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Sublimated

Congratulations! You have been Chosen.

By Samantha HearnPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Artwork: Samantha Hearn

Anyone else would rejoice this morning. Waking up to the notification that $20,000 has been deposited into your record by the Federation means more than the money itself - it means influence, fame, and the coming of more luxury and high technology than you could ever dream. It means you have been Chosen.

Anyone else would be in a state of elated disbelief, giddy in anticipation of their upgraded body and brand-new face. They'd be relieved at their uprooting from the ground class, the Federation, to the skies. To Hyperion. Their chest might be pounding at the chance to ascend, and I don't blame them. But my heart was racing for a different reason. This was planned, calculated even. I was Chosen, this piece of the puzzle falling perfectly into place like the middle notes of a well conducted orchestra. I prayed I wouldn't be off key.

My hand was shaking as I grabbed my record from the bedside table, a clear card that housed an endless symposium of data about me, checking again the balance in my ledger.

$20,004.89 with the note, "Congratulations! You have been Chosen. The Federation will arrive to escort you shortly."

The $4.89 I managed to maintain since last year when The Group found me, and the $20,000 I received this morning. My days of cleaning apartments for pennies as a cover was now over, but it left nothing but a buzzing feeling in my gut. The plan was moving forward.

For the last few months I had been close to $5, the amount you needed to legally extradite from the Federation. This wasn't an upgrade to Hyperion, but a disjunction altogether. Less than ten have ever made it out, and none have ever returned. Despite the plan that I was now a central part of, and despite James and The Group and everything that was at stake, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about extraditing.

Three months ago, I reached a breaking point. I had helped The Group execute Phase Two, the part of the plan where we launched a bit-coup on the Federation's secret crypto accounts. We were nearly caught until James enabled a code at the last minute that deleted the records of our cyber footprint, but I had never felt such intense fear. If they had located our signal, the punishment would have been unfathomable. There were stories about hackers who went missing. Sometimes their remains would turn up months later, mutilated to serve as a warning to others. I thought about the time I saw someone like this, the body strung into pieces on 3rd Alley. I was seven and coming home from work to have dinner with my parents. Needless to say, I lost my appetite after that. After this coup, I couldn't push the dark thoughts. The quiet battle cry edging closer with each Phase of the plan we successfully, often narrowly, carried out. I thought to myself, "What if you had $5?"

But I never got the chance to find out the answer to that question. Something always came up - quite often, it was $0.15 arbitration fees from the Federation. Things like meal tickets, air quality fees, broadcast fees - the silent prison guards of not just myself, but an entire population. The Federation Regulators who collected these sums weren't really the problem - they were how I got connected with The Group, and with James. It was the Federation itself that kept us all in the trenches, a population simply thankful to eat and too afraid to fight.

Unless of course, you are Chosen. Then you had no choice.

I wondered how long I had before they showed up and wished desperately that I had a mirror. I thought of James and his green eyes, the same color as mine. Would he recognize me when we next meet? If this works, and we're pretty certain it's going to work, then the next time he sees me I won't be the version of myself that he first befriended and recruited to help The Group. I'll need to be deprogrammed, and it won't be easy.

My mind will be microchipped by Hyperion technologists, and the extraction process will involve my future self being kidnapped and operated on by The Group, who I'll have long forgotten. My body will never be what it is now. Any imperfections that stain my frame will be smoothed over. My eyes would glow golden instead of green. James would only recognize me by the blazing red of my hair, a near impossible genetic rarity that was too fascinating to the Hyperion for them to change. Nearly 30 percent of all Hyperion had red hair, a statistic that meant I would have likely been Chosen anyway.

Sublimation is an easy process, or so they say. You go under, you get chipped, they upgrade your body, and when you wake up you don't remember a thing. I wasn't afraid of sublimation. Sometimes I thought it seemed like bliss. But de-sublimation? It was unheard of. No one has ever been deprogrammed and come back to their former selves intact. There were stories about the ones who went mad, cast out to fend with the extradited. In the early days of The Group's overthrow attempts, not even the hackers who did make it to Hyperion were able to recall what they were doing there in the first place. Which is exactly why James had me record everything into a small black notebook.

I never learned to write, it was forbidden for commoners in the Federation, but James had learned how in his Regulator training and taught me. We had to be stealth, always, but on nights we could log off the system we'd go to the sagging roof of my apartment building. Overlooking the neon waste of the city, he showed me how to press pen to paper.

"The ink comes through this ball here," James had said, pointing at the tip of the pen with his index finger. "And as you roll it across the paper, more ink comes out, creating a line." He demonstrated, his sandy hair falling slightly into his face as he looked down. I stared at him, the smell of spice and smoke nearly dizzying me.

He looked up at me, his deep green eyes mirroring mine. My chest tightened as his gaze shifted to my hands. Placing the pen in my palm, he guided his hand on mine to form the number one. Electricity bolted through me then and every night after when we were like this - student and teacher.

"This notebook contains a language only we know," he said, his tone serious. I knew he meant "we" as in The Group, the hackers, but I felt that in the end it would come down to the two of us. The clean pages lay open in front of us, its dense gravity anchoring the moment.

"You have to imprint this," he continued, still holding the pen in my hand, still touching me. "This is the one thing you cannot forget."

"I won't," I said, a promise I wasn't sure I could keep but made anyway.

Tucked away somewhere only he knew, that notebook would be my future self's saving grace when we reached the point in the plan where I'd find it and (hopefully) decode its contents. Where I'd relearn what I know now - that the Federation and Hyperion were working together to mine human consciousness on a vast, unprecedented digital scale.

Hyperion's leader was known as The Senator, a tech genius who founded the city some 200 years ago as an experimental artificial intelligence society. They figured out how to inextricably link the human mind with raw data, causing unprecedented hyper-intelligence and extreme longevity. Building Earth Two just outside of our atmosphere, Hyperion was established as a way for those who could afford it to escape the extreme conditions on Earth One. Ever since, those in the trenches of the Federation have been clawing for a way out, most either praying to be Chosen or dying from work exhaustion. Everyone in the Federation did some kind of manual labor. In Hyperion, people simply lived.

James, a Level 6 Regulator therefore confined to Earth One, had made certain through some data tweaking that he'd be on my team of handlers when they arrived. Or at least, that's what he told me the last time I saw him. That was five weeks ago. My stomach wrenched, hoping he would knock on my door at any moment as part of the Federation team that would lead me to my fate. I couldn't let on for a second that I knew who he was, but the thought of him being there to escort me was a small comfort in the face of so much uncertainty.

The quiet buzz in my small, box-like home was deafening, and a ringing in my ears began to fill the silence. I took one more look around at the concrete walls that had housed me since I was 16. I was grateful at the time for Federation-sanctioned housing, but 12 years later it felt like a prison cell. Empty. I placed my record back on the metal bedside table, just in time to hear a knock on my door that meant only one thing. It was time.

I rose, my limbs numb, and walked to open the door.

Two tall, spindly men wearing black Regulator suits stood before me, their golden eyes clueing me in to their true identities. These men were Hyperion, not Federation. Why were they dressed in Regulator clothing? And more importantly - where was James?

"Good evening, Miss Calla," the one on the left, his hair only slightly darker than his silent counterpart's bright blonde, said. "We're here to take you to Hyperion."

"Is - are there more of you coming?" I stuttered, trepidation filling my gut.

The man looked at me with the faintest glimmer of sarcasm then smiled, showing a large set of pristine teeth.

"No, we're afraid not," his smooth, angelic voice rang. A sweet scent emanated from him, but instead of soothing - it sickened me. I felt the color drain from my face, but schooled my features in an attempt to conceal how uneasy I was that James was nowhere to be found.

"It's time to come with us. Leave your belongings. You won't be needing them." His glowing eyes surveyed me from head to toe, sending a chill through my body as he scanned each part.

I took a narrow breath, my senses compounding as I followed them down the shoddy hallway. We reached the elevator, a stinking silver box that carried residents to and from the ground they worked on. But instead of going down we rose higher, well beyond the rooftop that James and I had shared on so many nights. I wasn't sure how - the men didn't press a single button. Despite the opulence that lay ahead, I had no doubt that my escorts were disgusted, their breath held tight from the stench and filth that held us during my final moments as a Federation citizen. My gut sank lower with each level we ascended until the doors opened to a blinding white light that encompassed my vision completely.

"How fitting," I thought. "Blind nothingness before an even blinder fate."

My eyes seared with pain in the seconds before I lost consciousness, but my mind clung to James - the one person who could save me from sublimation.

"You have to imprint this. This is the one thing you cannot forget."

His rich words were the last sounds to course through my subconscious as I submitted, letting the white light take me under to my unseen destiny in the skies of Hyperion.

humanity
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About the Creator

Samantha Hearn

Hi! I'm Sammy Hearn, a photographer and artist based in Nashville, Tennessee. I like to write all sorts of things - DIY how-to costume stuff, photo series, short poems, fiction, you name it. My work can be found at www.samanthahearn.com.

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