Том Светерлич - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Timothy finds me as I’m leaving Simka’s office. He pulls over in the Fiat, rolls down his window.

“Nothing you’re doing is more important,” he yells to me. “Come on with me. Get in—”

The lingering cigarette stink of the interior, the lack of legroom. Timothy inches through a throng of pedestrians crowding the boulevard, laying on the horn, and peels away once he’s clear.

“How did you find me here?”

“You mentioned you’d be over this way,” he says. “Kalorama, at Dr. Simka’s office. I figured I’d take a chance, try to spot you—”

Again the exhilaration of potential death in wreckage as Timothy drives—he cuts off a garbage truck at the intersection, running a stop sign he claims never used to be there. He’s wearing a suit and tie, a wool overcoat. He’s a slight man but flabby, and when he smiles his face blossoms into double chins.

“I have meetings today,” he says. “Actually, you’re on the docket. I’m recommending to the board that they withdraw you from group therapy. Waverly will be your sponsor, if that’s all right with you?”

“That’s great news,” I tell him. “Absolutely. I have the paperwork you needed from Simka—”

“I’ll take over your case as a private therapist, because there are treatment requirements we have to keep up with. Red tape. I’ll keep the talk therapy to a minimum, though, so we don’t waste your time. I will hold you to staying clean, however. This isn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card—”

“I understand.”

Timothy folds into traffic. I ask him where he’s taking me.

“A clinic Waverly uses from time to time. He has a gift for you, a sort of welcome to the company gift—”

“The company?” I ask. “Focal Networks? Is that who I’ll be working for?”

“You’ve been doing some research about him, I take it? You won’t be working for Focal Networks, not officially, but you’ll have some of their perks—”

“What is it, exactly, that Waverly does?”

“Psychology applied to business,” says Timothy. “Algorithms. Think of it like this: You see two advertisements. You pick one to pay attention to. Waverly figured out why you pick one and not the other—he can predict it. He can predict which images hold your attention in the streams, which ones you’ll remember. His work is mostly academic theory. I’ve tried reading his papers, but they’re all math—”

“So… Marketing?”

“Marketing consultancy, maybe, but you don’t quite understand. His company goes beyond marketing. Marketing is irrelevant once you hire Waverly—”

“Then why all this shit in the Adware? If he’s figured it out—”

Timothy laughs. “All that shit in the Adware is Waverly figuring it out. He’s programming you,” he says. “Every time you look or click or fantasize, you give him the key—”

A private Panda Electronics clinic in Chevy Chase. The showroom fills with spots for Panda Electronics, hallucinations of Chinese girls wearing cosplay lingerie and panda bear ears, cuddling with panda bear cubs, offering deals on personal devices. The clinician is dressed in Ralph Lauren, a polo shirt and white slacks—simple, but she’s a stunner, black hair and pale, high cheekbones and vivid violet eyes. A plastic surgeon must have installed her Adware because the scarring cresting her forehead resembles the veins of a leaf rather than the haphazard gridding most people have. Her profile’s set to public— Agatha Kramer , a biocommunications major at Georgetown, a cheerleader for the Redskins, vids of her in mustard and yellow spandex, doing high kicks on the sidelines. Her profile pic’s one of Gavril’s “Street Fashion” series—so she’d been one of his impromptu models for the blog. She smiles as we approach.

“Mr. Waverly?” she says.

“Yes, the Waverly appointment,” says Timothy. “This is Dominic. He’ll be yours this afternoon.”

Mannequins line the wall displaying the latest Adware—implants, SmartMed fashion, URL codes for upgrades and free app downloads. Timothy points out a mannequin with demo wiring—the iLux is beautiful, a net of gold wires set on a bioinorganic plate that rests on the skull, wire points that will grow naturally with the brain.

“This is what Waverly picked for you,” says Timothy. “I hope you like it—it’s already bought and paid for—”

“You can’t be serious,” I say. “The iLux? That’s too much—”

“Think of it as a show of support for the good work you’ll do,” says Timothy. “One of the perks I mentioned. Think of the iLux as your company car—”

I sign in, fill out the consent forms—in prouder days I may have balked at a gift like this, wondering at the quid pro quo, but now I accept iLux like I’d accept air to breathe. Agatha asks if I’m ready and leads us down sterile halls into a rear room. A dentist’s chair. I relax my weight into it, Agatha lowering the seat cushion and reclining me backward until I’m looking up at her, the ceiling lights like bright saucers in my eyes, the smell of her breath mints and makeup wafting down to me. She drapes a paper bib over me, tucking it into my shirt collar.

“Please turn off password protect for the transfer,” she says, and when I do, an alert surfaces about our mutual friend—Gavril. Agatha smiles, friends me. “You know Gav?” she says and I tell her he’s my cousin.

“He’s amazing,” she says. “I’m such an obsessive about his work. This one time he actually stopped me on the sidewalk and asked to take my picture—I almost died. The girl I was with couldn’t believe it—”

“He’s a good guy,” I tell her.

Timothy sits on the couch, settling in with paperwork on his tablet. Agatha shaves what stubble is left on my head, then preps me with an alcohol rub and applies a local anesthetic. As my scalp numbs it feels like my consciousness lifts several inches above my body, that I’m still aware of my legs and arms, but everything feels below me, down on the chair.

“Are you comfortable?” Agatha says.

“Very much, yes, thank you,” I tell her.

“Can you feel this?”

“What?”

“Any pressure of any kind?”

“No,” I say.

“Good—”

She leaves the room for a moment, wheeling in the surgeon arm when she returns—it’s chrome with a multipronged hand that she positions over my head. She flips a switch—glaring light—and lowers goggles over her eyes.

“Ready?” she asks.

“I’m ready—”

Her profile vids blink out as she cuts my current Adware. Unplugged. I feel pressure now—or imagine I can, hearing the quiet rotors of the surgeon arm operate. I feel the wick and whir when the arm slits me open and feel the liquid rush like a distant tickle and the towels Agatha holds against my neck to catch blood. Timothy’s watching the procedure, interested. Grinding, a spritz of something cold—an ice water bath or a chemosuture. The surgeon arm spools out the old Adware from my brain like winding spaghetti onto a fork, the old wires slipping out easily with only minor tugs and nudges, pinching a bit. Nothing to cause pain. It’s an odd sensation but not entirely unpleasant. Agatha makes a comment and laughs, but I miss what she’s said over the sound of the machine.

Agatha changes out my paper bib and dabs up more blood. The arm’s swiveled to a different needle, perforating my skull—I understand how this works, what’s happening. Jostling from the pressure and soon the arm begins stitching in the iLux, Agatha feeding the surgeon arm the gold netting like threading bullets into a machine gun. The surgeon arm replaces my scalp and sutures the wound with its heat needle—new scars from the operation, grids of scar tissue cutting across the scars already up there. The Adware boots. I lose my vision. The blindness is temporary but disconcerting—this total blindness is always disconcerting. I feel the surgeon arm swipe out the old retinal lenses and replace them with the Meopta lenses.