Sitting day after day in the veal pen, staring at a screen that flickered just the other side of discomfort, listening to the others bickering about data normalisation and print runs, Maria knew that she had not been normalised. The dirty PC was more akin to her than the chatterers. Maria seldom spoke to anyone. She derived a sordid, voyeuristic pleasure from deciphering some decade-old routine, like Schliemann at Troy.
"Saint martyred with arrows," Jerry, in the next cubicle, said to himself.
"Sebastian," she murmured automatically.
"I'm sorry?"
"Catholic legacy," Maria said sardonically. "You never grow out of it."
"Right. Thanks! That fits, so seven across must be ..."
Maria tuned him out and got back into someone's encryption routine from the late seventies. Evil-minded bastard! Half the code - the complex half - would never get executed. All the program really did was shuffle the hex bits around. The actual encryptation was quite simple if you looked at it right. Like picking at someone's brain. Right, run it. "Shit!" She mistyped the command, and jabbed the return key furiously as the screen filled up with machine code. "You know what I mean," she said to the PC, very low.
"Psychic terminal time, huh?" Jerry said breezily. Maria scowled at him.
Karen, her supervisor, leaned over the top of the partition. "How's it going, Maria? Any luck yet? I need those files by tomorrow. I'm seeing the client at ten."
Maria scowled at her. "Nearly there."
"Hmm. Doesn't look much like English to me," said the other woman, walking round to peer over Maria's shoulder. "Or sound like it." The PC beeped intermittently as it encountered control characters in the dump.
"It's got a migraine. It's being sick," Maria said facetiously.
Karen looked disapproving. "Maria, you have a deadline to meet. You don't have time to fool around. Is this stopping you working? I can find you another terminal -"
"It's fine. I just mistyped a command! Everyone does it. I don't want to kill the dump, I'll lose my session," Maria said in her best voice-of-reason. The Canadian frowned at her. "Maria, I need those files decoded! If you can't get them to me by tomorrow morning, then tell me now and I'll get someone else onto it."
Maria sighed. "Look, I'm leaving early tonight. I'll have the files ready to print by the time I go. Where do you want them printed?"
"You better not leave this office until I have those reports in my hand!" Karen snapped. "And I don't give a damn where you print them, so long as you collect them as they come off!"
Maria glared at the VDU until the hateful bitch had gone away. She hunched down and breathed deeply, trying to wish away the tears of anger. Bitch! Just you wait. I understand these things, you don't. I don't have a bloody problem. You do.
Eventually the screen cleared. Maria took a deep breath and typed the command carefully. She Ok'd the initial parameters and sat back, watching the display.
"Confidential. Access to this document is bound by the terms and conditions ..." Maria stopped reading. She knew some of the others printed this stuff off and sold it. It wasn't that interesting. What was interesting was getting it out in the first place. Beating some long-gone coder who thought he was oh-so-clever, working out the code, getting round the system security.
It would be so good to be at one with it, to get into the machine and flit around like a ghost in an inhuman realm. People were writing about chunks of data that you could move with your hands, code routines like cats-cradles. But she couldn't go into it, not yet, maybe not ever. That was for the flyers, the scientists ... not good Catholic girls with a problem-solving mentality. She could never have been a saint. She could not have given in to the grace of a superior God, a construct just as real as this system-world they had made up from little pieces of reality. Why was the Matrix black? Because screens were black? Because nobody knew what colour it really was. Like God.
She remembered the early Christians with their relics and their fetishes, embedding splinters of the True Cross in their feet to let them walk the stations of the cross. They didn't understand, just like she didn't understand, yet. There was a book she'd read, where the heroine cut off the finger of the dead saint and stitched it into her arm.
It could go into her.
Maria looked at the paper-thin blade. Difficult things to buy on their own; the woman in the shop had looked at her strangely, maybe thinking, "I know what you're going to do, you're sad and stupid, fool." She'd tried to look as though it would be someone else she cut, not herself; but looking up into the security mirror above the shop door, she'd thought: Christ! I look like I'm going to cry.
Paper-thin and sharper than needles. She knew the easiest way was to shut her eyes and press it along her arm like perfume, but that wouldn't do, accuracy was all. Draw a slow, straight line, from the inside of the elbow to the wrist, but please avoid the vein. For now.
It stung. She realised that she should have moved the white rug. The kitchen or the bathroom might have been a better place. Less messy. Real red. Pretty poppy patterns on the white wool.
Quickly, before the blood clotted, she took the chip from its lead foil wrapping and pushed it into the cut. Pain! Difficult to see if it had gone all the way in, because of the blood. Live blood, washing it, making it grow, like planting seeds and watering them. Tying the bandage on was hard. When the flow lessened she would stitch it up. Black nylon button-thread would look well, but the white would be less noticeable. Pressure-ache as she rummaged through the sewing box; feeling of something beside bones and blood-vessels there, inside. She should give something back to the machine. Can't just take. Blood won't do, will it? Tilt the machine and drip some into the disk-drive anyway. It has always looked like a mouth. It could have your soul. It probably has. So much emotion in this interface. About time now to see the other side.
Over the next week Maria worked hard. Karen was transferred, without warning, to another project and her new boss gave her the tricky assignments, radiocodes and satellite data, and left her alone to do her work. Every night she would go home and bathe the wound. "Nail in the door-frame," she said. "Yeah, of course I got the tetanus jab." It was healing well. A little dark lump where the corner hadn't quite gone in. No matter.
At night she dreamt in livid colours, like graphics; but then, she always had.
Occasionally, working late on a scanning routine that wouldn't compile, she would rub her eyes and see fractal patterns. Ah, so it must be working, then. She saw the tiny wires of her veins and capillaries, picking up the output, drawing it up into the brain. Maybe the dark lump was spreading under the surface, corroding. Plenty of raw materials in there. She made an effort to eat healthily. It was important to give herself the right ingredients.
Heading into a city sunset one evening, she looked at the pink and gold and violet and thought of her poisoned flesh. It was not difficult to assess the content of the atmosphere. Turning around, a cool breeze hit her, straight from the rising full moon. No poisons there, in the other world. Yet. Maybe I am a virus, she thought. Maybe I am destroying what I long to see. Nasty human virus in the electronic world. Maybe I will be destroyed. Maybe I will be a martyr. Maybe they will make me a saint.
"You're performing much better these days, Maria. The client's really pleased with you," said Martin, leaning casually over the wall of her cubicle one day. "No, don't stop reading," he added as she closed her book. "I trust you! I know you're too committed to read if you've got work to do. What's the book, anyway?"
"Just a science fiction novel." Maria held it up.
"Hmm. Never heard of him. I used to read a lot of Asimov when I was a kid." Martin smiled engagingly at her. "Not so keen on the new stuff. All a bit depressing and unbelievable ... weird."
Oh, if only you knew, thought Maria. I'm there already.
"Anyway, keep hacking code! We've got to keep the client happy. They ... well, I can't say too much, but they're big in the market, and I'd hate for us to lose their trust. It's like any relationship, Maria, you've got to work at it."
She smiled at him. Her relationship was working in her right now. Of course she didn't make mistakes any more. The system understood her now. Better than Martin did, easy.
Towards the end of the third week, she noted that she was becoming feverish. There was nothing poisonous in the chip, just minerals and printed circuitry. Nothing that could damage her. She began to see patterns that ordinarily she would have been blind to; Fibonacci sequences in the lift indicators, four-dimensional geometry in the sacred music on a Sunday. She could move through crowds without difficulty now, her enhanced mind ceaselessly calculating trajectories and the chaotic factor of the other, human movements. She felt like an angel with wings of rare-metal filigree. Printed wings, with serial numbers. She walked to work every morning now, unable to filter out the babble of the people on the train. Perhaps she'd never really understood it before. Even the African jabber of the women in the chip shop became clear. Language is just another code, she thought. Once you can crack one, you can crack them all. And now I have the software wired in.
Under the surface of her arm the dark lump remained, ominously. Sometimes it seemed to be spreading. "What's in a chip, Jerry?" she asked idly one evening, watching green numbers flicker over the screen as her code worked hard on some industrial file-dump.
"Silicon, I guess. Why?"
"I just read a story where someone had one implanted. Sounded disgusting!" Maria grimaced. White lights flashed in patterns behind her eyes.
"Doesn't sound very healthy. All that stuff they use to print the circuit on. Gold, probably, because it conducts so well. Maybe lead. How did the story end?"
"I don't know", Maria said. "I haven't finished it yet."
Floating on hardware-fever. Her dreams were geometric, on a black background. Sometimes a colour would break through but she could never, on waking, recall it.
Christ leant over the wall of the cubicle, casually, one morning. "Maria," He said to her with gentle reproof, "I am the way, the truth and the life. I died for you to be saved. Not for you to taste this forbidden fruit of knowledge."
"I'm not Eve," she snapped. "And I have to die to get to Heaven and be a saint there. There are other forms of sanctity, you know."
"They are illusions of the Great Deceiver, Maria."
"Binary code doesn't lie," Maria said firmly, turning back to her terminal. Jerry, in the next cubicle, said something, but there was a roaring in her ears and the words were indistinct.
"Just talking to myself," she lied. She stood up, relieved to see that Christ had gone away, and walked across the room to the water cooler. Half-way there, something hit her in the arm, or maybe in the head. She fell.
Unconsciousness seemed brief, and brightly lit. She was aware of raised voices. "It crashed!" Jerry was shouting. Shouldn't he be referring to her as 'she'?
Then there was someone kneeling beside her, a face she couldn't put a name to. It didn't seem to matter.
"Are you all right?" the woman asked. "Did you trip?" She looked around for something that Maria might have tripped on. "No loose wires. That's funny. We thought you might have knocked something out of a socket. The system's down."
"Of course it is," said Maria. "I fell over." The woman laughed as though she'd made a joke. Maybe better to keep quiet. She tried to stand up but her knees wouldn't lock. There was a luminous throbbing in her arm.
"I think we'd better take you to see the doctor," the woman said kindly, supporting her. Maria wanted to protest; but of course the doctor would understand, when she told him. The system was empathising with her. It had worked, then. "Evolution in action," she said, but there was no one to say it to. She'd tell the doctor. He would understand.
She woke up in a hospital bed. There were red flowers, but she couldn't focus on them. There was something missing. Everything was dim and blurred. She remembered then that they had cut her arm open and taken something out. Her heart? Her brain? Something, anyway. Something that they thought shouldn't be there.
She could hear them talking now, but it didn't make any sense. This must be how her terminal had felt when she talked to it, before... before ... Before what? When she hadn't understood. Words in grammatical order that meant nothing. They were saying that she should change jobs. "Too alienating. Too high pressure. Maybe something with children. I think that should suit her. After the treatment's concluded, of course."
"But I'm the next step! I'm evolved!" Maria told them. Fuzzy words. They didn't understand. Maybe they couldn't hear her. Or she was on the wrong bandwidth. Or they'd taken away her voice too.
Christ came and stood at the foot of her bed, resting His mutilated hands on her chart. "I told you so," He said, gloatingly, and went away again before she could reply.
© Tanya Brown 1994