The Future of Us

They’d arrived. Sharp knocks.

I glanced at the bedroom window. Faded red lights rinsed through the blinds. Not again. Bad colour.

Staying in bed was not an option. They’d leave my front door off the hinges. My neighbours apartment was still taped off and open. I hadn’t seen them in over a year.

Sitting up, I scratched my head, fingers running through hair and feeling the small bump on the side of my skull. Annoyed, my cat looked at me with confused eyes from the bottom of the bed, yawning with the young hours.

Slowly, I fumbled around and slipped some clothes on over my pyjamas, feet finding slippers as my ears were filled with louder raps on the door.

Rubbing my eyes I shuffled to the source, peeping through the keyhole, unable to make out anything yet knowing what awaited.

Fingers on the keys, I hesitated. I sighed, twisting the lock open and pulling the handle.

Cold air slapped me in the face. Two crew-cutted male officers stood uncomfortably close to the threshold, featureless, black boots and blacker insides, the scariest people you’ll ever meet, scarcely human, those that never question anything – they just do as they’re told.

‘Mr Fred Tills?’

I nodded.

‘We’re here from the CD. We’ve had an alert regarding your corvidol levels. They’re dangerously high and way over the legal limit. We’re taking you to the centre.’

Subconsciously my hand reached toward the chip again, that little square that had been with me since birth. Well, it had been ‘upgraded’ several times, but the user ID was the same. I could have checked my own brain activity through my mobile device – also chipped – but I didn’t doubt the veracity of the officers claims.

High levels of corvidol had been scientifically proven to be a high correlate and predictor of adverse behaviour, consistently referred to as a societal menace by the news I was allowed to see, a global threat to peace no less.
Given what was happening, I think it just spiked.

‘Is there anyone else inside?’

‘No.’ I had an agreement with a friend if anything happened again that he’d keep my cat safe.

Cuffs appeared like a magic trick. ‘Please turn around.’

A polite one this time.

I did as I was asked, with thoughts running through my mind of punching their lights out.
But you didn’t do that unless you wanted to end it all. Assaulting an officer was a death sentence.

One of the few pieces of information authorities desperately wanted to be kept a secret, had gotten out some years back. There were no prisons anymore. You didn’t do a sentence and emerge back into society like the old days. You would be experimented on by one of the pharmaceutical owned government companies. That was the best outcome. The other reality for those who displayed any anti-government sentiment, consciously or not, was a trip to the farm, the kind of farm where your organs are cut out of your body and sold to the highest bidder so they can live another year or two.

I felt the rubber rings press tightly into my wrists.

A high pitched electronic tone echoed in the stairwell.

One of the officers muttered something about my anger levels being dangerously high.

‘We’re going to have to sedate…’

My muscles tensed. I didn’t even feel it.

Words became as blurry as my vision. I felt myself sinking into the ground, into centre of the earth.

Three weeks later I stood outside my apartment block in the exact same clothes I’d left in.
Part of me felt I’d never see it again, but here I was.
I felt a tear rise, before my attention was broken by a crazy bitch named Annie who violently pulled her curtain back and stared at me, muttering deranged words into the window pane, but I wasn’t special, she did it to everyone.
And she’d never been taken away once.

Climbing the steps to my place, my legs felt weak, my balance off.

It was the longest four floors of my life.

I padded at my pocket for my keys, suddenly anxious that I didn’t have them, but my hand found the fob and clutched the warm metal.

And just as I stuck the key in the lock, a strange snippet of a song slipped into my mind as easily as elevator music. I hesitated, my hand falling to my side. What was that?

Faded steps neared.
I turned slowly to see a stranger on their way down who maintained eye contact, looking at me with unease before disappearing from view.

Again. The music.
It was electronic, before my time, without lyrics – but wait. The music wasn’t the important part was it? An arm reached out to rest on the door and I hunched over, eyes closed, rubbing at my head as if that would expose the mystery.

Where had it heard it? Where?!

And bang.
Like a bullet there it was. It was there, but not quite. A male voice. Or two?

He doesn’t even… have one.

He…

Footsteps intruded into my thoughts.

Scrabbling, I twisted the keys hard, enough to bend the metal and opened my front door, inside in a flash, slamming the door behind with a flourish of jangling keys, buying a moment of safety, of what felt like safety.

Familiarity rushed through my nostrils.

After a few moments of standing there, I knew Rascal had been taken by my pal, he would have been leaping at me already.

I surveyed the walls. The doorways. All the familiar unfamiliar. The home not home.

And then they arrived again.
The melody. The words.

What was it?

Eyes closed I focused, my hand running over my scalp.

He doesn’t even…what was it?…He doesn’t even have one.

Have what? What didn’t I have?!

And like my blood had turned ice cold, there it was.

My fingers hesitated on that bump. My goodness! That was it!

That’s the conversation the CD officers had had in the shuttle when I was sedated.

He doesn’t even have one. I didn’t even have – a chip…