Nurse Saarinen stared at her in silence. Her frown revealed some inner battle. Finally, she hopped down from the lab table and walked to a cabinet across the room. With her I.D. card, she popped open a small box inside the metal locker.
She walked back to Maija holding a white pill bottle. There was a small red X on the label.
“Well…there is another way.”
***
The wooden sauna stool seems to drill into her tailbone. She’s been sitting there for nearly two hours, holding a white pill—now partly dissolved—between her thumb and index finger—her second chance for what she considers to be a normal life.
She’ll still need to go through the operation and get the chip. But with a bit of help from this small drug—and Nurse Saarinen—she won’t be turned into some kind of a half-human-half-machine. She’ll be something Doctor Solomon calls Unchipped: a person who can’t be integrated with the system.
Kaarina will get the house, once she moves into the city. Which should be soon. Blue tiles already decorate the sidewalks of their neighborhood. Everything’s nearly ready.
Maija will happily go live somewhere else. In the suburbs, or the woods. Away from technology, brain implants, and alternative realities. Miranda’s eerie voice used to give her chills; now the thought of living in an imaginary city with digital plants and animals makes her sick to her stomach.
She won’t be lonely. Just like most people these days, dating and friendships aren’t something that come to her naturally. At some point they stopped being worth pursuing. Once people got too wary of one another, too afraid to speak out loud in any forum, social media became a thing of the past. By that point, people had been interacting exclusively over smart phones and computers for so many years that talking to each other face to face no longer felt natural.
These gloomy thoughts give her the final push. She claps the pill to her mouth before she can reconsider. She swallows the white pill. A few quick strides take her from the sauna bench to the bathroom sink. A gulp of water flushes down the pill.
She leans against the sink and stares into her own bottle-green eyes, staring back at her in the mirror.
Eat your digital heart out, Miranda…
Smiling, she turns to leave the bathroom. The chipping is in one hour, so she’d better get going.
Just as she reaches for the door handle, the white bathroom tiles around her start to spin. A burning sensation rises from her stomach and travels up toward her throat. Her legs buckle. Her feet go numb.
After a stumbling step backwards, she falls onto the bathroom floor.
Foam dripping from her mouth, her eyes lock on the bathroom mirror and its digital clock. The numbers turn neon-blue, showing her the time: 9:08—as it should be.
“Front door — unlocked.”
Miranda’s voice seems to come from under water. Even muffled and distant, it still sends cool shivers through Maija’s shaking body.
Unhurried footsteps make their way to the bathroom door.
Blinking is hard. Breathing even harder. Her vision blurs as darkness starts to close in.
“Test subject — vital signs low.”
The door opens. A pair of white lab shoes stop in front of her cold, sweat-covered face. A woman’s hand carefully places a pill bottle into Maija’s unmoving palm.
This bottle has a red triangle on its side. Maija’s vision is too blurry to read the label, but she knows it by heart.
“Caution. Opioid. Risk of Overdose and Addiction.”
Small, colorful pills ripple around her unmoving body. They spread around the white bathroom tiles, some landing in her hair, some rolling under the sauna bench a few feet away.
Just before Maija takes her last breath, she hears a familiar voice speak.
“So sorry about this, dear. Should have kept your thoughts to yourself.” The doctor's white coat rustles as she kneels on the floor. With a gentle gesture, she fixes a lock of blonde hair behind Maija’s ear. “People like you are simply too dangerous to keep around.”
***
1
KAARINA
November 2088
East-Land, City of Finland
CHAPTER 1 — THE WOODS
The silver duct tape wrapped around her worn-out sneaker snaps in half. A cold burst of muddy water fills her shoe, soaking her torn Nordic boot sock from toe to heel. Pushing up the narrow brim of her wool hat, she peeks at the sky. A gray, dreary blanket of clouds rests above her head. The forest is quiet, still. She has about two hours, maybe three, until the dusk arrives.
“That’s okay. Just keep going,” Kaarina says to herself. Stopping won’t do. She should just walk on, ignoring the unpleasant sensation that her toes are swimming in yesterday’s heavy rain.
Two more steps forward and the wetness reaches her ankle. Cursing under her breath, Kaarina stops and sits on a moss-covered rock under the pine trees that rise above her, motionless and somber, just like the clouds above the treetops.
“You just couldn’t keep it together, then? For one more day?” Like a madwoman, she holds the ragged sneaker at eye level and points at it, as if the damn shoe were to blame for the current state of her life.
After glaring and cursing at it for a minute, she drops the shoe on the ground. With a dull thump it lands next to her, the strip of duct tape still attached: useless but holding on. She sits on the rock with legs folded beneath her, arms wrapped around her knitted legwarmers. Her backside aches slightly as it presses against the harsh surface.
It’s unnaturally warm, too humid for November. Drops of sweat trickle down her ribcage beneath her navy-blue hoodie. Too bad her winter gear is the most presentable attire she owns. Otherwise she would have worn her shredded jeans and the long-sleeved black T-shirt, the one with a horse head silhouette printed on its ripped chest pocket. Her favorite
