Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

SynTech OS v.3.0.2.0462

IMPLANT INTERFACE INITIALIZED

There we go, feeling normal again now. I didn’t realize what it would do to have the implant powered down. It’s like having a limb removed. Not painful, just missing. Worse yet, I had to do my own remembering for a whole day.

“All up and running?” Father asks.

“Yeah, the overlay is up,” I report. “The setting all seems right. Everything looks good.”

“Double check your bots and make sure they’re responding as well, please.”

LIGHT-SHOW

I gesture with my right hand and light up a spinning cluster of red, blue and green spheres above my fingertips, courtesy of code I stole from my sister.

“Impressive, though that looks like something Andrea would make.”

Oops. Maybe too blatant of a copy. I tweaked the colors and physics a little from the original, but I should probably have customized it more.

“Yeah,” I say, looking over at her. “Her designs definitely inspired it.”

She looks back and just gives me one of her radiant smiles, taking my supposed imitation as a compliment. Father shrugs and starts on the next sibling in line, running his diagnostics and bringing Jeff’s implant back up. That will take a while, which is fine. I need to get some things written down that happened while I couldn’t live-journal them.

I’m worried about Louise. That girl is a straight-up junkie.

She did fine for the first few hours. The whole trip had kind of a road-trip-meets-game-night feel to it. We put on some old movies in the background while we played card games, ate snacks, and just kind of hung out. Then, around bedtime, she started getting irritable. No, irritable isn’t the right word. Angry. Snapping at everyone. At that point we were playing poker with M&Ms for money. It turns out Chad sucks at it, but Marc is surprisingly good at bluffing. Anyway, everyone was getting along, playing, joking, and having a good time. I even forgot that I needed to take down Father for a little while.

But then Louise got that look.

I knew a guy back in Colorado that got into some harder drugs, like more than just weed. Not a friend, just a guy I’d see around at school. You could tell what he was up to, it wasn’t rocket science to figure it out. He skipped school a lot. When he came in, he was either smiling and quiet, or he had this look on his face. Not quite hunger, not quite anger, but some of both mixed with a whole lot of desperation. It was a distinctive expression that I hadn’t ever seen on anyone else. Until yesterday on the plane when Louise got that look.

She excused herself after snapping at everyone a few dozen times and headed back to the bedroom in the back. She said she had a headache. I went and checked on her an hour later. She was sitting in the dark on the edge of one of the bunks, looking pale, digging her nails into her palms. I could see where they were starting to bleed. Her lower lip was purpling up with bruises where she was biting it. Her hair was damp with sweat. And that look. That junkie look.

Dammit, Louise.

It all clicked then. Louise is an addict to whatever she’s been doing with her implant to release dopamine or whatever it was. It had barely been eight hours without it, and she was already showing withdrawal symptoms. With our implants disabled, she couldn’t get her fix.

“You know what’s going on, right?” I asked her quietly.

“Shut up,” she snapped.

I knelt down on the floor next to her and waited, silent.

“Yeah, I think so,” she said finally.

“Breathe,” I told her, trying to keep my voice reassuring and not furious at her for doing this to herself. “Like with your panic attacks.”

“OK.”

She breathed with the slow, deep breaths she had practiced. Again. Again.

“Are you nauseous?” I asked. “I hear that happens with withdrawal.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Everything just hurts. And I hate everyone right now.”

“Sorry.” I wished I had something better to say, but I didn’t.

“What am I going to do?” she said, her voice thick with desperation. “If he finds out, he’ll take it away, and I’ll never get it back. I need it.”

“Hold out,” I told her. “If anyone asks, we’ll tell them it was a panic attack because you’re nervous about the trip.”

Father popped back to check on us after a few minutes. The panic attack story worked, and he didn’t look too closely at Louise. I ended up staying with her for a long time. She held onto my hand like it was a lifeline and she was drowning. Her eyes got distant, but she kept on breathing and gripping. After a while, she fell asleep, still clutching my hand. I didn’t want to wake her by pulling away, and I wasn’t sleepy yet, so I grabbed a paperback book off the shelf nearby with my other hand. It was some old Asimov anthology. I read it until I fell asleep, sitting there on the floor. The next thing I remember is Cindy touching my shoulder.

“You about ready for breakfast, hon?” she asked quietly.

I snapped awake and did what I could to keep her attention off of Louise. “Yeah, that sounds good. Can I give you a hand with anything?”

“Oh no, I’ve got to earn my keep. You head on up to the main cabin. I’ll have something out for y’all in just a minute.”

She moved her hand toward Louise but I stopped her and told her Louise asked to sleep in. She didn’t seem suspicious, so I followed her out and closed the door. Back in the main cabin, most of the rest of the sibs were already up. Andrea put on another movie and Marc was shuffling cards and trying to get a game of gin going. Evan snored loudly in his chair. Father was working on something on his tablet, and Chad was trying to copy him by doing something with his. No one asked how Louise was doing. After the night before, they must have been glad that she wasn’t there snapping at them.

Louise slept for most of the rest of the flight. I alternated between sitting with her and covering for her with lies to everyone else. I tried to get her to eat, but she refused everything. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate some of her meals so the others wouldn’t know. She finally sat up again toward the end of the flight. I got her to drink a little water, but she didn’t want anything else. She asked how long until we arrived. I told her it was a couple more hours. She cried again and fell back to sleep. She was still out when Father started rebooting our implants.