Connected / Chapter 1: Transitions

by Jonathan Wood

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is the first chapter of an ongoing flash serial, “Connected.” Search for the tag “Connected” to find other chapters. Subscribe to the Daily Cabal RSS feed for a new chapter every 2 weeks.

Every man has his tribe. Home. Work. Streams of consciousness flooding in. No man is an island. Even in the dark of the night, dreams stream in. Everyone, everything… connected.

Except for these moments. These transitions. Tribe to tribe. Home to work. Family, friends, all-access celebrities, blinked away. Alone. Isolated. David Morello–just a sack of meat waiting.

But only for a moment. The system dials, reconnects. His feed swallowed, disseminated, reconstructed. Detective David Morello. NYPD tribe.

Macros pilot his meatsack to its desk but he’s already got a homicide request. There is a moment of disorientation as the on-scene detective’s visual feed obliterates his own.

A man on a bed. As if asleep. Except his eyes. Black ruins that ran down his cheeks. Crisped flesh at the edges.

“Morello patched in,” he says.

“Chambers,” comes back a hard nasal voice. “My ‘sack’s on-scene. John Doe. Dead on my arrival. Fried.” Chambers pulls up images from the crime lab mainframe. Twisted cranial wiring. Morello asks the AIs in research to cross-reference them.

“Too much heat,” Chambers says. One more image. Graphic.

“We know what the Doe was connected to?” Morello asks. Known harmful feeds, or downloaded malware will cut the case time.

“That’s just it,” said Chambers. Diagnostics begin scrolling down the shared feed. “He wasn’t connected at all.”

No. Morello denies it. The thought of it. It is as if he is suddenly alone. Suddenly in the dark. In that yawning moment of disconnection stretching out, out, out. No feeds. A man alone. Quaking, Knowing this is the last transition. Life to death. Just a sack of meat.

#

He cuts the police feed. Dials his home tribe. His kids, his wife. Sensations wash over him, through him: puzzling over a math problem, over a recipe for stew, watching an ass track down the street.

#

Back. The murder scene. NYPD tribe.

“Thought I lost your feed,” Chambers says.

Again, the fear. But weaker now. John Doe’s problem, not his,

He gets Chambers to flip the corpse over and sees the burn mark. Suicide. Overcharged himself. Morello isn’t surprised. Disconnected… alone… No man is an island. He is either buoyed up by others, or he drowns.

Morello posts his report. He watches the feeds of those who read it. All of them sharing the knowledge. All of them, through him, connected.