The woman buttoned the top of her blouse and angled her body to the boy. “Yes, that is what I mean. You are alienating. Hostile. Even to those you know mean you well. Psych profiles place you in the top percentiles for intelligence. If you would have cooperated on the examinations we could have placed you more accurately. But you don’t use that intelligence wisely. You purposefully lash out and degrade those around you.”
“Or, you could just be more honest and say that people want to maintain the facade of comfortable lies and masks they use. Jesus, don’t you all get tired of it? Or is it that you’re all just so fucking scared all the time? Fuck all your boxes. Fuck all your strata and rules and cages. Look at you! Borderline anorexic, overly made-up, over-slutted, and probably thinking to get a boob job. Honestly, did you sign up for this shit when God handed out the double X’s?”
The woman looked away from him. “Is that why the girl left you? Did you treat her like this?”
The boy turned to face her for the first time. “Seriously? You know my fuck-buddies? Is that why they picked you?”
“We receive detailed dossiers on our patients. Personal relationships are often part of that. All anonymous. We try to understand and we need backgrounds to see the big picture.”
He laughed, throwing his head back. “You lying motherfuckers. You’re a goddamned Fed! I should have known it. All this therapy for juvenile offenders! You’re profiling me!”
The woman froze slack-jawed, but said nothing.
“I can’t believe I didn’t see through it sooner. I guess they picked you for that. I kinda trusted you. It was like instinct. All those pheromones and those boobs and the neural pathways — zap! They fuck you up. You really want to know? Zap! That’s what the girl was. Lots of research you can read online. It’s like heroin, you know? Same brain pathways. Same high. Same addiction and withdrawal. Except it also plugs into all these emotional pathways. So it’s a hundred times worse than heroin. Hormones and receptors and neural pathways designed over ten million years to get chunks of meat to fuck and make more chunks of meat.”
The woman paled and pulled back slightly in her chair.
“These thoughts, Tony, I am concerned—”
“You are concerned,” he barked, chuckling. “You don’t give a fuck except for what kind of checklist of personality traits you can enter into a database for your puppet masters. Fingerprints, blood type, you likely got my DNA. Now it’s gonna be some kind of brain-print. You need a pattern, profiles, data for the algorithms to train on. Not really there yet, are you, though? But let me help. I can tell you all about our relationship.” He leaned forward toward the woman. “I think you like talking about sex. I think it arouses you.” He held his face steady in front of hers. “Maybe that’s why you do this.”
The woman licked her lips.
The teen pivoted his body again and looked away from her. “Anyway, that fucking girl. I can tell you, heaven and hell, love and loss. All that. Damn, that panic. Lost, lost, lost.” He replaced his glasses. “But that’s the withdrawal. You’re sick, all the hormones fucked to hell. Then, you finally come out of it. Then you see. You finally know the truth.”
“Which is?” Her voice was hoarse and dry
“That there is no love. No destiny. No meaning to these stupid feelings. That’s the delusional thinking, doc. Then you understand that emotion is the problem.”
She shook her head vigorously. “Don't you see, Tony? This is just another form of extreme idealization. You went from an extreme belief in transcendent love to an extreme disbelief in all love, a rejection of all meaning in human emotion.”
His voice turned cold. “Look, dogs love us. Cats nurture their young. Birds have emotions. The only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the animals is a small first step in abstract thought. That’s it. With emotion, we’re puppets to our dicks, our ovaries, some asshole with a shiny car or a promise that you’ll live forever. Cut the emotion! Engage the fucking homunculus.”
He stood up and pressed his jacket flat, buttoning it closed.
“We’re done here,” he said. “You go write your report. Like I said, they’re not going to do anything with me. They wouldn’t dare. File it. It won’t matter. In ten years, it won’t even exist.”
The woman’s eyebrows arched upward, but he didn’t pause to consider her confusion. With confident steps, he walked to the door of the office and left.
30
It was one of the largest water filtration plants in the United States. Twelve acres, drilled through bedrock to a depth of over four stories in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park, it sat over one of the main supply lines feeding water from the Croton Reservoir into New York City. Water flowed from the force of gravity upstate through two eight-thousand-foot-long tunnels into the plant, where particulates were removed, solids dewatered by centrifuges, and the filtered water disinfected with ultraviolet light and chlorine. Chemical alterations were then made to control corrosion and add fluoride.
The entire process utilized several networked controllers, twelve workstations, five separate operator interfaces and numerous ‘intelligent’ devices, including flow-meters, pressure and temperature sensors, transmitters, and automated chlorination analyzers. Everything was networked, highly modernized, automatic, and requiring far less human oversight than anything else like it ever produced.
On the evening of October 27th, the first sign of problems was detected by a skeleton crew manning the equipment to analyze the quality of the final water to leave the facility. A young woman with Indian features and lush black hair gazed at the readings from a dilapidated sensor, a relic from the early testing of the computer systems. Her body was tense, the white of her lab coat contrasting with the deep caramel of her skin. The readings from the other sensors were normal. She felt that she shouldn’t care about this artifact of older tech, one that management had never given the order to remove. While it had never acted up before, common sense told you that someday it would fail. It shouldn’t bother her when all else appeared normal.
But it did. She spoke into a mobile phone.
“No, Larry. Everything reports nominal. It’s only the older ovation monitor. It’s screaming on the chlorine and fluorine levels. Look, I didn’t want to get you out of bed for this. Probably just the old unit has finally gone senile on us.”
There was a pause in her speech as she listened intently. “No, really, no need to come in. Look, I know your close, it’s just I…Okay. All right. Fine. I’m happy just to log it, but if you want…Okay. Yeah, I’ll call the chemists on three.”
She walked up to the bank of computer monitors to check once more the readings from the chemical sensors. Satisfied that all was within normal parameters, she sat down to open a video call with the staff upstairs.
“What the hell?”
The computer was unresponsive. She moved to a nearby terminal, but it too had completely locked up. The unease that had buzzed in the background of her mind at the anomalous readings came much more strongly to the fore. Is there a computer problem? In all the years she had worked here, there had never been a glitch affecting more than one unit. Multiple computers down alongside the dangerous readings coming from the other unit — she whipped out her cell phone and called the upstairs number directly.