Diffusion

Prologue

2073.07.22

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The room was white and empty. The glossy sheen of porcelain tile glared back at him as he gazed into the mirror. He gripped the glaze-smooth surface of the sink in one hand and touched his temple with the first and second finger of the other.

It was there.

He wasn’t imagining it. He had really gone through with it.

What had felt like a dream over the last few months began to feel more and more like a nightmare where he was falling and couldn’t wake up.

No one else would or could or should ever take on what he had decided to do. Interfacing with organoid brains and animal electroreception and prosthetic nerve fusions were not the same as what he intended to undertake.

Immersion. Override. Release.

He would dive an ocean never navigated by man. Its depths were uncountably unknowable.

‘Whatever philosophical framework I want to construe for this,’ he thought, ‘the reality I see in front of me is myself, standing wet and naked in my tiny, steamy bathroom, touching an illegal cortical interface that will probably kill me.’

‘Shit.’ He grabbed his shirt and cell phone, opening the door to release a flood of vapor into the chilly loft. ‘20 years and I still forget to take my stupid pills.’

He strode out into the messy and cramped living room, walking past an overloaded laundry basket and plopping down, ass still bare, into his desk chair. The orange bottle stared at him.

“Productivity in a tube,” he said out loud to his plants and fish.

Four thousand notifications and twelve hundred unread emails screamed at him from the blue-light-filtered monitor. The framed photo of his long-dead dog looked at him lovingly.

“Hey bubba. Miss you buddy,” Kurt said, pressing and twisting the lid to the tiny bottle and retrieving his first of a half dozen pills he now took daily.

This one made sure he remembered to take the others.