They had me.

I knew they had me.

It was only a matter of time.

There was no use fighting it anymore.

The only thing left to do was wait.

I sat on my couch like most days reading the screen like every other day. I hated that stupid tablet. I hated its screen. I hated its stupid button. I especially hated the thin wire that ran from the screen and into the port on my arm.

I was connected to a machine. It was my little electronic warden. It held everything, every detail of my life. My location, the t.v. shows I watched, even my medical records on one stupid device.

It watched me everyday. It knew who my friends were and where I lived. All contact to the outside world came through a seven-inch screen.

I didn’t have to remember anymore. It recorded everything around me. My little portable brain. In an instant I could have any fact in the world and could solve any problem.

What was the point of having a brain?

My looked at the tiny red number in the lower left corner of the screen. 13 minutes. 13 minutes was all I had left to myself. 13 minutes until my eighteenth birthday. And then they took over.

I laid down on the couch and tried to inscribe every detail of what it meant to be free. What my apartment looked like, the smell of days old take-out, the view from my window, I had to remember all of it.

Before I’d sorted into the job I’d do for the rest of my life.

The counter drained to one minute. The red number replaced with a loading bar on the screen. This was it. When that stupid red line reached the end I no longer belonged to myself. I would be conscripted. A tool for them. Whatever they wanted me to do I would and wouldn’t have a choice.

It was a pact that we made long ago. A device that became the center of our universe. The end all be all of gadgets. We should have known better. A device with infinite knowledge. A device to supplant all others. We just needed to give one thing, our humanity.

The thin red line was a quarter the way to making less of a human. This is how I would spend the rest of my conscious life, staring at a crappy wall in a low rent apartment in the bad part of town. It’s not like I had anything to worry about. There wasn’t crime, not anymore. The hive mind wouldn’t allow that. The only people that weren’t conscripted were kids. It wasn’t worth it anymore. Not when every single person was an informer to them. Why not live in the bad part of town?

It was halfway done. I was halfway done. This was it. I just had to sit here and wait for a piece of computer code to be beamed to the tablet and that was it. It was all over. No more me, there was only us. A computer virus would infect my brain through the wires in my arm.

Three quarters. For my reference they included a percentage projection. 74%, 75%, 76% it just kept going. Nothing much left now. The machine inside would awake and take itself to the nearest station where my new body would find instructions for me. This was my purpose in life.

It was almost up now, 97, 98, 99.

Wait.

I couldn’t do it. No.

I grabbed the wire that connected the tablet to me and pulled. I could feel the wires ripping deep within my tissue. A bolt of pain shot through my arm as this fiery tingle branched through my arm. Something was wrong. My arm ached and writhed while the connections loosened.

I kept pulling. Soon a web of bloody wires came out through the port. My arm hung limp at my side and rolled different sensation of icy cold and burning pain.

The red line had just a sliver of white at the end, 99 percent.

I ripped the wire out.

They can’t have me.