Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim

Author:Eugene Lim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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After the karaoke bar I stumbled home, rather drunk, and fell into a dead sleep. An hour or two later, however, I woke up thirsty and with a terrible headache. I got up to drink a glass of water and then lay back in bed, but found I was unable to sleep. Instead I again thought of Ms. Mistleto.

After losing her in the catacombs beneath the Himalayas, the next time I met her was when it was discovered she was behind a major cyberattack against our government.

The president, several members of Congress, and two Supreme Court justices had had their emails and drives compromised. In addition to the usual infidelities and sex trafficking, the drug habits and corporate kickbacks, it was deemed most embarrassingly revealed that these politicians were atrocious hobbyists. Several of them wrote confessional poetry, two were authors of soft-porn fan fiction, and the president himself painted psychoanalytically revealing self-portraits in which he unintentionally confessed he was a child-man, a buffoon manipulated by devious puppet masters.

The CIA decided this information could never become public, and so a massive effort was made to find the hacker and hide the evidence. Elaborate counterstories were concocted, witnesses disappeared, and journalists were paid off. Years later bits came out, and the president’s paintings even were revealed—but by that time the danger had passed and in any event his incompetence was less a state secret than an oddly effective ingredient of his charisma. Nonetheless, at the time a fortune in resources was spent on a tremendous hunt to find the guilty party.

Slowly we realized (or she let us realize) that the person behind these crafty invasions of privacy was Ms. Mistleto.

One night a few weeks after I’d been briefed on the situation I found myself in the town of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Our intel said Ms. Mistleto was holed up in a tower connected to an ancient bridge there. I approached the thickly walled tower via a scramble up a steep bank. A cold breeze shot across the river, and the air smelled of a mix of moss and limestone.

I scaled the structure and entered the tower through a window where I saw Ms. Mistleto standing in a shaft of moonlight with her back turned to me. I was about to reach for my raygun, but then felt a prick on the side of my neck. “I’ve developed,” Mistleto suddenly said, “an interesting derivative of the Amazonian drug curare, which as you know paralyzes the muscles.” I slumped to the floor, unable to move.

Ms. Mistleto said:

After I got out of jail I wanted to find my family, but they’d moved and no one knew where they were. I’d been away, and people were not particularly forthcoming to an ex-con and a woman who’d abandoned her family.

Losing everything does gift you with freedom if nothing else. That’s a rewrite of a pithier song refrain.

Eventually—and this wasn’t easy and depended not a little upon the kindness of strangers and the welfare state—I found an apartment.

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