Anhedonia

(This story contains the loss of a loved one)

The fingers of light pouring through the glass floor-to-ceiling windows of my apartment draw the curtains of sleep from the haze in my mind and let consciousness diffuse in. I have a fleeting thought to get out of bed, and almost will myself to, but something leaches my strength. I struggle to lift my hand to filter the light hitting my tear-stained and watery red eyes and rub at a pulsing spot in the space between my brows. Even such rudimentary actions eat away at my remaining strength, so I just keep lying down, filling the cold quiet room with my slow breathing. I dread the thought of getting out of bed. I dread the thought of getting out of the house. Of mixing with other people. Of my co-workers’ sympathetic gazes and well-meaning concern. Of being alive. What I feel can’t exactly be fully defined by diagnosis alone, even if prognosis techniques have advanced so much that I can identify and isolate genetic expression. 

I take a deep breath and I feel all my cells collapse along with me. I am used to this fatigue by now, but I can’t exactly say I even remotely like it. Under sparse blankets and the cool atmosphere dangling in the room like the blue crystal chandelier above my bed, it’s hard to warm up to anything. A recalcitrant sigh escapes the parted lips that aid me in the arduous task of respiring to keep my body alive while I am in the process of dying inside. I wake up every single damn morning and I feel like some life has oozed out of my pores throughout the night; maybe it hijacks a ride down the streams of tears that weave a path down my cheeks and onto my pillow while I sleep. I turn my head laboriously and cradle my cheek in the tear-stained circle. I let the coldness soothe me and fan a memory into flame. I close my eyes. 

Behind them, the colours start to play and paint a moving picture. I see his tan olive hand materialise and stretch out to caress my face in the nascent hours of dawn, feel nimble fingers lightly sliding down the soft lustre of skin, potent and soft in the way only affection is. His fingers are cool against the heat of my skin and every cell lying dormant in my body is suddenly awake, like a string strung in the silence. It’s a cold that ignites a fire within me. I stir in my sleep and feel his smile glide along the sunrays and settle on me while his gaze touches my skin. Then his other hand is under my head, displacing the softness of the pillow with the softness of his palm. He cups my face, cradling it. Cold fingertips promote every atom in my being into excitation at the point of contact. 

This is the best kind of non-invasive neurostimulation known to man, primal and instinctual; as old and basic as the first language of humankind that only consists of four letters - the human genome. It beckons me to reciprocate. My eyes are closed but that only makes me more awake. We follow derivatives of attraction’s blueprint. His lips touch mine in the metaphor of a shared smile that erupts onto our faces and fills the small gap that separates us until it dissolves into a literal translation and I am at the beginning of rapture. I feel his mouth capturing mine, tentative then firm. It is the tipping force that starts the domino - the force that makes my blood race in the dilating highway of vessels. I am falling, falling, falling - into deeper and darker unexplored places in the dynamic landscape bursting to brighter colours behind my eyes. Colours beyond the spectrum.

I’m forced out of the haven and leave the recollection in limbo. Memories are read out like the recital of a storyline, as the mapwork of cognition. I don’t need to muster even an ounce of strength to close the proverbial script in motion and stash it away in the far recesses of my mind. The darts of pain racing along the roads of my neural networks alarm the ‘traffic police’. These are tiny quantum-molecular neurotransmitters riding in our nerve channels that regulate the potency of our emotional footprints. They police the trace paths of our memories. The termination of the memory replay was a catharsis. We aren’t allowed to feel prolonged pain or any paroxysm for that matter. It puts us at risk of system failure.

‘It’s not real ’ I remind myself. Not anymore. I open my eyes and breathe in the emptiness of the space in the bed next to mine, hold it hostage in my lungs for a painful second, and then breathe it out. Then I drag my body out of bed. The clock on the bedside table reads five fifteen. I’m an hour early for my morning routine. I do it anyway. It doesn’t get any easier, but most of it has become perfunctory. I first make my bed. I do not hear the cocktail of laughter flooding the room, filling it with yellow and amber, complementing the sun. I do not feel strong arms wrap around me from behind. I do not walk into the bathroom with a beaming smile plastered on my face, trailed by intertwined hands. I do not feel my heart transcend the cage of my ribs and fly into a preternatural realm of bliss. I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel. I slipped a numbing pill into my mouth and dry swallowed before I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Today I’ll be trading the temporary fix for a more permanent one.

I walk out of the bathroom into the sparsely furnished room. It’s not hard to miss that the bed is not the only thing that remains empty. I remain empty with it. There’s this heavy void that has hijacked my being right down to the innermost parts that no technology can quite touch yet: my soul. I wait in ambush to steal back the pieces of me that grief is stealing. In the midst of all the fighting chaos, I recite something in between a prayer and a summon of strength. I AM eating well. I AM getting enough sleep. I AM coping. I AM FINE. I have just been fighting monsters in my sleep every day, which explains why I wake up so tired. I tread out of my room and down the hall into the kitchen. When I close the fridge door after my fingers curl around any solid thing they come into contact with, I come face to face with the stranger living in my house. 

Black tendrils of hair fall in curls and cascade down an oval face with a defined jawline. Her lips are full and sultry. Empty brown eyes stare at me with a hint of swelling reminiscent of crying. They remind me of a grave under a sunless sky. They are familiar to me. They look like mine. But they are lifeless. Freckles stand out like tattoos against her cinnamon skin, dotting the bridge of her nose and her cheeks. She is flush. Her lean frame would have been considered petite if she was a little shorter. I scrutinise the sight of her. She’s wearing the same blue jeans and white shirt that I am, but they hang loosely over her body. She’s lost some weight, I note. The most salient thing about her is the sadness that eclipses her aura. It almost consumes her like she is made up of it. I start to feel sorry for her. I reach out to touch her. She reaches out to touch me back, her movements synchronous to mine. Our hands almost meet, but instead, I am stopped by a cold panel. Our gazes catch at the same time through the equidistance. My empathy has no strength. It takes a while for my mind to consolidate my reflection in the mirror to the image I have of myself in my head. I could almost laugh at the cruel difference. ‘That’s not me’ I deny. She might wear the same clothes. She might look like me. She might even be me in another dimension. But those aren’t my eyes.

I bite on the apple in my hand as I walk out into the world that is ready to receive me. It will be a while before I open up my arms to it again. I hear the sound of my feet shuffling on the concrete slab, but I do not feel the sensation that confirms that the steady footfalls are mine. I am motionless like a rock in a rapid. People are frothing sprays of life in the river of routine but I don’t register them or their noise. I am so out of place I can hardly believe I am even coexisting with everyone around me. I could still be in my bed right now. In the distance, I can see the high rise of the Genetics Advancement and Modification Institution, a white beacon that tears through the clouds in the sky. I make my way there without thinking; like my mind has a pre-programmed GPS and is following geospatial prompts. On a normal day, I would enter that building as a senior resident pioneering research, but today, I feebly push through the revolving doors as a patient. My shoes squeak against the tiled, richly polished floors as I make my way to the receptionist. I have an appointment.

“Raelynne Jones,” I say my name and she logs it in and nods.

I don't have to be directed. I know this premises inside out. I walk through the long corridor lined with doors adorned with complicated names for decidedly intrinsic fields. Everything is white and bright and blinding. I can barely make out faces in the crowd of scientists and researchers bursting through doors while machines hum in the background. I see looks of recognition mixed with concern. I do not acknowledge any as I make my way to the elevator in the middle of the long hallway. I fumble through the controls when I manage to stuff myself into the empty glass box. I need to get to the top floor. I fix my eyes on the control display as the numbers ascend and the apprehension starts, forming in the pit of my stomach. 

My heart rate picks up with every floor cleared. It brings me closer to the consequence of a decision I was probed into. I already feel the calming effect of the ‘emotion enforcers’ regulating my rising stress. I take a breath in assistance. The elevator door mechanically slides open. I hesitantly step out. That’s all the motion I can muster. Whatever willed my feet to move before doesn’t work now. Maybe the signal has been lost being so high up. Maybe it was gravity and it’s not so strong up here. But I feel a weight descend on me, making my feet heavy. The floor is carpeted here and the room is leisurely decorated. The sound of someone calling my name down the hallway provides the resultant force that gets my body moving without my permission. I make my way to the door that was left slightly ajar in invitation. A lady wearing a white labcoat had been standing in the space just seconds before, calling me. A feeling of dread washes over me as my hand curls over the knob to usher myself in. I have just walked down a road of no return. I look up to the plaque outlining just what happens in this room. White letters are suspended within the sandblasted black glass.

“Memory Modification: Updating, Planting And Erasure”

In recent years, biomolecular and neurological breakthroughs littered every advancement horizon sparked by desperation to curb the exponential rise of AI advancement so that we remain above the machines. Prospects of being employed by machines or even being run by them didn’t seem so out of reach. And that was scary. Furious debates ensued. The Earth Council ruled that the problem wasn’t the rise of machines, but the fall of humankind into complacency and judged that if we could address our human weaknesses and enhance ourselves above the capabilities shared between man and machines then we had no need to worry about our security. We were given a decade to rise to the challenge while AI’s advancements were deliberately slowed to make it easy for us; like when you give your slower opponent a head start in a race. If each year was a lap in the race, then we were down to our last four. People went to maddening heights to find the je ne sais quoi that would give us insight into the missing gaps in the information we barely had about ourselves, searching anywhere they expected to be blessed by an epiphany if nature would be so kind. 

Ageing was an inarguable target. It made us less of avid learners, eroded our memories, shrunk our brains, depleted our cells, and made us liable to sickness. Death was the next biggest hurdle, but we had to start small. For now, we just had to live longer, and smarter. There was an unprecedented surge in epigenetics and the control of gene expressions. If we could make our cells younger, we could manipulate a lot of biological mechanisms that decline with time. The first targeted area of biological manipulation was memory and cognition, all in an effort to make humans learn better and more efficiently. The goal was to raise an ‘Einstein Army’ to pursue the mandate before time ran out. I thought that was genius; so much so that I enlisted. 

In order to enhance memory, three things were done. First on the list was keeping the critical period windows open. While toddlers had an undesirable tendency to forget a memory almost as soon as it formed, they had an attractive uniqueness in the ease at which they assimilated breadths of information and picked up skills in a way that adults found taxing. During that window, which closed around the age of seven and eight, neurons doubled and so did the number of synaptic connections. The genes for the opening and closing of the critical periods were identified and tweaked. A mechanism of years was transcribed only to a 24-hour period. 

Sonogenetics was the second next step and phenomenon that sprung from the success of optogenetics. Little nano-atoms bound together and folded similarly to proteins and once administered to the hosts’ body, attached to targeted genes and modified them so they became sensitive to sound frequencies which were catalysts that prompted the mechanisms to activate or suppress relevant gene expressions that controlled the critical period on command. The third thing that was done was to heighten the link between emotion and memories. Since animals are predisposed to remembering memories that are linked to emotion, the manipulation was used in brain cells to make sure any memory deemed important, naturally and by wave stimulation, would get an emotion stamp. Each emotion stamp had an identity. The identity helped to map the memory, the same way information that is broken down has a marker that tells it in what order it should reassemble itself. 

This was perhaps the biggest revolutionary achievement. While we still weren’t able to put our consciousness onto a computer, we were able to put our important memories onto one. Because identities were assigned to fragments of memories as they got transported to different parts of the brain to be stored, it was easy to map those identities onto a digital canvas. This took us years into the future of possibilities of memory editing, with tools of memory rewriting, erasing, updating, and implantation made accessible to authorised personnel. 

There was one flaw in the design. The exaggeration of the emotions needed to be regulated so they didn’t extend the natural threshold, after which the brain tended to shut down in a system failure. That failure is what brought me here today, and into the lone ‘dentist chair’ that stood in the middle of the room. Falling in love wasn’t advised. There were too many emotions to regulate and most of them were so strong they often resulted in collapse with a long recovery. That was precious time we couldn’t waste. I was perfectly aware of the risks but I jumped into that deep end and floated. It was perfect. It was beyond dreams. Then it was gone. The memories became obstacles. I had a job to do, and meeting the deadline was more important than my feelings. 

A serum would be administered into my blood that would disable the exaggeration of emotion and all the memories being erased would be played on all the four walls of the room as they were deleted from my mind. It was like a personal walk down a virtual memory lane. A gift. A tribute to my sacrifice. It wasn’t worth it. But it was necessary. I had one condition before I agreed. There was one memory they had to leave untouched. They agreed only because I was valuable, but it didn’t matter to me.

“Ready?”

I nod and I feel a needle prick my skin and then the cold serum mixing with my blood. She leaves the room. I exhale and the replay starts. Tears stream down my face as the memories play out like a movie in front of me. I won't remember any of this after today. I gaze longingly at the only memoir I’m allowed to keep - the first time I ever gazed into striking deep hazel eyes that robbed me of my breath and swept me off of my feet. The eyes that made me throw all caution into the wind and fall in love head-first.

I will never forget those eyes.