“Five o’ clock, f-five o’ clock, twenty watts and rising, five o’ clock. Twenty watts. Five… five o’ clock.”

Uncle Wallace shivered and sweated on his study’s leather sofa, clenching the tartan blanket he was ungraciously knotted in. He mumbled this mantra obsessively for a while, then stopped, shivered as if freezing, then perhaps started chanting the words again for a bit, then suddenly breathe slower… Sophie, of course, had been watching him for a few minutes now. She couldn’t sleep and had wandered, in her signature disdain for social norms, into Wallace’s office, lured by his feverish ramblings.

“…o’ clock. Fifteen watts. Twenty watts. T-twenty watts and rising.”

The girl figured he was worse off in this pathetic attempt at sleep than being awake. “Uncle…” she shook him lightly on the shoulder, “uncle, wake up.”

Sophie had barely the time to even realise what was happening before she found herself dangling, tiptoe, from a metal fist grasping her pyjama on her chest, pulling her up. As soon as she managed to get properly shocked and let out a rather inelegant “aaaugh!”, Wallace had already released the grip, but still breathed slowly and deeply, and kept the arm stretched forward in defence. “You are one fucking weird kid.”

She had nothing to say to that.

“…fuck me.” panted him. “Why, ever, would you ever”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I just saw you were sleeping so badly…”

“Well I’m not getting a good night sleep now am I?”

“No, I know, but you were shouting in your sleep and saying things”

“I was?” Wallace turned on the lamp on his desk. The 3D image of a candle flame lit up and started dancing above a simulated stick of melting wax. “and what was I saying?”

Sophie found it natural to lie. “I didn’t understand, you were just screaming and mumbling and you seemed very upset. Sorry.”

“Huh.” He lingered a bit on this statement.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Figured as much. Neither can I, at this point, thank you for that. So what do we do now?”

“Do you want to play chess?”

“Chess.”

“Yeah. Dad said you used to love chess. Hold on.”

She ran out of the room trying to be quiet. She returned soon enough failing as miserably. She carried along her big backpack. “I have actually three things for you in here.”

“For me?”

“Yes. But they’re supposed to be surprises and come in time.” she replied dropping the bag on the desk rather uncautiously. “I guess the first one, well, we can take it out now.”

Wallace stared at her probably trying to figure out whether this weird dream with his niece was significantly weirder than usual or just on the rightmost tail of the bell curve. Out of the bag she pulled out a large engraved box of wood. On the upper surface, a pattern of alternating lighter and darker squares, framed by a celtic knot. He couldn’t help but reach for it, caress lightly with his bio fingers the wooden reliefs, each square and scratch. “I haven’t played in a long time. Not flesh chess at least.”

“Perhaps you can teach me?” she pressed on, releasing the brass latch and opening the box to reveal its wonders.

He smirked. “Love, my toaster could teach you.”

“Well, not the flesh version.”

He had nothing to say to that. Well, nothing wholesome. Both of them of course were aware that robots existed somewhere on the planet which could easily manage a way better job than they could at appearing human, and could probably play some mean flesh chess too. But this thought was interrupted (as it’s the natural course for human thoughts) as Wallace caught eye of the simplistic, yet beautiful, handmade pieces laying in their slot in the green felt. “Where did you get this set?”

“Oh, we found it in dad’s old stuff. He was throwing it away.”

“Give me the kings.”

“Which one are the kings? These with the crown I guess.”

“No, that’s the queen; those with the cross, love.”

She placed the wooden white king in his plastic palm. He grabbed it by the neck and rotated it in its sagittal plane, accompanied by the still somewhat annoying buzzing of the servos, until he could look at the bottom of the wooden figure. “There” he said. “That’s Sebastian.” He returned the king to the confused girl, and Sophie examined the base too. A letter ‘S’ had been crudely engraved there. “And this” he added, pointing at the bottom face of the black king, “is me.”

Sophie managed to find that sweet and smiled. “Wow. Though… this is a ‘G’.”

“It is, yeah.” Wallace stared at her in silence for a couple of seconds to ensure she understood he wasn’t going to explain that. “This set used to belong to my grandfather. Me and Seb loved it for some reason, even though we didn’t exactly play chess with it. We just liked moving the pieces.” A virtual drop of wax suddenly dove faster with no sound, while Wallace grasped bionic handfuls of chess pieces and precisely positioned them on the board in rapid succession. “You wanna be black or white? Flip a coin for it?”

“Wallace.” He appeared surprised by this formal addressing. “Uncle, I think I would like to show you the second thing now.”

“Uhh… ok?” His hand was already impatiently hovering above the rows of pawns. “You got me all excited for chess though.”

“Yeah, I know, but… I didn’t think this through. Or, I think, I overthought it. I think I’ll just ask you what I want, the reason I came here in the first place.” She reached into the bag.

“So it was your idea to come visit me?”

In fictional candlelight the young woman extracted a sheet of flex-paper. She placed the thin, white rectangle on the desk, then lingered with the fingertip of her index on a corner. Through neural connection, she navigated her folders and displayed an image on the screen. “This was a printed picture, actually. I couldn’t bring the physical copy. I scanned it front and back.”

The photograph appeared black and white at first glance, but on a closer look very faint pastels could be identified here and there; it was noticeably noisy and certainly digital. A group of people posed in front of an old bus station, from a time before AutoDrive. From this picture alone, you wouldn’t assume these humans held any kind of importance nor could ever manage be any sort of threat. They were mostly young men and women dressed in mismatched, brutally casual clothing, carrying backpacks and sacs and a single shopping trolley, most of them injured or malformed in some way. Their skin was a bluish white, eerily milky or pearly in a sense, and their eyes small and pitch black. The most important person to Wallace was the large, tall young man in front, with a flat cap and a tattered leather jacket, and some long rusty cylindrical object weighing in his arms. He glared at the camera without a trace of shame above an unruly beard. He was important to him because it was him, Wallace. He just squeezed the flex-paper in his hands, moving his attention quickly from detail to detail.

“This” he said, “this must be… twenty two, or twenty three…”

“It’s actually from the eighth of October, twenty twenty-two. It’s on the back.”

Indeed it was, ‘8/10/22’ scribbled in ball pen, as he checked. Nothing more written.

“Now, I have a question…”

“I know what you’re about to ask” replied him tapping the picture with his index. “Why is everything white? The people, and this tree behind here. The reason is that this picture,” he continued, unconsciously stroking his current greying beard as he compared with its old one, “this picture is taken in the infrared. Or better, it was a regular CCD from a digital camera, but without the near-infrared blocking filter they usually have. Had. Anyway, so you get all this light from the NIR part of the spectrum clogging up the colour channels, and it comes out like this.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I figured that out at home.”

“All right. So… what was the question again?”

“The question, dear uncle Wallace” said she planting her finger on one of the figures in the image, “is why the fuck is my mom in this picture.”

“Oh.” reacted Wallace. The girl’s finger pressed over the image of a psychedelically-dressed, pleasant-looking young woman with a smug grin – the only positive facial expression in the photograph. Sophie wasn’t exactly an expert in wartime fashion, but she was fairly sure bikinis didn’t go on top of nightgowns. But she was very sure that smug grin belonged to her mother Mary, and so did Wallace. “Oooh! Yes! This was in ’22 all right.”

“Care to explain?”

He seem to ignore the question for a while, lost in the picture. “This was a very, very long time ago. Your mother, well, she actually only saw a part of it.”

Sophie observed the middle-aged man as he appeared to be lowering himself in a stagnant abyss.

“I thought…” he began, smiling imperceptibly. “I thought I had managed to leave it all behind me. Turns out perhaps I just started forgetting. If I wasn’t holding this picture in my hands right now, I could very much convince myself I had dreamt it.” He turned towards her. “You want to know how your mother got to be in this picture.”

“Yes” she replied. “And where my dad was at that moment.”

“Hah!” he immediately laughed. “Your dad, your dad was safely home. Actually, at the time I had no idea of it. But still. You want to know.”

“I don’t need to. But I would like to.”

“I figure you’ve asked Mary herself already.”

“Of course.”

“And it went nowhere.”

“Obviously.”

“Ditto with your father.”

“Rhetorical question.”

“Well, I’d gladly light up a fire and have some high-quality story time together, but I’m afraid” he said reclining in his leather chair “that I won’t do it justice. I don’t remember much of it.”

Sophie could tell Wallace was lying and that his fear was directed elsewhere, but she could equally accurately tell pointing it out would have proven counterproductive. “This brings us to my third gift.”

He leaned forwards intrigued. She continued: “as I said today, I am pursuing a degree. It’s actually in psychology.”

He nodded.

“I hope this is not crossing a line. But from what my parents have told me about you”

He frowned.

“but, most importantly, from our short interactions today”

He slightly relaxed his expression.

“I have been able to make an educated guess about your psyche.”

“Which would be?”

“You have unresolved issues from your past, and they bring you pain.”

No reply.

“You don’t have to agree with it.”

“That’s reassuring, given that I don’t.”

“Exactly. But… if this assessment is even partially right, then perhaps what I want to propose might alleviate some of this suffering.”

“And what would this proposal be?”

“In prehistoric times mental and neurological disorders where treated with trepanation. That is to say, the skull was drilled so that the illness could escape.” To prove her point, Sophie opened up Hieronymus Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone Of Madness on the flex-paper. “Recounting your story, and doing so accurately and honestly, bypassing the filters of repression, might, so to speak, ease the pressure in your brain.”

He didn’t counter to that. He remained leaned forward – but did not dare move further, to closely watch Sophie pull out the elongated device of dark polished metal.

“Your memories might be damaged or modified. Some of them might be consciously accessible but you would have difficulty in relaying them to me, may it be because they are too painful, or hard or fatiguing to describe in words. This is the reason for taking into consideration this piece of technology. This is”

“I know what this is.” he interrupted. He had moved back into the chair, his legs pulled up to his chest.

Sophie was considerably shocked. “You do?”

“It’s a brain worm.” The rice grain-shaped, palm-sized reflective object stood horizontal in perfect silence.

“…how?” she stuttered. “This is a research prototype.”

“Love” he answered inching away from the object. “I very much appreciate your rational mind. Which is why I’m disappointed this is not obvious to you. Those things had to be tested at some point. Who do you think had to do that, and when?” He looked her in the eyes. “On whom?”

Sophie didn’t feel like saying anything.

“Though the one the put on me in Ciudneau, it wasn’t nearly as fancy as this one.” Wallace turned to her again, and probably saw she was genuinely sorry. “Look… Sophie. Look. Perhaps after all of these years… this is a different thing.”

Here I must make a remark on linguistic. Professing the existence of the city of Ciudneau (a redundant expression, really, not unlike ‘People’s Democratic Republic’ or ‘burning fire’) is forbidden nowadays, and has been since its dismantlement. Therefore, there is no universally accepted spelling nor pronunciation for its name. Some common spellings I’ve documented include Ciudneau, Sood Noo, Seaudneau, and of course Sudnò, and many more variations; the pronunciation averages to /sjud’no/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet which, of course, is also currently forbidden.

“I’m sorry, uncle Wallace. I would never have brought it if”

“Tell me how it works.” He scratched one of his metal knuckles. “I know you had a speech ready for it.”

She sniffed and nodded. “The… the BW is a neural transmission interface. It’s an adapter cable, in its lowest terms. It allows for the subject’s memories to be relayed as they are to the operator, which can relive them in real time.”

“Yeah, that definitely rings a bell.” He stared into nothingness for a few seconds. “But on a more physical plane, how do you use it?”

“Oh” she grabbed his right hand, and placed the device in his open palm. “Then I just shake your hand.”

“Ooh, wow. That’s way more convenient.”

Sophie was mortified. “I realise I’m only doing this because I want to know about my mother. I hadn’t thought about the pain I would cause you. You don’t have to do this, and I’m sorry.”

“Perhaps you misunderstood me.” He confidently held his open palm in front, offering the shiny black egg forward to her. “I believe I know what you said about me to be true, or, more poetically, I know I need to believe it true. Perhaps I do need to let this pressure out, and I see no harm in something we would both profit from.”

“So you want to.”

His hand shook from what appeared to be a sudden wave of doubt, but ultimately remained firmly in place. “Yes, I will do it. But I must warn you, and this comes from direct experience: the pressure you ease from me might flow back into you. My memories will affect you. Perhaps not in the same way they did me, but I know them to not be easily digestible.”

She involuntarily raised her right hand towards his.

“Before you do this, you need to understand the consequences of the procedure.”

“I should really be asking you this question. You’re the patient.”

“Sophie, do you or do you not accept these terms?”

Her hand was right above his, could feel the warmth of the fingertips and the electric pinching of the brain worm scanning for access. “Fuck it.”

“I do.” and she shook his hand.

#5

Connection established.

I am submerged in colourful static and I have no eyes to close.

click.

I see the giraffe, the dog and the chicken and many other friendly shapes and colours. I reach for them and a hand appears.

click.

I am fighting with a child for a toy car remote on a persian carpet and I scream for mommy.

click.

I am playing Crash Bandicoot on a cathode ray television.

click.

The teacher is explaining the nutation of the Earth and summer light seeps through oak leaves to drizzle on my school desk. I am drawing a cube in pencil on graph paper.

click.

I am smoking a joint in an abandoned courtyard and my heart is beating very fast. There are other people in the darkness and a broken panel of asbestos.

click.

I am submerged in immense pain. I cannot hear anything. I am laying on a cold, dirty gym floor. There is a woman a few metres away. She gathers her entrails from the floor and tries to place them back into herself, but they keep falling out.

click.

I am sitting with legs crossed on a large cloth opened on an empty highway, as are some other people in a circle. The road stretches through luscious hills and fades into the blue sky where three puffy clouds inch rightwards. On the centre of the cloth is a bowl with tomato sauce and beans, with a twig of rosemary floating, and I eat from it with a spoon. It tastes very good.

click.

I am sitting on the edge of a beautiful canopied bed. I only look at the floor, and study the veins on the parquet tiles. I hold my robot hand, deactivated, into my flesh one, and caress it lovingly. My eyes are watery, and someone is laughing at me.

Connection severed.

Wallace had retracted his hand. Both were considerably shaken. “Not like this” he said. “You’re going to deep fry me here.”

“Sorry.”

“I never thought these could get so intense. Last time I got under a worm, it was a sweaty dream sogged in milk.” He puffed. “Now it’s… wow.”

“Perhaps you could drive.” proposed Sophie.

“I suppose I could.” He bit his lip. “Perhaps in chronological order, for starters”

“Definitely would appreciate that” she smiled.

“Also” he added, “there are things you shouldn’t see.”

Sophie admonished: “as your de facto therapist, that sounds really unhealthy and kind of against the whole point.”

“It wouldn’t be for me. It’s for you.”

This warning, or threat even, latched onto the back of Sophie’s mind, where it would go on to reside for a long time after. “Well then, shall we start again?”

Wallace tapped his metal fingers on his wooden desk. One last look to those old chess pieces. A long sigh. And then, finally, a big, hairy hand extended.

“We shall.”