Osiris

The thing in my mother's skin says it's her. It looks like her and it walks like her, but it is not her. My mother was stolen from me, and my best friend had to die to make me realize it. When they come back, they will not remember me, and I will not remember them. That is why I am making this journal log, and burying it as deep inside my brain as I possibly can. I am not myself. And if you're reading this, you are not yourself either.

Everything started when my best friend Anara called and said she needed to talk to me. My mother and I lived out in the woods, so it took her about thirty minutes to get there. When she arrived, I could tell immediately that something was very wrong. She was jumpy and nervous. A thin sheen of sweat covered her brow, and she kept stealing glances over her shoulder. Everytime she looked at me, a shocked expression slid over her face before she could mask it.

When I asked Anara what was wrong, she insisted that we talk in my room. Away from them was all she'd said. This was unlike her. I had never known Anara to be anything short of garrulous. If she needed to chat somewhere nobody else would hear the tea, then I wasn't going to argue.

We went up to my room and closed the door. Anara wouldn't sit down. Her hands were quivering, and she kept pacing from one end of the room to the other, looking out the blinds, pacing, checking that the door was locked, rinse and repeat.

"I'm seeing things," she finally said. "Well, not exactly things. People."

I didn't say anything. I knew better than to interrupt her when she got going on something.

"They look like people I know, but then they don't, and suddenly I can't remember if I really knew them at all, but then I'm sure I don't, and it doesn't make any sense!"

She stopped to suck in deep lungfuls of air. That was always the only way she quit talking, but this time I didn't know what to say. I just stared at her, a puzzled look on my face. The expression on hers was expectation, but there was something else too. Was it worry? Or distrust?

"Okay," I said. The words came out slowly. I needed more time to process this information. "Could you maybe be a little more specific? What people are you seeing?"

Anara studied me closely. She scrunched her face up like she got a whiff of a week-old rotting corpse.

"Friends. Family. People I've known my whole life." She paused. Her eyes flitted back and forth over my face, like she was scanning me, searching for something.

"You."

The word came out so softly, I was sure I wouldn't have heard it if I hadn't seen her lips move. My stomach tightened, and the back of my neck grew hot.

"What do you mean, me?"

"You're not you either," she said.

I laughed nervously. "Of course I'm me. You know me. We've been friends forever."

Anara didn't respond. The heat on my neck increased as her gaze bore deeper into me.

"No, you're not. And you never were to begin with. I know that now."

Something flashed in her eyes then. There was an explosion of red, followed by a muted popping sound.

I swallowed hard. My throat was sore as if I had been screaming for hours.

"Anara, you're splintering. We need to get you to an Osiris station. They can help you."

She rose slowly to her feet. Her hands had stopped shaking, and her mouth was set in a grim, determined line.

"They're the ones who made me this way."

Anara lunged at me with impossible speed. I tried to roll out of the way, but she was way too fast. All the breath was forced out of my lungs as she slammed into me with the force of a runaway jet train. The execrably sweet scent of her perfume infiltrated my sinuses. I would've gagged if there was any air left in my chest.

We rolled off my bed together. The nightstand toppled to the ground with us. I managed to get on top of Anara, but it didn't last long. She tossed me off like I weighed nothing. My head slammed hard into the dresser. My ocular HUD flickered, and warning alerts went off in my mind.

Black snakes coiled at the edges of my vision. Agony split through my skull, and I could feel warm wetness trailing down my neck. Everything in my body wanted to go unconscious, shut off and heal, but I fought to stay awake. I bit down hard on my tongue. Copper filled my mouth, but the pain sent off more warning bells that kept me conscious.

Anara had risen to her feet. She wrapped both hands around my throat and lifted me clean off the ground. Pinned against the wall, I feebly kicked at her torso and clawed for her eyes. A red light gleamed behind her pupils. It was the same light I'd seen just a few seconds ago, but I couldn't be sure if it was real or not. Her fingers were cutting off my air flow. I hadn't been able to catch my breath since she knocked me off the bed, and I began to see those umbral vipers creeping into my vision again.

One of her hands left my neck. My eyes followed her movement as she grabbed a pair of scissors off my desk and held it high above her head. Sunlight glinted off the sharpened points as they aimed menacingly at my breast.

"This is the only way," she snarled. "It always was."

Then she plunged the scissors into the side of her head.

I stared in horror as my best friend twisted the scissors, corkscrewing them deeper into her skull. The red lights in her eyes sputtered. For a split second, the Anara I'd known my whole life returned. She looked scared, and her eyes pleaded with me, making some alien entreaty that I couldn't understand. Then the light left her eyes entirely, and just like that, she was gone.

Her lifeless fingers released my throat. The two of us fell to the ground together. I gasped for air, and crawled over her body. Screams rose in my throat, but all that came out was a scratchy whimper. I pressed my hands to her head in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding. Tears stung my eyes and mingled with the blood running down the side of my face.

Four days later, the authorities had everything figured out. They said she'd splintered. Osiris Inc confirmed the medical examiner's report with their own assessment. All Osiris implants came complete with an event recorder, essentially a mental black box of everything the microchips captured in the days leading up to her death. Everybody said there wasn't anything I could do. Somewhere deep down, I knew that. We'd all heard the horror stories about people who splintered, and all those stories were the same. Anara was already too far gone by the time she got to my house that night.

But then I started seeing things.

Funerals were extremely rare. Mankind had conquered death through medicine and technology long ago, so anytime a human life was extinguished, it was always a massive blow to any community. Anara's funeral was exceptionally difficult due to the graphic nature of her death, but it was particularly devastating to me. She had been my best friend for a long time. But the day she died, she had also been my attacker. Grief mingled with anger and betrayal like cheap wine mixed with sour milk. I didn't know what to say or how to feel. Everyone looked at me weird. Our mutual friends tried useless platitudes, but it was clear they didn't know what to say to me either. Anara's family members regarded me with a mix of rage and suspicion. Most of them didn't say much to me. But I could feel their eyes.

Those angry, hurting gazes followed me everywhere. They openly stared when I entered the small, candlelit chapel, and stole glances while I sat quietly near the back of the room. They watched for my reaction when the priest stumbled around the word "suicide," and they quickly looked away when I caught somebody being a little too conspicuous. And they followed each of my steps as I walked up to her casket.

Anara lay peacefully upon her bed of silk pillows. Her face was completely serene, the huge gash in her head neatly covered with her hair. Tears rolled down my cheeks and my chest burned, but I was determined not to have a breakdown in front of all these people who hated me so openly. My fingers brushed lightly over her hand. The pale skin was cold and tight, as though the mortician had skinned her and then re-stretched the flesh over her musculature.

Then I lifted my gaze to her face and screamed.

Anara's father escorted me from the premises in no uncertain terms. I can't say I blame him or his wife. But they didn't see what I saw. Anara's face was the same one second, and the next, it was so wrong.

That wasn't Anara. It couldn't be. They must have been unable to sew up the knife wound in the side of her face and put a completely different cadaver in her casket as a placeholder. It was the only explanation that made sense.

When I got home, my mother was there. It was just the two of us in our big country home. Dad died some years back. Rather than driving us away, the experience had only brought my mother and I closer together, so when I found her home from work, relief quelled my screaming nerves.

"What's wrong?" She asked when I came through the front door. "You're pale as a ghost. Was it the funeral?"

"Kinda," I murmured. "Mom, how much do you know about splintering?"

Shock rarely crossed my mother's face. In that moment, she looked as though she'd been impaled on a rusty hook. Her mug rattled as she slowly sat it down on its saucer.

"Katherine, you know we don't talk about that kind of thing. Splintering is very serious. I will not speculate on its nature, and neither should you."

"I'm not speculating, mom, just asking a question. I've heard all the horror stories, but nobody wants to talk about what it actually is."

My mother's brows knitted together, and I could see her cheek pulled into her mouth as she chewed on it.

"Sweetheart, there isn't much I can say," she said. "There isn't much known about it, other than that sometimes it happens to people who start asking questions." She paused for a moment, her jaw furiously worrying at her cheek. "Questions like the ones you're asking me right now, dear."

Frustration flared inside my gut. I threw my hands up in the air and said, "Great, so even my own mother won't tell me anything more about it than anyone else will. Anara splintered in front of me, mom. How am I supposed to cope with that if I don't even know what it is I saw?"

"That's enough," she snapped. "You know why we don't talk about it. Because one of the only things that's known about splintering is that it happens when you decide to stop trusting in Osiris and asking the same stupid questions that got Anara killed."

Her rebuke was startling. I had never known my mother to be so blunt or harsh with me, not since we both lost my father. My mouth stood agape as she stared at me with cold, calculating eyes. I tried to remember if I had ever seen her react like this. The HUD in my vision reacted to my inquiry instanteously, pulling up old video files of the few times I had seen her angry. As the files shuffled at 10x speed in my mind's eye, an agonizing bolt of pain tore through my skull.

I grabbed at my head, instinctively protecting it against whatever attack this was. A shudder ran through my HUD, and for a split second, it shut off. There was a deafening pop, and in that moment, my mother's face changed. Flesh and hair sizzled and spat, shifting momentarily as though her entire face was somehow burning with a lightless flame. Her features morphed and melted, digital rivulets of flesh that coalesced into a hideous amalgam.

I clapped a hand over my mouth and stifled the scream trying desperately to escape my throat. With a static fizzle that only I could hear, my HUD returned, and my mother's face went back to normal. There was a look of worry on her face, but I could do nothing except stare in open horror.

"What's wrong, sweetheart?" She asked. Her hand reached out for mine. I yelped, and ripped my arm away from her.

Surprise replaced worry on her face. I didn't blame her. Never once in the dozens of years living with her had I flinched from her touch. Before she could say anything else, I turned, ran upstairs to my room, and locked the door.

Over the next few days, I barely left my room. Anytime I did, I would catch glimpses of her face. Not the one that I grew up with, but that other one. Food and sleep didn't matter. What little sleep I got was plagued with nightmares of Anara and my mother holding me down and cutting off my body parts with dull fabric scissors. They always had those awful amalgamations of features, like somebody took the images of hundreds of people, created wax versions of them, and melted them all together in one horrifying fleshy glob.

On the fifth day, I couldn't take it anymore. Every second spent in my room was like living in a prison of my own design. I needed to figure out what to do, and since nobody else was going to help me, I had to do it myself.

I knew as much about Osiris, Inc, as anyone else. What I didn't know already was information easily found online. Osiris was one of the few international megacorporations still allowed to operate after most of the world governments imposed heavy regulations on business size and monopolies. The only reason Osiris was the exception is because their advances in medical technology allowed mankind to conquer its oldest enemy: time.

Osiris researchers were the first to permanently cure cancer. Other diseases followed soon after. They made man impervious to illness or disease. Life expectancy soared, and within a few more decades they had also cracked the code to eternal life. Everyone who could afford an Osiris implant did so at any price range, and as the trend grew and spread, fewer humans died at all. That was over eight hundred years ago.

When I dug a little deeper, I discovered a number of articles covering early scandals involving Osiris. Most of them were from a couple hundred years after the First Implanted were chipped. That was when the first cases of splintering came out. A few articles, however, were more recent.

Almost half a dozen scientists had defected from the company over claims of malpractice and what they called "implant-accredited mental degradation." From what I could see, the scientific community had largely discredited their unpopular views, and the scientists in question were dismissed as little more than disgruntled employees or kooks.

One of the names appeared more than the others; Lamar Wolfe. Apparently, he was one of the more...eccentric personalities involved. His disgruntled colleagues called him idealistic; Osiris representatives preferred the word "fanatic." The only thing I cared about was that he lived less than two hours from me.

Lamar lived in a small studio apartment on the middle floor of a building that looked like it was once part of an affordable housing initiative. At some point after the Winnowing was completed in the year 2109, community members had turned the entire building into a multi-story mural. Huge swaths and swirls of color characterized one of the structure's exterior walls. Those same sweeping strokes coalesced on subsequent walls into magnificent landscapes of bright greens and blues, trees that reached beyond the building's highest story, lakes that were so clear they looked like aquariums bustling with aquatic wildlife. It was breathtaking.

The interior was just as colorful. Each floor was dedicated to a different aspect of the overarching themes that the exterior boasted. Lamar lived on the seventh floor, which appeared to be an homage to the distant mountains. Hand-painted monoliths of natural stone stretched down the hallway in long waves of earthen greys and browns. My feet followed the path of a mountain stream that chased the baseboards in happy little billows. By the time I reached Lamar's door, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was a supplicant searching for answers from the mountain sage's zenith apartment.

Lamar Wolfe was not the man I expected. He was tall and broad, with large, sculpted muscles that threatened to burst through the seams of his T-shirt at any moment. The only part of his appearance that was even remotely like how I expected a renowned scientist to look was a pair of thin, wire-framed glasses that perched precariously on the end of his nose.

"Go away," he snapped.

"But I-I haven't even said anything yet."

"You've got the look of a nosy reporter anxious to drudge up the past for a payday. I'm not interested."

Before he could slam the door in my face, I blurted, "I had an earth-shattering migraine and now my mother doesn't look the way she used to."

The heavy wooden door stopped mid-swing. Lamar's glare was like hot iron on bare skin, searing through me to my deepest parts, searching me for...something. Finally, he grunted and walked away. He didn't shut the door behind him, so I took that as an invitation and stepped into the eccentric ex-scientist's apartment.

Perhaps if it were not for that conversation, things would've turned out differently. Maybe if I hadn't sought out the answers, and just gone to an Osiris station to be adjusted, my mother wouldn't be dead. The only solace I have in these final moments is that I won't exist long enough to ever know the answer. I'm just hoping that you will.

When I got home from Lamar's, the thing with my mother's voice was waiting for me.

"Where have you been?"

Her voice was coolly disconnected, as though she wanted to mask her rage. I studied her shifting face carefully, but there were no human expressions on that waxen knob.

"I was just...out. With friends."

She took a long sip of her tea. When she sat it down, the closest approximation to human emotion on her face was malice.

"I received a notification directly from Osiris's Customer Wellness Department. They said their servers picked up that you went to visit a disgraced ex-scientist of theirs."

My intestines knotted together, and my mouth became a barren heath. I tried licking my lips to wet them, but it was like running my tongue over sun-scorched desert fissures.

"I needed answers," I said slowly. "You wouldn't give them to me, so I had to go talk to somebody who would."

"You could've splintered." Her voice was barely a whisper. "You could've lost your life talking to that nasty man."

Everything inside my body went cold. That agonizing bolt of pain shot through my skull again, but I remembered what Lamar told me. Osiris couldn't access me anymore.

"I've already splintered, mom. It started the day Anara killed herself in front of me."

Her body jerked violently, then went rigid. Auburn bangs fell over her eyes, but the rest of her face was unmercifully bare. The only movement was the shifting features of those who splintered before her oscillating across her face. There was no way to tell if I had known any of the people that previously inhabited her body. I don't think I'd remember them even if I had. Osiris had taken all of that from me.

The silence between us stretched seconds into lifetimes. The amalgam rose slowly from her chair, her movements snappy and erratic. When she looked at me, her bangs fell back into place, revealing bright red neon lights in the center of her pupils.

When she lunged at me, I felt stupid that I didn't see it coming. When she wrapped her fingers around my throat, I wondered if this was all my fault. When I grabbed the little red tea kettle she knocked over and slammed it into her head, I saw Anara's skewered temple instead of hers. When the tears stung my eyes and burned streaks through my makeup, I didn't stop swinging. And when she stopped moving, the rest of me died with her.

They're all out there now. There must be a hundred of them. All the empty husks that have yet to receive an implant, all of them standing there lusting after what I've got in my head, all of them staring into the house with those horrible scarlet pinpricks. Osiris sent them. They'll retrieve me and my mother, and our memories will be suppressed and hidden away in the back of a microchip's memory drive, pushed aside to make room for the next consciousness that paid for the immortality package.

I don't know how little time I have left, but I am using it to write this memory log in the hopes that the next person who inherits my chip can succeed where I have failed. If you're reading this, then you are not yourself. You're not me either. You are all of us. And you have to stop them before they've downloaded the rest of the world.