Digital Detox Delirium

A sharp stab of pain in my neck causes me to look up from the thousands of words on the hundreds of pages on the phone I wasn’t really even seeing. I gingerly stretched, wincing when I heard the distinctive popping of vertebrae. They sounded like gunshots. I glance at the nearby clock, my breath catching in my throat when I see the time.

10:51 pm.

It’s almost eleven! But… but how?

I remembered eating dinner, a sorry excuse of lasagna with pasta that wasn’t fully cooked and tomato sauce that had freezer burn. After putting my dishes by the sink I headed to my room; as soon as I had sat down, my phone vibrated, alerting me to a new notification. Picking it up I saw Janie had just posted on Panoptic. 

That had been at 7:04.

I blinked, realizing how dry my eyes were and how numb my butt felt.

Had I really just spent FOUR hours looking at… What had I been looking at? 

Groaning, I tossed my phone aside, hearing it land with a satisfying thud on the table beside me. Most people would have worried about cracking it. I wasn’t. You could run one of them over with a car or drop it off a twenty-story building, and the thing wouldn’t have a scratch on it. I should know. I tried both last summer. 

The four-note chime sounded, alerting me to another notification. I ignored it. Instead, I let my eyes wander around my room. There was a partly folded pile of clothes on the floor by my dresser, a task interrupted by my phone. In the corner was a bin of stuffed animals, the layer of dust coating them visible even from where I sat. Nostalgia washed over me, and I smiled, remembering the hours I used to spend playing with them, creating stories from nothing but my mind. I don’t know if I could still do that even if I tried. 

Finally, my gaze landed on the bookshelf at the foot of my bed. Well, in reality, it was a shelf that I happened to use for books, a small collection of antique paper-backs, probably some of the last print books published before the switch to digital. They all had cracked covers, dog-eared pages, and coffee stains, but there was something charming about them: the way they felt in my hands, the sound the turning pages made, and the smell…

When was the last time I had picked one up?

Maybe I should start one tonight. Just a few pages before bed. 

I was about to scan the shelf when my phone vibrated, and the same four-note chime rang out. Automatically, I felt my hand drift towards the table. At the last second, I paused, hand hovering above the phone.

Vibration. Four notes.

I sighed, irritated and longing for the time when notifications could be silenced with the push of a button. But those days were nothing more than a fading memory now, so I did the next best thing: I got to my feet and left the room. 

Unsurprisingly, I found my parents in the living room, side-by-side on the couch, noses glued to the screens of their respective device of choice. Neither of them acknowledged me when I entered, and I’m positive they didn’t notice when I walked out the front door, letting it slam shut behind me.

I flopped down in the middle of the driveway, savoring the warmth of the concrete against my back and the oscillating calls of the nearby katydids. Thousands of pinpricks of light danced in the night sky. If I squinted, I could almost pretend they were stars, just like I had done when I was younger. I knew better now, though. I knew that years before I was born, Earth’s leaders had finally declared that light pollution was a crisis. They had been too late. Now, the only star that could still be seen was Sirus. Everything else was satellites, airplanes, and drones. 

I heard the front door slam, and I didn’t need to turn my head to recognize the distinctive footsteps of my older sister, Emery, walking towards me. 

“Watcha doing out here?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Sky watchin’.”

There was a muffled thump as she plopped down beside me, and then... It was so quiet I thought I had imagined them at first, but then the sound came again. Four distinctive notes. I stiffened. 

Emery laughed as she removed my phone from her pocket. “Oh, right! I came out here to give you this. It was going crazy in your bedroom.”

She threw it to me and my hands reflexively darted out to catch it. I stared down at the device. It vibrated once more.

“I don’t want it,” I mumble.

Emery looked at me, cocking her head. “What?”

“I said. I. Don’t. Want it!” I pulled my arm back and then hurled the phone as far into the yard as I could. As far away from me as I could.

“Matilda! What did you do that for? Mom and Dad worked hard to get you a nice model,” she admonished. 

“Relax,” I huffed. “It landed in the grass.”

“Well, didn’t you at least want to check what the notifs were about?” 

“Not really,” I said, crossing my arms.

“But what if it’s important?”

“I’m sure it can wait until the morning.”

“What if Leaha is trying to contact you?

“At 11:20? You know she goes to bed at like 9.”

“Or if it’s a reminder for an assignment due tomorrow?

“It’s the summer, Em. There are no assignments.”

“Or what if your favorite band, what was it… Velvet Nebula! What if they’re going to have a concert tomorrow and tonight’s the only chance to buy tickets?”

I let out a snort. “Now you’re being ridiculous. I haven’t liked Velvet Nebula since middle school.”

Emory grinned. “I’m just saying, Meti, you won’t know unless you check.”

“Em, drop it. I don’t want to check the stupid notifs.”

“But why?

“Because I don’t want to be scrolling through Panoptic until 3 am,” I snapped. 

I could feel Emory roll her eyes. “You know you could just check and then close it after you’re done, genius.” 

A wave of calm washed over me, and I could think for the first time in what felt like months. “That’s just it, though. You can’t ‘just check’.  I’ve told myself that hundreds of times but I always end up scrolling for hours afterwards. It does something to our brains, Em… It makes it impossible for us to just check.” 

“Are you auditioning for theater next year? Because that was some monologue!”

I reach over and hit her on the shoulder. Enough to hurt, but not enough to leave a bruise. “I'm serious, Em. It’s not natural.”

Emery let out a long sigh. “I don’t know when you suddenly decided to become anti-technology, but you know it's not all evil, right? Think about all the wonderful things it has allowed us to do! Message friends hundreds of miles away, make new friends on Panoptic, look anything up, learn any skill you want... Not to mention there are thousands of options for entertainment! Honestly, Mittens, I think you're catastrophizing.”

“Mittens?” I echo. “You haven’t called me that in years.”

“What? I can’t reuse old nicknames?” she said, flashing me her perfected “annoying big sister” smile. 

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I mutter, smiling despite myself. “Anyway. Since when have you become a walking, talking, breathing advertisement?” 

“Since I’ve been trying to cure you of your stupidity and help you see how wrong you are.” 

I groaned, knowing she wasn’t going to let the subject drop. “Fine. Fine! I’ll check the notifs before I go to bed, just… give me a few more minutes, okay?”

I saw Em nod her head out of the corner of my eye, clearly satisfied with herself.

I decided, then, to change the topic. “So what are you still doing up? Don’t you have work tomorrow?” 

“Nah. They gave us the day off. I’m going to meet a couple of friends at 8-Byte Bagels.”

“But how are you going to get there? Your car’s still in the shop.”

Emery stared at me with an expression on her face like I had asked her what color the sky was. “Uhh… I’ll take the bus, obviously,” she said, laughing.

I sat up, head spinning a little at the sudden motion. The pit of my stomach felt hollow. “What did you just say?”

“That I’ll take the bus?”

My heart quickened to match the racing of my thoughts. My breathing involuntarily increased as well, but regardless, I felt like I couldn’t get enough oxygen. Emery NEVER used public transit. She hadn’t directly said so, but I know it’s because she’s scared of it. After all, it’s the reason why she had to have her left leg amputated. 

Back when I was younger, she had always taken the bus to school. One day, though, something went wrong. A semi-truck drifted out of its lane, hitting the bus head-on, totaling it and killing five passengers. Emery had been one of the “lucky” ones, the doctors had said as they prepared her for surgery. 

The post-accident investigation found that there had been an error in the truck’s self-driving system, and so immediately after being discharged, Emery had gone to a scrapyard and salvaged an old manual car that she had by some miracle managed to repair. She has refused to drive or ride in anything else since. 

“Meti. Meti. Hey, are you alright?”

I looked up to see that Emery was sitting up now, staring at me, her forehead wrinkled in confusion. That’s when I looked at her, and I mean really looked at her.

Everything about her was so familiar. The slight curve of her mouth quirked up in a perpetual smirk, her thick eyebrows that she used to tell me were caterpillars fused to her skin, the small mole dotted on her right cheek…

The closer I studied her, though, the more things that seemed… off. Her nose was a little too straight, her teeth a little too white, her jaw a little too sharp, and her eyes… For a second, just a breath, I could have sworn her pupils looked almost… square.

Then I blinked and everything was right again. All I could see was the concerned face of my sister staring at me. “Matilda… you haven’t answered me. Are you feeling al—”

I didn’t let myself hesitate any longer. I slammed my fist into my sister’s face, cutting off her question. She let out a sound of surprise, but I hardly noticed. Blood roared in my ears, drowning out her cries of pain, her pleading, her begging. I ignored her, punching again and again and again. I ignored her because the thing standing in front of me was not my sister. 

My sister was dead.

She died on my 17th birthday.  

Slowly, everything began to dissolve around me. The first time this had happened, I had panicked. Now, though, I stayed still watching as the concrete beneath me vanished and the sky disappeared. Eventually, everything was dark. Then, light. 

I groaned, squinting against the bright fluorescent assaulting my eyes with the ferocity of a thousand suns. Muffled voices became clearer, and the blobs of color eventually stopped shifting as my vision returned to normal. Four doctors in freshly pressed lab coats stood in front of me. Two were humans and two… were AIs. 

The female AI with curly red hair was bent over a clipboard furiously scribbling down notes. I had never bothered learning its “name”. Assigning it a name would humanize it, and it was definitely not human.

The doctors still had yet to speak to me when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. That’s when I saw…it. The AI from the simulation. It was still wearing my sister’s face. I felt my features twist into a snarl. Nothing I did in the simulations ever transferred over into the real world, but I had still secretly hoped the AI would have at least a little blood on its face. Sadly, there wasn’t even a speck, and unfortunately, I could not remedy that fact due to the restraints around my wrists.

My non-sister walked over to stand in front of me, smiling. “Mati,” it said, voice sickly sweet.

“Don’t call me that,” I growled.

Something flashed in its eyes. Annoyance maybe? I still hadn’t figured out exactly which emotions AIs felt, if any.

“Matilda,” it began again. “Why must you fight against all of our attempts to help you? We only want what is best for you.”

“Go to hell,” I spat.

The not-Emery AI’s eyes darkened. I swallowed. Definitely anger. I knew I was treading on thin ice but didn’t really care. I noticed the curly-haired AI was once again writing on its clipboard—probably something along the lines of “Patient quick to anger; demonstrates emotional distress upon seeing dead sister.” 

“I think that’s enough for today. Why don’t you go back to your bedroom and have a nice long think about today’s session, Matilda?” 

It was phrased like a question, but I knew what it actually was. A command. That’s when the needle pierced my skin.

The next time I opened my eyes, I was back in my “bedroom,” although calling it that was being generous. Sure, there was a bed tucked into the corner, and there was also a small table with a lamp, but besides those and the four pale blue-gray walls, there was nothing else in my “bedroom.” 

At one point there had also been a rug, but that had been removed after I spent an entire day counting its threads. I had gotten to 653,457. 

To me it had simply been a way to pass time; to the doctors, it was distracting me from the thing they believed I should be doing—scrolling mindlessly through Panoptic. 

As if simply thinking its name was a trigger, the phone lying on the bedside table vibrated, filling the room with its insufferable chime. I didn’t move from my spot on the bed.

Much to the doctors’ annoyance, I had already gone almost a year without looking at Panoptic. I would rather die than let it consume me like it had my parents. Emery’s death was the catalyst. I stopped doing a lot of things after she died, like using Panoptic… or eating. Instead, I spent the majority of my days lying in bed staring at the ceiling or sleeping. My eyes were constantly red from crying and my nose was constantly raw.

My parents were so engrossed by their precious screens, that they didn’t notice I was suffering from a depression so deep that it rivaled the Mariana Trench.

By the time they finally did realize, I had to be hospitalized, where I was treated and then diagnosed with depression. The doctors, though, were more concerned about the fact that I hadn’t logged into Panoptic in over three weeks. “Far too long for any ‘healthy’ person,” they claimed. Ultimately, they diagnosed me with ludditea delirare, its key symptoms being depression and uninterest in technology. They offered to enroll me in a government-funded correctional program. My parents quickly agreed, and before I knew it, I was shipped off to this place, where doctors claimed they wanted to help cure me while I screamed at them that there was nothing to cure. 

Again, the phone chimed at me, vibrating and dancing on the little wooden table. Vibrating and chiming and screaming until I couldn’t take it anymore. 

Leaping to my feet, I grabbed the phone and hurled it against the wall. The phone bounced off and landed with a clatter on the floor, still vibrating. I ran over to it. Not a scratch. Rage. White, hot, and blinding took over, and I began smashing the phone against the floor. It was still screaming. Or was that me? Was I the one screaming? Maybe we both were. All I knew was that I wanted it to stop. I wanted the safety of my bed and the warmth of the concrete beneath my back. I wanted the calm of the katydids’ calls. I wanted my parents to finally look up and see me, I wanted my sister to be alive, but most of all I wanted silence. 

My hand was numb from gripping the phone, and when I raised it up to check, I already knew what I would find: a pristine screen with not a single chip. Instinctively, my eyes found the latest notif: User 01000001_01001001 has posted on Panoptic. 

I watched as that same notif appeared again and again. I knew then, that there was only one way to silence its demands—I clicked on the notif. I clicked on it, and the logo for Panoptic appeared on my screen: a simple, stylized eye, with two gently sloping lines forming the eyelids and a small circle in the center forming the pupil. If you looked closer, though, you would realize it wasn’t really a pupil, but a camera lens. 

The post filled my screen. It was from an account I had never heard of before and consisted of two words: stop resisting. 

It was only then that I realized how tired I was. Tired of waking up at night every time a notif chimed, tired of having to constantly stop myself from checking, tired of staring at blue-gray walls, tired of fighting…So I did the one thing that made sense to do: I stopped resisting. 

A single tear broke free from the corner of my eye as I began slowly scrolling through Panoptic. I scrolled…

and scrolled…

and scrolled… 

I scrolled while looking at the thousands of words on the hundreds of pages on the phone that would be forever what I see.