A tall building rises in the distance. In the field next to it, long rapeseed stems sway slowly in the wind. It’s been two years since she ran away from the Chip-Center. While she stands and stares at the building, memories flash through her anxious mind like a surgeon’s knife.
Nurse Saarinen kneeling by the toilet, emptying a white lump of flushed-down, half-melted pills from a secret strainer.
Doctor Solomon’s soft and reassuring voice, telling her how she understands.
Her own bare feet, flapping against the concrete sidewalks.
The stabbing pain whenever she crosses the blue tiles, getting closer to the woods.
Bill’s frantic voice, screaming at her to run faster.
She never filled out the applications. She never pedaled a bike or grew a potato or bottle-fed a newborn baby. She never met with the other Unchipped in the center—the other test subjects, her kind.
Her week in the Chip-Center was divided between the lab and her room. Doctor Solomon drew blood, asked about weird sensations, voices or hallucinations. Nurse Saarinen told her what channels to watch, what food to eat, what pills to take. Somehow, every day, she was able to get away with not doing the latter.
On the last day of her brief visit, she refused to be plugged into a brain scanner. They told her she’d be “out cold for only a split second”. Bill screamed “scam, scam, scam, scam,” for so long, she was finally too anxious to co-operate. She was sent back to her room.
That night the nurses paid her a surprise visit. Nurse Saarinen made a beeline for her tiny bathroom, knelt by the toilet and pulled out the flushed pills.
Before the dumbfounded nurses had time to react, Kaarina ran through the door, down the hall, and into the city. Maybe they didn’t care if she stayed or went—no one ever followed her out of the Chip-Center.
Through the city and through the woods, Kaarina had run to her old apartment. There she found that most of her belongings were gone, scavenged by the outcasts—people like her.
Collecting anything she could fit in a torn plastic bag, Kaarina had gathered together a pair of jeans, two stained T-shirts, her worn-out sneakers, her never-worn summer sandals, and a fleece lined hoodie, tucked away at the back of the closet.
The plastic bag slung over her shoulder, she walked thirty minutes until she was at the barn where she used to work. All the stalls were empty and the aisle was cluttered with broken buckets, empty grain bags, and ripped-apart horse blankets.
The hay loft above the barn was untouched. After arranging the hay bales into a single bed, she used the manure-stained horse blankets to keep herself warm, hiding her few belongings under the loose floorboards.
There she waited for the Chipped to arrive.
Days crept by. The few small stores—only a five-minute walk away—were the only places she visited. There, she ate what crispbread and canned beans she could find and carried the rest up to the hay loft.
At nighttime she waited—for them. For her forced return to the city.
But they never came.
Flabbergasted, she had questioned her own sanity. Why on earth had she run away? Only an idiot would choose not to stay and let them fix whatever was wrong with her brain.
During the months that followed, she let Bill reassure her that lying low and keeping watch was the right course of action. But the city kept pulling her back. It still tempts her today, even if its buildings and roads make her ill. She wants to be like the rest of them: content, snug, filled with possibilities. But just the thought of taking one of their pills, or jumping into the program with two feet, images of her mother rush right back into her mind. Something about her suicide doesn’t add up. The pills, scattered around her—
An electric buzz interrupts her reminiscence and makes her turn around: the pharmacy sign is back on. The front door opens, and an old man with a hunched back walks out. He seems to be walking straight at her, standing behind the park bench.
AR-glasses hanging from one hand, a familiar-looking paper bag from the other, the man makes his way across the pavement and the blue tiles. He stops in front of the park bench.
His visor pointed at the Chip-Center rising in the distance, the man stares into space, silently. Can’t he see Kaarina standing there?
A deep sigh fills the air between them. The man places the paper bag on the park bench, sits down next to it. Kaarina’s frozen on her feet, unsure what to do.
“What kind of infection is it?”
She cocks her head, takes a step closer.
“What?”
“Your horse, what kind of an infection does it have? Considering the amount of medicine the young man purchased for you yesterday, it’s a horse you’re trying to save. Unless you’ve made friends with the moose or the bears…” He stops to laugh a little at his own joke, “But that’s unlikely, considering that you’re standing there in one piece.”
With careful steps, Kaarina walks around the bench and sits on the opposite side from him. He must have seen her through the pharmacy window yesterday. How else would he know it was her who Markus bought the medicine for?
“It’s something in his respiratory system. He can barely breathe.”
The man takes off his AR-glasses, exposing a glazed eye. His other eye is only partly covered by the milky film.
“Your eye,” Kaarina says, knowing that she shouldn’t stare. Or ask. “Can’t they fix it?”
“They sure can.”
“But?”
A shrug. The man gives her a small smile. “I rather know when it’s my time to go. Let my body age with dignity. Not all of us have the need to run from what’s coming.”
The paper bag rustles as he places it between them on the bench. He nods toward it, his hands playing with the headband on his AR-glasses.
Kaarina holds her breath, hesitating, her eyes moving between the old man and the paper bag between them.
“What’s in the
