The Buzzing in my Head

It's begun.

I'm not sure if it's this that's awakened me, or some other noise or rhythm of the night. But I am awake, and I can hear it, working away at the base of my skull. The buzzing is quiet, a tentative arrangement of bees; and the feeling of it is that of spilled honey, warmed by a fierce sunlight, dripping slowly from the base of my brain, along the spine, dissolving into the bloodstream.

If I've ever felt this before I don't remember, but still I know exactly what this is. Six thousand miles away somebody's hit a switch, they've sent a pulse to the nano-processors embedded in my brain, and told them to begin disassembly. Cold, and true to form, untroubled by the hesitation of human fear or human pity: here they go.

I don't really know what to do right now.

#

Eileen knows as soon as she sees me, as soon as I stumble into the kitchen alongside a glaring dawn.

“Oh, David, no!” Her hands fly up to her mouth.

“I'm sorry, love.”

“No! No! No! No!” She's not having it. She swipes the breakfast dishes – the breakfast – off the counter and onto the floor, she slams her fist against the oven door. “This isn't right. It's not, they've made a bloody mistake! We have to call someone.”

I can feel it, trickling through my head, honeycomb holes opening up. This isn't reversible.

She stares at me with wide eyes, eyes amber-coloured, embedded with fashionable, irresistable sparkles. Tears are budding there, shimmering and deepening the colour. It seems to me as if the sun shines directly and only out of those eyes; it seems inconceivable to think I could forget them, I could lose myself, my knowing of them, my absolute love of them. She has her fingers wrapped in my collar: “Oh, but you haven't done anything wrong, have you? There's no reason for this.”

“That's not how it works.”

“You're still useful.”

“Who knows how they know when the time is.” I know I should feel something more, some level of terror, some screaming, harrowing need for escape. This limbo is part of the process – I've heard someone say that once – the releasing of sedatives directly into the brain, softening the blow, blunting the reality.

“They must see...” she insists.

“They see what they see.”

“It's not fair!” she rails.

“I know it's not.”

“This can't be happening.”

I keep her close. “I think it is.” No, I know it is. This thing that I guess I must have known sometime before; maybe five times, or ten, or a hundred. There's nothing in me of remembering it, just a vague sense of deja vu – an oh, this, like this then.

And she whispers: “Oh God, David. I'll have to tell them all. I'll have to tell Gwendoline, and Sharthia back on earth. She won't understand!”

I should say this, I should say: It's all right, I'll do it. While I still can. But I don't. I don't think I'd still know the right words to say.

#

Jakob next door knows as much about this as anyone. He's had more human losses than most. His Margaret was taken just last year. He leans his chin and forearm on the fence after I've told him. “Margaret told me it felt like having spiders in her head, that they talked to each other, fizzing away inside her. She reckoned she could feel their tiny feet scurrying around on the inside of her skull.”

“It's more like a wasps nest for me,” I say.

“Everybody's different.”

“So they say. Yeah.”

“Look man, I'm sorry. Really. This is so rough. And I tell you, you don't deserve it. Not a bit. You're too young for dissolution, too healthy. You must have decades of work and thought left in you. You could make all kind of contributions.”

“I suppose I still will.” Disassembled, repurposed, changed.

“This you.”

“Well the Upper Chamber think differently.”

I can see it make a quick sprint across his face, that dangerous thought: idiots. But I see him just as quickly squash it – brains the size of buildings, millenia augmented... there's some people you just can't get on the wrong side of.

“Jakob.”

He knows the drill: “Anything. Anything at all.”

“You already know. I need you for Eileen. Okay? She won't know what to do next, she'll atrophy. She'll be at a loss, and vulnerable. You have to take her in hand, all right?”

“I'll be there for her.”

“Take care of her please. You should probably...” and I make myself say it, “you should probably find
room for her in your bed. If you can persuade her.” The way she'd done for Jakob, in the days after Margaret, when I'd slid to the side and let this go on, because it was what he needed, what would keep him right and useful, a contributer, safe.

Jakob says “Of course.” And he tells me: “My Margaret lasted three days, you know. She resisted, she didn't want to leave me. It was weird David, watching the way she slowed down, as if she were wax setting. She got vaguer and slower, she'd forget little things, and then whole segments of her life would be gone, whole segments of understanding. It's things you wouldn't expect – she'd lose her way in the house, she didn't know what the fridge was. She looked at photos of the girls, she looked at Manda's letters, like they were new to her, like she'd never read them. 'Who's this Manda?' she said, and it broke my heart hearing it.

“She froze to the steps outside our house in the end, she didn't want to come inside. She was there, wrapped in Manda's red shawl, when they took her away.”

“That's awful,” I say, more from reflex than feeling. I can still touch the feeling – that horrified sympathy – but I can't quite apply it to myself. And yes, I can see the blue sky, I can see the twinkling drones flying across it, I can see the trees, all striking out in matching blossoms. I recognise it for beauty, but without that beauty settling at all on my heart.

“I don't mean to scare you,” Jakob apologises

“Oh, it's all right. I don't think I scare any more.”

“Yes, well, my Margaret, she was the same.”

#

I feel bad – as much as I still can – for wanting this time alone. For wanting to spend these precious hours with my feet bare in the grass, in the company of dandelions and purple-headed thistles. Not with Eileen's arms encircling me. Her grief is too intense, and there's nothing left in me to bounce that off against. There are things about her that I already can't remember, and I know when I go inside to her I'll find surprises in the sight of her; my joy at her beauty will be like meeting her after years gone by, and yet there'll be something missing, some core of her, that shared knowledge of a life lived together.

My head buzzes patiently. That fine lacework of nanotech unravelling along my back. It feels hot at times, fresh coffee spilled and trickling out of my brain, along my spine, pooling in vertebrae. At other times it feels cold, or it only feels numb, and there are strange tastes on my tongue. My vision blurs a little bit, readjusting constantly to the changed state of my brain. Funny, imagining it: like child's building blocks being taken apart.

I write my letters: One to Eileen of course. One Gwendoline, one to Kevin, one to Versa, one to Sharthia, one to Lexon and Sarah. All hard in their own way, and quietly distressing that I find it harder and harder to come up with the right words. I look at these letters alongside each other and I see how much the same they are. The special, individualised things I had all planned to say are blurring so rapidly. And my hands shake. The fear, for a moment, breaks through the fortress of sedatives, and strikes somewhere near my soul. It's happening very fast. I won't live out the night.

Humans wear out. I know. What's left can be reworked, repurposed. That much goes on. So is it death, then? When the man in the Chamber makes the call, when he pushes the button, clicks on 'approved'? I'm not sure I know where life begins and ends. What I know is that I feel as if I'm flowing through my own skin, dissolving into the world. I don't want it. Dimly, deeply buried, there's this thing in my heart I think's called fear.

#

I don't know this woman who sits beside me on an unfamiliar couch.She's pretty, her eyes are fire-like, they have colours in them of rose petals and toffee. Her hair is some wonderful concoction of honey and caramel; and she's dressed in red - a frilly neckline that exposes lightly freckled shoulders. I'm pretty sure that I know her, closely, as if in some other life. I hope, whoever she is, I had the sense to be in love with her, to marry her, to hold her in my arms every day. I have flashes of us together, two bodies coiled around each other, hot skin brushing hot skin.

She looks so sad now. I want to reach out and hold her. I want to comfort her. I don't because the distance is too great, because there's this gulf between us of what must be memories and expectations, hopes, fear, grief. That expression on her face is her grieving for me, and I can't answer it in kind, I don't have that in me any longer.

“Can I get you anything?” she asks me.

“No. No I think I'll go outside.”

She looks hurt. And I'm sorry. Dimly sorry. But I can't make the right connection between those feelings, and her, and me.

I stumble as I stand, and she comes to help me. I shrug off her touch and I make my way out there. Am I an old man? I can't remember how many years have come and gone. But I sink onto the steps, turn my eyes up to the heavens. The stars are a mixture of gold and green, they're spread thick along the skyline, a twist of light; and the black void behind them seems itself full of colours, as if those stars are midway through dissolving into it. They're dying with every breath, but when they spill their guts into the universe those guts will be reabsorbed, caught in the orbit of other stars: reused,
reworked, repurposed.

I lean my head against a post, ready for them to come.