Spark A Novel (John Twelve Hawks) by John Twelve Hawks

Author:John Twelve Hawks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780385538688
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

The cubicle with the smiley face did not seem as real as my apartment or the hospital. It felt as if my Shell was about to dissolve and break apart, my molecules drifting away and bouncing off the walls of the windowless room. I tried to save myself, but nothing happened until—

Either Levitt or Barbieri moved their office chair and it squeaked. This noise, oddly human, made me stand up and glance at the wall clock. I had been staring at the monitor screen for almost three hours.

I don’t recall making a conscious decision to leave, but my Shell lurched out of the cubicle and moved in a herky-jerky manner down the hallway to the elevator bank. I left InterFace forever and headed north on Sixth Avenue. This wasn’t a dream. I was clear and alert, but now I had lost awareness of my Shell. It felt as if my Spark was a pure point of consciousness, floating through the air, observing the city.

The glass-and-steel office buildings, the taxis and delivery trucks, the sidewalk blotted with petrified chewing gum, appeared more real, more solid, than the citizens passing in and out of the revolving doorways. Scars on the back of their hands showed that RFID chips had been inserted into their bodies. Some of them wore E-MID contact lenses and the corners of their dead eyes displayed a continuous stream of information. A Vast Machine watched and evaluated them, remembering their past actions and predicting their future behavior.

The Human Units passing me on the sidewalk believed they determined the direction of their life, but that was an illusion. Most of them were doing their jobs without thought, taking pleasure without satisfaction, delivering opinions and obeying desires that were given to them by others.

But I was different. I had broken free.

Because I was dead, I was alive.

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