Children were controlled. They had to be; the population needed to be sustained according to extremely specific, narrow protocols. So children weren’t created because of love or sex or any of those messy, natural reasons, they were created on a schedule. When a person died, genetic material was taken from two hosts and a new child was grown. And then that child, once its consciousness emerged, was delivered to the next pair of waiting, pre-licensed parents.
At least, that was how it was supposed to go. No one really knew what had happened with Chanter she had just appeared out of whole cloth to them, not requested, not scheduled and — it was very difficult for her not to assume — not wanted. Since she existed outside of the system, she had no assigned parents. And though someone uptop could have altered it, could have forced her into the queue, could have given her a lineage, a purpose, a meaning…
They just… never did. It was a failing that had occurred long before Chanter had the knowledge or voice to question it.
So that is how Chanter had lived out her life; as a ghost. She had no needs, not really. Children were, for the most part, automatically taken care of by the system; put through routines that taught them, that tested them. And the people around her did care for her, as needed, from time to time. But there was no family that she could call her own. There was nothing that she knew as hers.
And maybe, somehow, this is offered her a perspective that grew beyond the mechanical tethers of their shared experience. She felt like her consciousness was an ever-growing balloon extending out and beyond the thin veil of electrical impulse reality, encompassing a wideness of space and time.
Sometimes there’s a moment like flicking on a light in a dark room, when a consciousness turns in on itself and seemingly verifies its own existence. This was the moment that she was experiencing now: a supreme consciousness of being, a sudden realization of self.
And then the clamor bled back into the air, into her pressurized surroundings. Voices returned, all at once; so much so that she wondered if there had just been a glitch, like her. And then, she realized, there was panic; she felt it, sensed it, before she saw it. Just outside the temple door, there were people crowding around in the street. And in the very center of all of them she could see someone — lying on the ground, not moving.
She did not want to move closer. So she did not. Yet, in another timeline, in another layer of reality, she felt as though she did. She felt separate from this alternate self; as though the split from her doppleganger was so recent that she could catch up, if she moved fast enough. That she could just slide into that alternate reality and find herself moving through the crowd to reach to that fallen person; a young boy dressed in blue.
But she did not move and her alternate self faded away, lost forever; that reality would never exist. She did not want to move any closer; she did not want to become responsible. Her entire life she had been blamed for small things, random things, things that just could not be explained. Her existence itself was a curse and the things that she touched became a glitch.
She did not believe this. But she did.
Unplugged: a Cyberpunk Serial 