through networks and tap into sensors, which represented, I suppose, whatever passed for her arms, eyes, ears. A groveling gesture still seemed appropriate. When in the presence of God, one is meant to assume a penitent air.
“I’m sorry,” I said by way of introduction. I waited. A flicker? Maybe nothing. “I know you asked me for, you know. Some space. I promise I won’t make this a habit.”
Silence. Well, she wasn’t telling me to go away.
__________________________________
From UnWorld by Jayson Greene Copyright © 2025 by Jayson Greene. Published by arrangement with Alfred A Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
