Issue #11 | Excerpt, "A Defiance of Violins"
AS SEEN IN PLANET SCUMM ISSUE #11
WRITTEN BY ANA GARDNER
Illustration by Maura McGonagle
Blood trickled from Nina’s ear. A normal side effect of the neuroport implant, said the doctors. If she keeled over from an aneurysm, the same doctors would shrug, adjust their protocols, and try the experimental surgery again on someone else, all with the same reassuring smile.
Their entirely voluntary experimental surgery. So said the papers Nina had signed, in which she gave the re-education center consent to stick a data port into her brain. Across the post-op room, a man began convulsing in his cot. After a minute, his choked gasps faded, and his body slumped to the floor. A doctor in sterile slacks pressed the wall buzzer.
“Clean-up crew, please.” He smiled hearteningly at the other volunteers. “A very rare post-operatory reaction. This is an extremely safe procedure.”
The consent forms said so, too. Nina wiped her red-stained fingertips on the sheets of her recovery cot. Kind of the doctors to bother with consent forms at all, really. The Peaceable Order controlled everything from the ash-cloud in the west to the diesel-sludge shores back east; if they chose to drill into Nina’s brain with corkscrews, no one would question them.
Two orderlies removed the man with the very rare post-op reaction. The recovery room was emptying fast. Since Nina’s arrival the night before, two post-op volunteers had come in and over a dozen gone out via clean-up crew.
An imbalanced dynamical system.
She could almost remember the equations to solve it: she’d learned them in her first college engineering class. But the Order had shut down all universities that year. So she’d taken refuge in the old city junkyard instead, with a stolen gardening toolbox, and discovered she preferred the practical stuff to the fancy math anyway.
Another thud and a bowel whistle flagged a new volunteer expiring. The doctor pressed the wall buzzer again.
“He had a pre-existing condition,” he said, though everyone knew volunteers had to be perfectly healthy.
Three years ago, Nina might've argued. Shouted at the doctor, thrown a punch, even. But the center had since been gently reminding her about the Freedom of Orderly Protest Act. The best protest was one expressed politely, one that didn’t make anyone uncomfortable. Nina had defied the FOPA once, when Order officers had found her junkyard hydroponics shack and torched it. Three years in the center hadn’t yet erased that debt; her Civic Credit balance sat in the abysmal negatives. Bad enough to keep her in reeducation several more years, and she didn’t much like the idea of turning forty inside the center’s sterile walls.
So she’d volunteered for the extremely safe experimental surgery—with its hefty credit bonus—and let the doctors stab a clump of tiny electric filaments through her skull, past the middle occipital and superior temporal lobes, and into the hippocampus. And now here she was, neuroport stuck in her head and ears bleeding normally. The clean-up crews stuff the latest volunteer into a body bag.
“Please remember to fill out your hourly symptom report,” the doctor said, in his cheery voice. “And don’t worry—most violent tremors and severe bleeding should fade quickly!”
Nina lay back down on her cot, and she waited to die.
