Read an Excerpt From More Perfect

A small implant allows one access to a more robust social media experience directly as an augmented reality…

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Temi Oh’s More Perfect, a near-future science fiction novel reimagining the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus—out from Saga Press on August 15.

Using the myth of Eurydice as a structure, More Perfect is set in a near-future London where it has become popular for folks to have a small implant that allows one access to a more robust social media experience directly as an augmented reality. However, the British government has taken oversight of this access to an extreme, slowly tilting towards a dystopian overreach, all in the name of safety.

Moremi

‘Will it hurt?’ Moremi asks the girl from the sixth-form who sits opposite. The girl is lit in zebra-print by the slats in the blinds, holding a hot-water bottle to her stomach, and her hazel eyes keep flitting up to the muted television screen at the far end of the waiting room.

‘Only at first,’ she says.

‘That’s what everyone says.’ Moremi is nervous. She’s only been waiting in the school nurse’s office for a quarter of an hour, but already she’s chewed her thumbnail down to the quick.

‘Where does it hurt?’

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More Perfect

This morning she’d been excited about the procedure—she is the last in her class to go through with it and has been begging her mother to sign the medical waiver for almost a year now. There is an asterisk next to her name on the school register, which indicates she is still ‘Pulseless’. Even the word, she hates.

The sixth-form girl casts Moremi a sideways glance as if considering how much of the truth to tell her. ‘Everywhere,’ she admits finally. ‘Your whole body, but only for a minute. Less than, maybe.’ Moremi swallows. ‘And not just your body, also… your mind.’

‘You mean, my head?’

‘No, it’s deeper than that.’ The girl frowns in recollection. ‘It’s a weird sensation. As if something is there that shouldn’t be. That feeling you get when someone is looking over your shoulder, only this is deeper, the machine eavesdropping on your thoughts, your memories.’ She touches her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘It’s as if you’re not alone in here anymore.’

‘But that fades away after a while, right? That feeling?’ ‘Not really,’ the girl says, fiddling with a loose thread on the edge of her school skirt.

Moremi had only been thinking of the moments after, how good it would feel once it was done; she’d forgotten about this, the scalpel, the pain.

The bulk of the device is the size of a five-pence coin, placed under the temporal bone. The sixth-former must have had hers implanted a while ago because the skin around it has completely healed over. Moremi can’t help but stare, even though she knows it’s rude. Around its central processing unit is a cluster of accessories—the pin-headed RAM, HPU, sensors and transmitters as well as optional drives—that make a ‘constellation’ of LEDs and metallic notches in the skin behind her ear. The girl wears her hair, as a lot of people do, to one side in order to make the lights of her constellation visible. Pinks right now, indicating that she is in mild discomfort, steady beat of her heart, the brightest light, throbbing like a distant drum. Moremi’s friend, Zen, had been the first to get one a few years ago and Moremi remembers leaning close to her head to marvel at it, an unnatural fusion of organic and mechanic that she used to find almost viscerally repellent.

‘How old are you?’ ‘Thirteen,’ Moremi says.

‘Isn’t that a bit old?’ the girl asks, regarding Moremi with a familiar suspicion; some people consider parents who refuse to give their children a Pulse the same as parents who turn down vaccinations. ‘Have you watched the video?’

On the screen above them, it’s running on mute with subtitles. An informative broadcast about the implantation procedure. Moremi catches words like ‘direct neural interface’ as they flick across the monitor. ‘I’ve seen it a few times,’ she says. In doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, on television. Something about it, today, makes her a little queasy. Maybe it’s the spongy pink schematic of the human brain. The nanoscopic fingers of the Pulse are called arrays. They measure less than one thousandth of the width of a human hair. Once the Pulse is implanted under the bone, millions of arrays extend, penetrating the thick membrane of connective tissue that surrounds the brain. The arrays spider through grey matter, routing around for cranial nerves: the optic and auditory neurons, the hippocampus—where memories are stored—and the amygdala to interface with.

‘So… it’s like brain surgery?’ Moremi says.

The girl snorts derisively. ‘Don’t be dramatic. My dentist does, like, ten of these a day. It’s like getting your ears pierced.’

They’ve learned a lot about the brain this year in biology. Moremi has discovered that it contains around 86 billion neurons. That the external world can be fractured into lines of analogue or binary code for it to interpret. The colour of the sky right now is a specific wavelength of light that sends a pattern of impulses into the back of her brain. A kiss on the cheek sets off fireworks of its own in her facial nerve. Strange to consider how rich her inner life appears to her— including at this moment, the smell of the waiting room, the glitter of dust in the air, the sound and sight of schoolchildren playing on the Astroturf out the window—even though it is simply the result of some chemical code disseminated through grey and white matter. Just as hard to believe that the whole of the internet, every picture and video, email and game, is written in the binary language of machines: ‘on’ and ‘off’ switches, 1s and 0s. It’s these similarities which make it possible for the machine to interface with her brain.

The Pulse is programmed to transform neural signals into lines of computer code and vice versa. The whole process has been called ‘neural digitisation’ and it allows the Pulse to turn the brain into another node on the internet. This means that once the procedure is over, Moremi’s head will be part of the internet in the same way a phone or a tablet computer is. The thought of it is astonishing and terrifying.

She would have had the procedure years ago if it wasn’t for her mother’s hesitations. Her older sister Halima had done it as soon as she was old enough to sign the consent herself. ‘I don’t understand you and your sisters. You’re already “connected” all the time. You have computers, consoles—’ ‘Not connected where it matters.’ Moremi’s gaze drifts back to the girls who are walking into class, the same dozen feet, black leather Hush Puppies, almost in step. The other girls live on a different plane of existence. They live in the Panopticon, the network of networks, connecting everyone’s constellations to each other, and tethering them all to the internet. It’s the Panopticon that allows them to talk without opening their mouths, or to watch each other’s memories. She’s heard that they all wear filters on their skin, bat wings or cat ears that she can’t see. Sometimes their class teacher raises her hands like a musical conductor and everyone but Moremi says, ‘Oh!’ Over the past few Pulseless years, Moremi has lost every single one of her friends; she can’t understand them anymore.

‘Is that what you want?’ her mother asked. ‘To be like everyone else?’

Moremi always said: ‘Of course!’

Her resolve weakens a little, though, when she remembers how afraid she is of pain. If only there was a way around it, she thinks.

The nurse is calling her in now. Moremi stares at the door to her office and wonders what she will be like when she emerges. Will she emerge fundamentally altered? Or will it be different like turning thirteen was different, only an incremental change? The seconds before and then after midnight on New Year’s Eve on the dawn of some millennium? Different the way people say losing your virginity is different?

‘More-rem-me?’ says the school nurse, an overweight Filipino woman, before frowning at Moremi’s last name. She makes a familiar halting attempt, sounding out every syllable with none of the certainty of Nigerians.

‘Hi,’ Moremi says, and follows her in. The detergent tang of the room threatens to turn Moremi’s empty stomach. Lemon and pine-flavoured floor cleaner. Sponges soaked in iodine. The curtains drawn, and the place cold as a mortuary. She was told not to eat anything for twelve hours before the procedure, and now her gut is twisting itself in knots. It’s like getting your ears pierced, she tells herself, reaching her hand up to the little silver stud in her left ear and reminding herself of the day her mother took her and her two sisters to Claire’s Accessories to get them done. Her older sister, Halima, had been so nervous about the procedure that when the technician touched a Sharpie pen to her lobe, she burst into horrified tears. Moremi had been braver, but she still recalls that her terror in the moment before the needle punctured her skin was so much worse than the event. She still remembers how silly she’d felt on her way home, compulsively touching the gold hoops just to remind herself it had happened. It had been such an easy thing. Such a short moment of pain, nothing compared to the rest of her life.

In the centre of the room is what looks like a dentists’ chair. Several monitors have been set up to measure her vital signs, a glass console with a projection of her brain, as mapped half an hour earlier by the scanners, turning like a bloody moon.

‘Okay, then,’ the nurse says cheerily. ‘Are you ready?’

Moremi tries to smile, but then she spots the scalpels glinting on the equipment tray, blades silver under the sun-bright surgical lights. ‘Um…’ She can’t bring herself to say ‘yes’ yet.

‘It’s been a while since I’ve done this procedure on a pupil so old.’ The nurse eyes her suspiciously. ‘Are your parents…?’ She doesn’t want to say the word ‘Luddites’ or, worse, ‘Revelators’. She doesn’t want to ask if Moremi’s mother is the kind of person who burns down cell masts and carves stars into her skin as a sign of protest against the Panopticon.

‘No, nothing like that.’ Moremi is quick to jump to her mother’s defence, even though she has noticed that whenever the Revelators are arrested, her mother will never denounce their actions. Instead Moremi says, ‘I’m scared… it will change me.’

‘Of course it will change you,’ the nurse says, ‘but what doesn’t change you?’

She tuts near Moremi’s head where she guesses her date of birth is projected. ‘Thirteen. It’s too late, really. The way things are going, give it a generation and most people won’t even remember when they first get it. Which, they say, is the best thing, really. You know, the solid-state drive inside the Pulse is capable of storing a lifetime’s worth of memories.’

It is made up of a virtually indestructible quartz crystal capable of storing a zettabyte of data. That is, Moremi has seen in her study console before, one sextillion—one followed by twenty-one zeroes—bytes. A number so large it means almost nothing to her at all.

‘Research suggests we only remember about a tenth of the information we are presented with. Which is pretty appalling. If I ask you what you were doing at this exact moment last year? Seven months ago? Can you tell me? Probably not. And do you know that every time you recall something, the way your mother sings, your tenth birthday, the first time you ever jumped on a trampoline, you change the memory just a little. It’s not like replaying a DVD—oh, I know you don’t remember DVDs— you change a memory every time you recall it. Most of them slip right out of your head. Whole days, whole years, it feels like. More when you get older. Before we had the Pulse, there used to be this disease of forgetting, a real epidemic. It happened in the elderly. I’m a nurse, I still see what happens to old people who don’t get the procedure.’ She shakes her head sorrowfully. ‘A home I worked in a few years ago. This lady of eighty-five tossed all her family pictures in the trash. She kept shouting at me, “Who are these people? I don’t want these pictures!” It was heartbreaking to watch. You see it less and less, and in your generation, we won’t see it at all. For that reason alone, if it ever comes time to vote over “total adoption”, I know I’ll vote to give the Pulse to everyone. Let’s not forget anything. Not a thing.’

As Moremi sits down, the nurse adjusts the height of the chair then takes her wrist and says, ‘Okay now, you’ll feel a sharp scratch.’ Barely a moment, and the needle breaks her skin, cool liquid pours into her veins. Quickly, a numbness sets in and her muscles unspool.

‘This is a unique cocktail, devised by the Panopticon to aid this procedure. It’s called nox.’ The nurse straps a mask to Moremi’s face, and her jaw flops open as she breathes. ‘You might notice the taste’—like bitumen and burnt sugar in the back of her mouth—‘especially calibrated for your height and weight, this concoction will keep you asleep for the duration of the procedure.’

As Moremi’s mind peels away from the inside of her skull, the nurse’s voice takes on a tinny discordant ring. Her mind is flung into a graveyard orbit, spinning out, out of her body, of school, of the sprawling city.

‘…here comes the machine.’

‘Is this the part that hurts?’ she wants to ask, but can’t. It is. Her mind is shunted back into a body full of pain. She screams, an animal howl of agony, every joint locking, every nerve on fire. They say it lasts a few seconds, but there is no time in this agony.

‘No!’ she shouts. But the machine is inside her now. Although she knows it’s impossible, she thinks she can feel its microscopic needles puncturing her skull. Spidering into her grey matter.

‘Make it stop,’ she cries. This was a bad idea. A mistake. Too late, now, to change her mind. ‘Make it stop!’ When she opens her eyes she can see nothing but the blinding surgical light, all faces eclipsed. Nothing but white-hot, searing rods of pain thundering through her bones. How much longer, she wonders, before it turns on?

They say it feels like falling. That falling asleep Pulseless for the final time really feels like tumbling off a cliff. And it does. She slips right out of her skin, elevator-drop plunge in her gut, like falling in a dream. Her life will never be the same. Her mind will never be the same.