The Chip
Photography by Tori TisoWritten by Emma LiverseedAlice’s wrist was too small, and the medical ID bracelet kept sliding off. She pulled it tighter to feel the plastic bite into her flesh, the pinch of pain distracting her from the anxieties swirling in her head. After the nurse recorded her height and weight, Alice stripped down in the preoperative room and scrubbed her skin with antibacterial wipes. The hospital gown was purple and stiff. Every time she moved it crinkled like tissue paper. A framed watercolor of a fern hung opposite to the hospital bed; it was meant to be soothing, she supposed, though it did little to calm her mind. She thought that a hospital painting should be more uplifting, but the colors were dull and stale, like the fern was tired of trying to please the patients who stared at it. If she squinted, she could see a fine layer of dust covering the glass of the frame. The artist had used only one shade of sickly green, painting the edges of the fern harshly as if they thought they were using acrylics instead, forcing the outline of the individual leaves onto the stark canvas with exactly-engineered strokes. Alice closed her eyes, envisioning herself with a paintbrush. Watercolor paints should drip down with gravity, she thought, creeping into the paper fibers, blooming and spreading. They should be allowed to breathe and move, following the flow of the water. It made her long for the paint set and colored pencils on her desk at home. Lately she couldn’t stop drawing birds and had a sketchbook filled with capped petrels, snowy egrets, black-necked grebes, and tawny owls, every feather illustrated in exquisite detail. She thought of the half-finished sketch in her room, a drawing of a belted kingfisher that she was going to finish as soon as she returned from the hospital. Will used to tease her, telling her he wouldn’t be able to handle the fame of being related to a soon-to-be famous artist. Alice gazed at the fern for a moment longer, wishing she could paint a more cheerful picture for the hospital walls. Holding a paintbrush or pencil would help her relax, would stop her hands from fidgeting with the paper gown.It wasn’t the surgical procedure Alice was worried about. She had no doubt that the surgeon could do his job. It was what she would be like after the surgery, after the chip had been implanted. She remembered the day her brother had come home from the hospital with a small portion of his scalp shaved and a distant look on his face. He had instantly retreated to his room to study for the Admittance Test, the exam that, if he passed, would enable him to enter into the country’s most prestigious college. She hardly saw Will that summer, his intensely concentrated face always buried in a mound of textbooks. Gone were his easy grin and corny jokes; this Will was serious and studious. But that was the whole point of the chip, wasn’t it?Being able to afford the chip wasn’t any different than sending your child to private school, hiring a tutor for them, driving them to an ACT prep class, or paying a club membership fee so that they would be trained by the best swim coach in the area. Since the passing of the Chip Enhancement Act, all students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one were eligible to receive a memory enhancing neural implant, provided that their families could pay for it. The silicon chips were smaller than a grain of rice and mimicked the hippocampus’s ability to convert short-term memories into long-term memories, dramatically increasing one’s capacity to retain information. Alice was about to join the ranks of privileged students who could afford augmented intelligence. The procedure did have side effects, but it was the general consensus that the benefits of the chip outweighed the cons. And if these side effects produced a generation of competitive, intelligent youth, well, that didn’t seem like such a terrible thing.She thought of the last words her mother had spoken to her while they sat in the hospital waiting room. Alice had let one worry slip, had let one apprehension about the procedure escape from her lips, only to be completely dismissed.“Alice, honey, I hope you realize how fortunate you are. This is an opportunity that two percent of the country is lucky enough to get.” She had smiled at her daughter, but her grin was too big and Alice couldn’t stop staring at the smear of lipstick on her teeth. “I think you’re happier about the chip than I am.” Alice murmured.“Does it make your father and I happy that our children are going to be successful? That they’ll get into the best schools, get the best jobs? You kids could run this country someday. Be grateful that we’re able to afford this.”Her mother squeezed Alice’s bouncing knee with a manicured hand, tightly, silencing her with the same look she’d given her when she’d brought up applying to art school. Then the nurse had called Alice’s name, and Alice followed her, and the preoperative prepping began.Alice’s veins were so unwilling to be punctured that the nurse had to use an infant needle to insert the IV into her wrist. It didn’t help that she was terrified of needles, so when the ponytailed nurse finally found a vein on the fourth try, Alice excused herself to go to the bathroom. She hadn’t eaten anything in almost twenty-four hours to prepare for the surgery and felt nauseous and tingly and ready to pass out. She needed a moment to breathe, a few minutes away from the beeping monitors and depressing fern painting. She swung her bare legs out of bed and grabbed her phone from the plastic bag that the nurse had put her personal belongings in. She padded into the hallway, dragging the IV pole behind her. The tickle in her stomach wasn’t just nausea; something else was gnawing at her. It was cold in the bathrooms and Alice’s teeth chattered mercilessly. She stared at the phone in her palm. She knew who she had to call, even though she hadn’t talked to him in months. She’d called a few times, back at the beginning of the semester, but he was always busy with exams or his position at the research lab or both. Eventually her calls to him had stopped. And he’d never called back. But if anyone could understand what she was going through, it was him. The phone rang for what seemed like ages. Please, she thought. Pick up pick up pick up.“Hello?” “Will? It’s Alice.”There was a brief pause on the other end.“Alice. How are you?” His voice was stiff, distracted.“I’m actually in the hospital right now. I’m about to get the chip. “Congratulations. I’m sure Mom and Dad are thrilled.”“Are you happy?”“What?”“Are you happy, with the chip?” “Alice, what is this?” Annoyance crept into his tone. She could picture him bent over his laptop, pinching the bridge of his nose.I’m your sister, she wanted to scream. You left me and now I’m here and I’m going to be just like you because that’s what they want me to be.“Do you even miss me?”A stretch of silence curled around her like a rope, pulling tighter and tighter until she was forced to break it. “There’s an awful painting of a fern—”“Listen, Alice, I’m sorry I can’t talk longer. They need me at the lab.” “Will, just tell me—”“Goodbye.”She set her phone on the bathroom countertop, suddenly noticing a throbbing in the tip of her left index finger, though it was impossible that she should still feel anything from the injury. Three weeks after Will received his chip, Alice was dicing an onion when she’d sliced the end of her finger, resulting in a peeled flap of flesh, certainly deep enough to warrant a trip to the ER. She’d quickly bundled her finger in a kitchen towel and rushed to Will’s room, pounding on his locked door, begging him to drive her to the hospital. When he finally answered, Will stared blankly at her tearstained face and the bloody towel before regretfully glancing at the scene behind him. It was as if she had woken him from a trance. Although his body blocked most of the doorframe, she could see a mess of books and papers scattered on his desk and the floor. She had followed Will to the garage, startled by the terseness of his motions as he snatched the car keys from the kitchen counter, the irritated clench of his jaw. Sitting in the passenger seat, Alice squeezed her right hand tighter around the balled up towel as a small surge of relief rushed through her body.“At least it wasn’t my drawing hand.” “Would it have really mattered if it was?” Will muttered, so quietly she almost wasn’t sure if his lips had moved at all. He abandoned her in the emergency room, telling her to call their mother’s work phone when she needed to be picked up. She knew he was going to return to his bedroom, to his cluttered desk and flashcards, feverishly studying, altogether forgetting he had a sister. That afternoon she sat alone in the waiting room, overcome by anger and confusion, wishing she could read her brother’s thoughts, wondering what she would find inside his head.Alice looked in the bathroom mirror and pressed both palms to her skull. Soon a surgeon would be poking around in her gray matter, inserting a little piece of silicon that would alter the way her electrical impulses fired. Improving her. I let this get too far. Alice could feel her throat tightening as her heartbeat ricocheted in her chest like a spatter of bullets. She had to leave. She needed to get the IV out of her wrist, she needed to put her real clothes back on. She could feel herself spiraling, her thoughts twisting and splitting and tangling until she no longer had a coherent thread to grasp. She stumbled out of the bathroom, supporting herself against the cool cinder block wall.“There you are!” A voice chimed. It was her nurse with the brown ponytail. “We need to finish getting you prepped. Follow me.” She put a hand on Alice’s shoulder and steered her back into the preoperative room.The nurse placed the heart rate monitor on Alice’s finger and frowned. “Your heart rate is a little high. Are you feeling okay?”Unable to contain her nerves any longer, hot tears ran down Alice’s cheeks. Embarrassed, she swiped them away, but they continued to fall.“I’m just-just-,” Alice said, gripping the sides of her hospital gown, “just...a little...panicked. I don’t think I can do this.”The nurse nodded sympathetically.“You’re a lucky girl, you know. If the chip had been around when I was your age, if my parents could have afforded it…” She tilted her head. “Let me check with your anesthesiologist. I’ll be right back.”A few minutes later the anesthesiologist ducked her head in the room. She had bright blue eyes and spiky lashes. “Hi there, Alice. I’m Dr. Bennett. I’m going to administer an anxiolytic into your IV line to calm you down a bit.”“Okay,” Alice puffed her cheeks and blew out a shaky breath. If she was relaxed, she’d be able to think more rationally. She could explain to the doctors, to her parents, exactly why she couldn’t get the chip, and then they would let her leave.Dr. Bennett released a syringe into her IV bag. Alice’s eyelids fluttered as the anti-anxiety medicine flushed her veins. The walls of the room began to soften, the watercolor of the fern wavering like a flag. “Does that feel better?” Dr. Bennett asked. “I’ll let Caroline know you’re ready, and then she’ll bring you to the operating room.” The drug was stronger than she’d expected, and Alice’s head began to drift. She was aware of a nurse wheeling her out of the preoperative room and down a long, beige hallway that seemed to extend for miles. The room they entered had a narrow table in the center of it, a steel rectangle surrounded by looming medical equipment and four figures in scrubs. The fluorescent lights flickered and she could taste the antiseptic in the air. She felt her limbs move from the gurney to the operating table. The nurses and doctors circled around her in a precise dance, sticking electrodes to her sides and snapping on blue gloves. She had something to tell them, if she could just find the words. If only her head would stop spinning like a merry go round. Alice was incredibly tired but could not let herself fall asleep yet. She tried to speak, but her tongue refused to move. Blue eyes with spiky lashes swam in her vision as an oxygen mask was slid over her face. “Wait,” Alice murmured, “wait.”
Alice flipped to another page of her textbook. She’d memorized over eight hundred pages in just three hours. She knew everything there was to know about the history of Western Europe. Soon she would take the Admittance Test, pass with flying colors, and attend the most prestigious school in the country, just like her brother. Her phone rang, the screen lighting up with the face of her mother. Alice did not care to answer. If it was important, the woman could leave a voicemail. What she did care about was solving for x.
The answer was J. Alice laughed. It was almost too easy. She’d never been great with math, but now she felt invincible. She put her workbook aside and flipped open her laptop, catching a glimpse of herself in the dark computer screen. Although she wouldn’t admit it, her looks were becoming worrisome; her face was gaunt from forgetting to eat, eyes bloodshot from the inordinate amount of caffeine she’d been consuming.Alice rarely interacted with the two adults who still shadowed her life with an air of authority, but her parents were elated at her progress, grinning over the practice exams she had been scoring perfectly on for days. Yes, they told their friends, we’re so proud of Alice and Will. We can’t wait to see what the world has in store for them! Alice tapped at the keyboard with ragged fingernails, clicking to a new set of math problems. The ability to process and retain every scrap of new information was like a high. And yet, sometimes she couldn’t help but feel a nagging sensation in the back of her mind, a tiny ache that demanded to be noticed. She would glance at the untouched art supplies in the corner of her room, at the sketch of the belted kingfisher that she never found the time to finish. The image of a wilted fern would materialize into her head, and she’d feel a faint stutter of her heartbeat, a pleading twinge of longing that halted her studies, if only for a moment.