Seneca Rebel

I LAY FLAT on the cold bench as it pulled me into the BioNan. Although this was an intimidating process, Dom’s going first eased a lot of my fear and doubt. We seemed to do that for one another. He picked me up when I was down and vice versa. He had let go of the need to be in control and accepted this radical plan of mine as if it were as inevitable as the sunrise. I had started to let go of my mistrust of people and drift off into a world of possibility when it came to Dom. And here I was, inside a machine that would connect my brain to my flexer. More than half of the previous attempts at this had resulted in death. That was why the whole movement toward this high technology approach to medicine had shifted underground, and why Anika’s lab had been dismantled.

The debate was legitimate. One side said that life was too precious and the outcomes too unpredictable to experiment with humans in this dangerous way. The other side believed that the potential for huge breakthroughs was too great not to attempt the creation of singularity between humans and technology. There were so many arguments. How would privacy be redefined? Would this allow us to live longer or shorten our lives? What would become of a world where information was wired straight into everyone’s brain without the need to read and spend countless hours absorbing it? Ultimately, there were too many “what ifs?” The government jumped in to regulate these activities. Humans turning themselves into cyborgs was outlawed. But the people refused to be regulated. Which brought us to Dom and me– specifically me, laying flat in this BioNan.

As wide open as my eyes were, there was no light to let into them. I couldn’t even see the inside of the vessel that contained me. I felt vulnerable. My shoulders and chest were exposed, my bare back was against the bench. The whirr kicked in. Here we go. I took a deep breath. A blue light flooded the chamber. My blue light. My mind raced. What if the lights went out permanently? I’d never been scared of death because I’d never had to be. But I realized I could die right then and there. I was scared. If I had to go now, I’d go knowing I had lived and I had loved. I never said goodbye, but there might be no such thing as goodbye. It might just be something we say but not something we ever do. In some incarnation of energy along the road to infinity, would we meet again? Whenever I tried to visualize what came next I always ended up with an image of speeding blasts of static. What would become of me when my heart stopped beating? My blood stopped flowing? My breath became harder, shorter. I tried to tame it, right then, just to see if I could tell what it would feel like. Death.

I felt a numbing pressure on my spine. It lasted ten seconds and then my lower back became warm. I dared not move. Strangely, at the same moment, my thinking shifted from death to life. What was it going to be like? What would I be capable of now? I was filled with a sense of hope and I imagined my reemergence into the world. It couldn’t come soon enough.

My head was locked into place by an unseen source of compression. I didn’t resist. I felt something like cold metal lowering onto my eyelids and clamping them open. A liquid washed over my eyes, and then a film meshed onto my eyeballs. A searing heat formed a circle inside each eyeball. It didn’t hurt, but my eyes felt dry, even with all the liquid that had just gushed into them. I wasn’t thinking about anything now. The whirr slowed, then purred into idleness. All that was left was an empty echo inside the chamber. I identified my own breath. My heartbeat. My surging sense of wonder.

The bench pushed me out. In my rebirth, I entered a new world as a new girl. With my eyes wide open, the beat of my heart marched towards the future, my mind stretched far beyond the confines of my body.

It was go time.